Weekly Grounding #28

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.

Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:

• “Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records”

  • Wired reports on recently revealed details of the Data Analytical Services (DAS) surveillance program: “The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.” Sadly, new revelations of U.S. government spying programs seem to elicit less and less outrage among Americans the more that social media has normalized an anti-privacy culture. Any movement against surveillance will have to, first and foremost, figure out why it values privacy in the first place.

• “How RFK Jr. Could Decide the 2024 Election”

  • Unherd interviews pollster Joe Bedell one year out from the 2024 U.S. presidential election to discuss where things currently stand. Like the recent New York Times/Sienna poll (discussed in Weekly Grounding #26), Bedell finds that Donald Trump is leading in most decisive swing states. Moreover, he discusses Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential campaign and how it might disrupt polling projections. Bedell’s polling data suggests, somewhat surprisingly to me, that Kennedy is pulling slightly more from Biden voters than Trump voters, but it is still unclear how this will play out going forward. He also reports that most donors to Kennedy’s campaign are individuals who have never contributed to a political campaign before. Beware of Democratic Party efforts to dust off their attacks on critics of the covid regime in order to fight the Kennedy threat, as well as attempts to search for a new manufactured crisis to move attention away from Biden’s failures in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine.

• “On Israel-Gaza & the Corrupting Media Dynamic of ‘Audience Capture’”

  • On System Update, Glenn Greenwald highlights the dangers of “audience capture” in the subscription-based alternative media space. Audience capture refers to the phenomenon of audiences determining the positions of journalists and other content creators through the constant threat of withdrawing support if the journalist breaks ranks with the positions expected by his or her audience. While the problems with corporate control of mainstream media are well-documented, the phenomenon of audience capture is, in many ways, more pernicious. It can lead to self-censorship on platforms like Substack and Rumble where free speech is permitted but, at the same time, content creators are also directly dependent on individual subscribers. While all content on Handful of Earth is currently free, I hope it is clear (especially from some of my recent writing on Israel/Palestine) that I will not conceal my views on controversial issues simply to appease a section of my audience.

• “Kids Still Aren’t Going to Class, So Schools Are Getting Aggressive”

  • The Wall Street Journal chronicles public schools’ efforts to enforce attendance, which is still poor in many parts of the country even after the pandemic. It’s staggering just how much taxpayer money is devoted to “monitoring” attendance (a euphemism for legally threatening parents in their homes): “Baltimore City Public Schools has a contract to pay up to $18.7 million over four years to Concentric Educational Solutions to visit the homes of truant students and provide mentoring. Chronic absenteeism was high there even before the pandemic: 42% in 2018-19. It rose still higher during Covid-19, hitting 58% in 2021-22 before decreasing to 54% last school year.”

• “Home Schooling’s Rise from Fringe to Fastest-Growing Form of Education”

  • On a related and, I believe, more hopeful note, The Washington Post provides “the most detailed look to date at an unprecedented period of growth in American home schooling.” The whole article is worth a read, but one of the most interesting findings was that “Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.” The following state-level data demonstrates how far-reaching the increase in homeschooling has been across the country:

    

    For more on this topic, see my 2019 article, “John Taylor Gatto Challenged the Ideas Inherent in US Mass Schooling.”

• “Being Homeless Means Not Being Free − As Americans Are Supposed to Be”

  • At The Conversation, philosopher Paul Schofield argues that homelessness is not only a state of deprivation, but also a state of unfreedom: “Given the way society protects private property and regulates public spaces, it seems that people who are homeless are left with no space at all in which they are free to do the things they need to do in order to live. This is about as severe an infringement on freedom as you can imagine, and…a society that loves freedom simply cannot tolerate it. Anti-homelessness is not just about benevolence and generosity, then. It is about protecting liberty.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.