Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. I hope they help ground your thinking in the midst of media overload. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
Katherine Yon Ebright summarizes a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice which chronicles the massive scope of secret United States war-making. Ebright highlights the role of “security cooperation authorities,” which have taken American secret wars to another level since 9/11: “Congress enacted these provisions in the years following September 11 to allow U.S. forces to work through and with foreign partners. One of them, now codified at 10 U.S.C. § 333, permits the Department of Defense to train and equip foreign forces anywhere in the world. Another, now codified at 10 U.S.C. § 127e, authorizes the Department of Defense to provide ‘support’ to foreign forces, paramilitaries, and private individuals who are in turn ‘supporting” U.S. counterterrorism operations.” The article continues: “Through these security cooperation provisions, the Department of Defense, not Congress, decides when and where the United States counters terrorist groups and even state adversaries. Moreover, by determining that ‘episodic’ confrontations and ‘irregular’ warfare do not amount to ‘hostilities,’ the Department of Defense has avoided notification and reporting requirements, leaving Congress and the public in the dark.”
“Niger Is the Fourth Country in the Sahel to Experience an Anti-Western Coup”
In this article for Globetrotter, Vijay Prashad and Kambale Musavuli provide important context surrounding the recent coup in Niger and its relationship to American military presence and French neocolonialism in the country: “The coup in Niger follows similar coups in Mali (August 2020 and May 2021) and Burkina Faso (January 2022 and September 2022), and Guinea (September 2021). Each of these coups was led by military officers angered by the presence of French and U.S. troops and by the permanent economic crises inflicted on their countries. This region of Africa—the Sahel—has faced a cascade of crises: the desiccation of the land due to the climate catastrophe, the rise of Islamic militancy due to the 2011 NATO war in Libya, the increase in smuggling networks to traffic weapons, humans, and drugs across the desert, the appropriation of natural resources—including uranium and gold—by Western companies that have simply not paid adequately for these riches, and the entrenchment of Western military forces through the construction of bases and the operation of these armies with impunity.” Uranium, in particular, is a key battleground in Niger: “Strikingly, 85 percent of Somaïr [a “joint” uranium venture between France and Niger] is owned by France’s Atomic Energy Commission and two French companies, while only 15 percent is owned by Niger’s government. Niger produces over 5 percent of the world’s uranium, but its uranium is of a very high quality. Half of Niger’s export receipts are from sales of uranium, oil, and gold. One in three lightbulbs in France are powered by uranium from Niger, at the same time as 42 percent of the African country’s population lived below the poverty line.”
On uranium and related topics, this article by William J. Kinsella at The Conversation describes the devastating environmental and health impacts of nuclear weapons production and testing. The case of the Hanford nuclear site in eastern Washington demonstrates the folly of technological solutionism: “Extracting plutonium from the irradiated fuel, an activity called reprocessing, generated 56 million gallons of liquid waste laced with radioactive and chemical poisons. The wastes were stored in underground tanks designed to last 25 years, based on an assumption that a disposal solution would be developed later. Seventy-eight years after the first tank was built, that solution remains elusive. A project to vitrify, or embed tank wastes in glass for permanent disposal, has been mired in technical, managerial and political difficulties, and repeatedly threatened with cancellation.”
“Tony Blair: ‘If I Was Back in Front-line Politics…’”
This wide-ranging recap of an interview with Tony Blair by Andrew Marr at The New Statesmen is well worth reading in full. In light of my writing on artificial intelligence at Handful of Earth (here and here), Blair’s comments on AI demand particular attention: “Blair sees this as essentially about the huge technological revolution being brought about by artificial intelligence: ‘I know some people disagree with it, but in my view, harnessing this, understanding it, mastering it, is the single biggest change, because it can produce the biggest amount of improvement in public services and in the way that people live and interact with government.’ AI will be ‘a revolutionary change… it will change literally everything.’ Looking for examples, I ask about digitised health accounts, containing people’s full health histories, as some smaller European countries have: ‘Yeah, absolutely, it’s the future. And the larger countries will just have to catch up with the smaller ones, because the benefits are enormous.’ But Blair then goes much further in ways that many will find disturbing: ‘But you can also apply this to education: you should be able to store with each pupil not just the tests but the assessments – the teachers’ assessments, the interactions.’ And after education, crime: ‘You will be able to do things like – through the use of DNA – change the whole basis of crime-fighting.’”
“Cognitive Liberators of Substack”
Providing a much-needed rejoinder to Blairian technotopianism,
at recounts a conversation with an “internet service technician who is a certified luddite”: “He uses the library across from where he lives if he needs to send an e-mail to arrange appointments. There he also borrows books to read. His family and friends are local, and he stays in touch with them in person. He commented, ‘you can either try and keep up with technology - which you never will - or actually focus on doing work.’ He has decided to stay in the human, physical realm. He is hopeful that many more people will begin to recognize how tech distraction is undoing us as humans.” Gaskovski also provides a useful list of Substackers who “have been relating their experience of quitting (or trying to quit) social media and other digital addictions.”
“Funny How The UFO Narrative Coincides With The Race To Weaponize Space”
- asks some important questions about the UFO drama at : “One of the most important unanswered questions in all this UFO hullabaloo is, why now? Why are we seeing all this movement on ‘disclosure’ after generations of zero movement? If these things are in fact real and the government has in fact been keeping them secret, why would the adamant policy of dismissal and locked doors suddenly be reversed, allowing ‘whistleblowers’ to come forward and give testimony before congress? If they had motive to keep it a secret this entire time, why would that motive no longer be there?” Her response to these questions seems very reasonable: “I am 100 percent wide open to the possibility of extraterrestrials and otherworldly vehicles zipping around our atmosphere. What I am not open to is the claim that the most depraved institutions on earth have suddenly opened their mind to telling us the truth about these things, either out of the goodness of their hearts or because they were ‘pressured’ by UFO disclosure activists.”
“The Catholic Prophet of Inequality”
Benjamin Studebaker explores the relationship between spiritual crisis and political economy for Compact Magazine: “Christian traditionalists have long lamented the West’s spiritual and cultural decline. And who can blame them? The signs of decay are everywhere: from widespread porn addiction to the opioid crisis, fertility decline to the collapse in church attendance across most of the developed world. But the same conservatives are almost fanatically determined to blinker themselves to the material and economic roots of this malaise. They believe that to link cultural decay to economic conditions is to give in to materialist reductionism—a Marxist sin.” He then turns to the writings of fourteenth-century thinker Nicolas Oresme to develop a more dialectical understanding of the relationship between spiritual crisis and political economy.
“In Defence of Critical Theory”
Regardless of where you find yourself positioned in the debates surrounding “critical race theory” and other hot-button culture war issues in the United States, this is an informative piece by John Michael Greer at Unherd. Greer provides important historical context surrounding the term “critical theory” in addition to some interesting analysis of the scientific intelligentsia: “If science were really a matter of following nature wherever it leads, the emergence of the replication crisis would have caused a sudden, frantic search for the causes. We’re talking, after all, about something that challenges the act of faith at the centre of the scientific enterprise. By and large, though, that search hasn’t happened. Instead, scientists have chosen either to ignore the problem or to denounce anyone who dares to draw attention to it — typical behaviour of any elite group faced with a challenge to their legitimacy.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Thanks for the shoutout Vincent! I appreciated the care your put into your roundup - you have a new subscriber :)