Weekly Grounding #23
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 mission. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“Without a College Degree, Life in America Is Staggeringly Shorter”
In Weekly Grounding #21, I featured reporting from The Washington Post on the epidemic of chronic disease in America and how widening class divisions have exacerbated this trend. In this article for The New York Times, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton analyze data on life expectancy to argue that what many “economic statistics obscure in the averages is that there is not one but two Americas — and a clear line demarcating the division is educational attainment. Americans with four-year college degrees are flourishing economically, while those without are struggling.” They continue with the following observation: “The divergence of life expectancies on either side of the college divide — one going up, one going down — is both shocking and rare. We have found reference to only one other case in modern history, in the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like those countries, the United States is failing its less-educated people, an awful condemnation of where the country is today.” The graph below illustrates this failure:
For more more detailed analysis of related topics, see my book review, “Populism, Political Realignment, and the Professional-Managerial Class.”
“He Feared His Refinery Job. His Brother Stayed to Help. The Explosion Hit at 6:46 P.M.”
Lifestyle differences are often invoked when describing differential class outcomes in disease and death, but differences in employment are just if not more important. Working class jobs often involve a greater exposure to toxins, which, among other factors, drive chronic illness. This tragic story about an oil refinery explosion in Ohio last year that claimed the lives of two brothers illustrates that injury and even death can also be a serious risk. The Wall Street Journal reports: “BP has spent years working to come out of the shadow of two of the most devastating industrial accidents in U.S. history, including a 2010 explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and causing billions of dollars in environmental damage. In 2005, a deadly explosion at its Texas City, Texas, refinery killed 15 workers and injured more than 170 others.” The article continues: “Max’s [one of the brothers] complaints made him unpopular to some of his bosses, and frustrated co-workers who thought he could have been more measured when he spoke up about what he saw as problems at the plant…At home, Max appeared increasingly anxious. ‘He told me I didn’t understand how dangerous his job was,’ [his wife] Darah said. ‘He told me that BP was going to kill him,’” and, eventually, it did. For more discussion of labor, health, and workplace safety, see Weekly Grounding #5, Weekly Grounding #13, and Weekly Grounding #16.
“Bureaucrats ‘Working Silently’ with WHO for One-Size-Fits-All One World, One Bed Policy”
At Counterview epidemiologist Amitav Banerjee draws on Greek mythology to eloquently expose the folly of the pandemic response and the dangerous direction of the World Health Organization: “Measures unprecedented in public health history violating all logic and principles of pandemic control were implemented with a heavy hand in almost all the countries of the world often taking help of the police for enforcement. All the principles of public health ethics and human rights were breached. The world is still to recover from this ‘shock’ and a number of ‘aftershocks’ as a result of an alarm, sans evidence, of an ‘impending pandemic’ of highly lethal and contagious ‘Disease X.’ Meanwhile, instead of working on steps to heal a fractured society, silent and hectic preparations are on for creation of a giant bed of Procrustes. This colossal bed will accommodate the whole of humanity and even include the animal kingdom.”
This week on Handful of Earth, I addressed the political fallout in the United States from war in Israel and Gaza in my article, “The ‘Free Speech’ Right Embraces Cancel Culture.” I am indebted to
’s reporting on this topic and would highly recommend this episode of his show, System Update, on Rumble. In it, he documents the about-face on civil liberties performed by many conservative “free speech” advocates in the wake of events in the Middle East. The interview at the end of the program with New York Times reporter, Kashmir Hill, on facial recognition technology is also well worth a listen.
“AI Voice Clones Mimic Politicians and Celebrities, Reshaping Reality”
The Washington Post reports on the proliferation of AI-generated audio, “leading to a flood of faked content on the web, sowing discord, confusion and anger”: “Voice cloning technology has rapidly advanced in the past year, and the proliferation of cheap, easily accessible tools online make it so that almost anyone can launch a sophisticated audio campaign from their bedroom. It’s difficult for the average person to spot faked audio campaigns, while images and videos still have notable oddities — such as deformed hands, and skewed words.” Predictably, the mainstream reaction seems to be calls for increased censorship of private citizens rather than efforts to investigate whether this technology should be allowed to develop in the first place. This is an excellent example of how technology is used by the ruling class and its techie lackeys to sow division among the people.
“Sam Altman Is the Oppenheimer of Our Age”
Speaking of techie lackeys, this piece by Elizabeth Weil at New York Magazine on Sam Altman is a long haul, but it’s worth your time (audio version recommended). She profiles the OpenAI CEO of ChatGPT fame, delving into his family and professional background in quite a bit of depth. It’s hard to pick something to excerpt from such a long and wide-ranging piece, but this paragraph was one of the highlights: “This is not the portfolio of a man with ambitions like Zuckerberg, who appears, somewhat quaintly compared with Altman, to be content ‘with building a city-state to rule over,’ as the tech writer and podcaster Jathan Sadowski put it. This is the portfolio of a man with ambitions like Musk’s, a man taking the ‘imperialist approach.’ ‘He really sees himself as this world-bestriding Übermensch, as a superhuman in a really Nietzschean kind of way,’ Sadowski said. ‘He will at once create the thing that destroys us and save us from it.’” The final sentence is especially revealing, and one of the reasons why discussions of existential risk from AI need to be put in perspective (something I’ve attempted to do here in “Telos or Transhumanism”). If Altman is truly as powerful in the tech world as Weil suggests, the following passing observation doesn’t bode well for Silicon Valley’s role in promoting a peaceful resolution to the current conflict: “In the early days of the pandemic, he [Altman] wore his Israeli Defense Forces gas mask.”
- draws on the music of Edward Bland and Adam Guettel to make the case for repeated listening in his column at The New York Times: “When you like a beat or the texture of a voice or are hooked by a catchy chorus — the prime elements in most modern pop music — songs can grab you instantly. Here’s to them! But when music is founded on things beyond those three elements, it can take a few listens — for me, often about seven — before you connect with it as viscerally as you do to your favorite pop.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.