Category Archives: Free Markets

NEW ESSAY: E. Musk: The AI Oligarchy Needs More Scrutiny Than The Technology

Argument, Elections, Ethics, Free Markets, Free Speech, GAZA, Israel, libertarianism, Middle East, Military, Palestinians, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Pseudo-intellectualism, Technology, Terrorism, THE ELITES, War

The dangers of AI lie in the AI Oligarchy, a powerful cabal of deformed characters, whose products are often slip-shod, but who truly believe they are the Gods of the Machine.… ~ilana

New essay is “E. Musk: The AI Oligarchy Needs More Scrutiny Than The Technology.” It appeared on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market, at The Unz Review, and on ilana mercer’s FPV Resistance on Substack. 

Excerpt: 

FOR THE LUCKY ONES, “Black October,” the PHP code vulnerability that roiled cyberspace, might have begun with a slightly urgent tone in the otherwise scrupulous calm of a software engineer.

He or she would have sternly directed the fortunate individual, whose online universe they oversee, to a likewise careful, managed web-hosting service. There, the cybersecurity expert coders would have already implemented “the fix”—and would be hard at work fencing vulnerable websites in their charge. We hope.

The story would later go around that the vulnerability of PHP, a “general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development,” is a feature of 70 percent of websites worldwide. (The last word is probably a redundancy, but it works to stress the point.) That’s just how pervasive PHP is. If not patched, its vulnerability would allow unauthorized access to countless web systems.

Originally created by a Danish-Canadian, PHP was later “parsed” along the way, whatever than means in computer jargon, by two Israeli programmers. Since the word “paranoia” implies irrational distrust; feel free to come up with a better descriptor of my febrile thinking as to anything Israelis unleash on the world—no matter how long ago the Israeli segment of the PHP code was abandoned and ceased to be supported.

Reasonably or unreasonably, the PHP digital drama soon led to the question of AI (Artificial Intelligence) “run amok,” a risk that PHP software developers had deemed positively esoteric, before AI accelerated that risk.

Experts worried, reported the capable Krystal Ball, that this particular fix (“a patch”), just by way of an example, can be—promises to be—reverse engineered to hack, hack, hack. Scrupulously calm and understated herself, Ms. Ball is a former accountant with a degree in economics. She carries the Breaking Points podcast.

Consider: So munificent and beneficial an industry is AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or AI (Artificial Intelligence)—that you had better start defending against its onslaught, if you know what’s good for you. That’s yet another conclusion to draw from the PHP digital drama. 

One grim reality of the AI scam industry is simply that small business has fewer resources to divert toward digital fortification.

The too-big-to-fail principle is another feature of the AI oligarchic economy. Those most vulnerable to systemic software penetration, surmised Ms. Ball, will thus be the smaller outfits and organizations. Economic behemoths the state won’t let fail.

Hacked, hobbled in the workforce, or forced to pay: The little man or woman will be unduly marked for suffering in some way or another by the hot-air industry that is AI.

Prospective investors should certainly study Ron Unz’s distillation of the “industry’s stark financials,” which will likely see “top AI executives and investors retain much of their current wealth, amounting to billions or tens of billions of dollars, while foisting the trillions of dollars of looming financial losses upon the suffering American taxpayer.”

This is why Elon Musk, the face of the Deep Tech Oligarchy, has deigned, now-and-again, to disgorge a few foreboding words against AI. It’s a show and a sham for the benefit of the moron media and the Musk fanboys.

For example, the issue of labor vis-à-vis AI has gotten so bad that even the Wall Street Journal punched through Microsoft’s “offer to ‘buyout’ 60,000 employees.” The Journal implicated both Microsoft and David Ellison’s “entertainment conglomerate,” Skydance, in “trying to shed a lot of workers. Just don’t call it a layoff.”

Musk, for his part, has only just infused “about $1 billion” into Ellison junior’s Skydance company. David is the son of Oracle’s Larry Ellison, a billionaire who is beholden to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). As its largest donor, supporter and promoter, the elder Ellison is heavily invested and vested in the IDF’s AI necro-technologies.

To that end, Ellison Senior successfully led a Trump-approved financial putsch on American media conglomerates—TikTok, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, and others. The Ellison coup has curtailed, even criminalized, speech critical of Israel….

… READ the rest: “E. Musk: The AI Oligarchy Needs More Scrutiny Than The Technology“

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, November 2
LewRockwell.com, November 2
ilana mercer’s FPV Resistance, Substack, November 2

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance” on Substack.

https://ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com

Ilana Mercer, a widely published paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, decades back, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. Because it’s our duty. 

NEW BOOK REVIEWED ON RECKONIN’ By Dr. CLYDE WILSON

Argument, Business, Capitalism, COVID-19, Economy, Free Markets, Government, Healthcare, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, libertarianism, Nationhood, Outsourcing, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, Pseudoscience, Republicans, Technology, The South

“The Paleolibertarian Guide to Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & the Aberrant Economy” by Ilana Mercer: A RECKONIN REVIEW by ~ CLYDE WILSON, distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews. Dr. Wilson is also is co-publisher of Shotwell Publishing, a source for unreconstructed Southern books.

LIBERTARIANS rightly understand that economic freedom goes along with individual liberty and prosperity. But American libertarians have become, it seems, advocates of a solipsistic individual will and license. The sovereign individual is an imaginary beast that does not exist. Paleolibertarians like Ilana Mercer understand that man lives in a community, the virtues of which are necessary for capitalism and which is his best protection from intrusive government. And such virtues do not fit any and every society.

In this incisive chapter-and-verse exposé of the current American regime, she argues that the state, which now represents a merger of government and large corporations, is presiding over the destruction of American civil society. That is the nature of the touted global economy and global politics.

Mercer’s description of the American economic and social condition will not find disagreement from any Reckonin’ reader. “The business of life,” she writes, “one’s livelihood, and the locality in which one lives and loves – these are the property repositories for conservative loyalties.”

Living standards of the middle and working classes are falling. You would think this would bring the attention of public leaders. Instead, they are busy promoting ethnic chaos, genocide, and sodomy here and abroad. The Covid lockdown killed 3.3 million small businesses; the homeless now include more and more families; Deep Tech claims to need to import foreign talent (Republican boilerplate) while firing Americans. Differences in wealth distribution are higher than ever seen in history.

Our leaders don’t seem to see any problem with their ways. They don’t notice catastrophic debt and overextended, wasteful, and incompetent military as problems, despite their contribution to the “aberrant” economy.

Mercer’s treatment of health tyranny, immigration, and outsourcing is informative and hard-hitting. “The free flow of goods across borders is not to be confused with the free flow of people across borders…. The very stuff of life has been contracted out. Not mere jobs, but careers; not just some products, but entire production lines; not one or two manufacturing plants, but the means of production.”

The author advocates and illustrates a preference for good old common sense. Common sense was long the undergirding of our Anglo-American law and way of life. Why have so many abandoned it, as in the Covid fraud, for the authority of phony “expertise”?

Mercer is always a fun read because of her creative labelling: castrati Republicans, Washington wokerati, FixNews, ConOink, Learjet liberals, bafflegab for bureaucratic and progressive discourse, ‘Walmart with Missiles’ for the present U.S.

NEW BOOK: UPDATE II (3/13): The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy

Argument, Business, Capitalism, Classical Liberalism, Economy, Ethics, Free Markets, Free Speech, Government, Healthcare, libertarianism, Liberty, Logic, Morality, Natural Law, Outsourcing, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Pseudoscience, Reason, Regulation, Republicans, Science, Technology, The State

State ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another ~ilana

Between the State and the Corporation, Homo sapiens has been reduced to a Hobbesian, hedonistic version of homo economicus and a sad iteration of homo solitarius ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of “The Paleolibertarian Guide” (TPG) compendium.

“DEEP TECH,” my preferred term for the high-tech sector, denotes how deeply the head honchos of high-tech have penetrated and poisoned the American public and private sectors. As a coinage, Deep Tech is superior to Big Tech. Drawn from the term “Deep State,” the term “Deep Tech” better captures Big Tech’s overarching, enervating and tentacular reach into state and civil society.

“Deep State,” of course, is no conspiracy. Before the Left turned the term against the Right; it had long since been deployed on the Left and by libertarians to denote the state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally. To all intents and purposes, Deep Tech has become almost as powerful as the State in molding the Little Guy into a right-thinking Global Citizen.

In The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, I make the case that state ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another. The State no longer merely silhouettes civil and commercial society; but is absorbing it. What’s more, corporate culture, my purview in this volume, has been thoroughly co-opted by the State. Willingly so.

It has become the reflexive habit of corporations, not necessarily malevolently, to work together as well as to collude with government, to snuff out all lineaments of subversion in labor. After all, the progressive ideology is a gospel which these industry leaders never cease to proclaim and act upon. And if you fail to conform to it; they’ll fire you, isolate you, expose you, silence you, cancel you for good. These observations apply across party-lines.

“THE ABERRANT ECONOMY” in this work denotes the attitude of the multinationals toward economic growth. This attitude is today rooted not in healthy, community-based practices stateside and abroad, but in some aberrant economic gigantism. The derogatory diagnosis of economic elephantiasis undergirded by hubris, greed, and devout woke religiosity is warranted, I believe. Acromegaly is a physical deformity. In the human body it is caused by overproduction of certain compounds and is characterized by aberrant enlargement of the structure under discussion.

A diagnosis of economic acromegalia in Deep Tech is warranted ~ilana

The economic acromegalia or giantism diagnosed here in Deep Tech is one that manages to trample individual rights and other elementary decencies. Let us thus not confuse the metastatic multinational, motivated mostly by stratospheric wealth and a woke worldview—itself a gutter-like philosophy—with a business propelled by the good old-fashioned profit motive, whose growth is sustained by individuals and families tethered to corporeal communities, as opposed to colonies of imported laborers. Individuals, families, living in authentic, organic communities: These misty attachments are anathema to, and enemy of, the multinational’s clubby elites.

I underscore, as if in red ink, and deconstruct in detail how the awfulness of the COVID years, in particular, was underwritten by giant government, Big Pharma, and its latest malignant offshoot, the COVID Cartel—Disease X ad infinitum, if you will—in informal cahoots with social media. Again, a state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally.

Just how control is achieved—more reflexively than conspiratorially—I demonstrate by taking the reader through the COVID years, when “Agency And State Capture” were consolidated. I show how and why the Grand Old Party, Republicans, will always be missing in action on matters of individual and constitutional rights. On all matters, actually:

The overtone window alludes to a range of ideas once considered unthinkable, but now normalized. With their flaccid, crushingly stupid responses to most situations—Republicans have helped to normalize tyranny ~ilana

And I touch on the deformed foundations of the American Third-Party run healthcare system, down to how Deep Pharma’s patent privileges subvert market-based profits and free market medicine. Fault Deep Pharma, I counsel, not China.

In fact, not mere jobs, but “the very stuff of life is outsourced” by High-Tech, which loathes a labor market. (Chapter 7.) After reading “Homeless In The Homeland” (Chapter 6), the most heartbreaking of the book’s chapters, the reader will understand not only how “High-Tech Compounds Homelessness,” but that “homelessness in the United States is both physical and metaphysical”:

When your home belongs to The World; it’s everybody’s home, and nobody’s home, not even yours, which means you could find yourself homeless ~ilana

Ultimately, the sundering of cherished natural and constitutional rights by entities whose market penetration and capitalization equal those of many countries combined is why a solution is urgent.

Free-traders such as myself contend that it is worse than corrosive for big, powerful business to usher in a mind-controlling creed which they enforce against the Little Guy—on pain of social and financial demise—so that his speech is confined to politically correct, do-or-die guiding lodestars, the kind that sap and leach away the individual’s native power. Such an immoral drive ought to have miscarried a long time ago. A solution is provided in Chapter 9, “Dispatching Deep Tech; Enforcing Natural Rights.”

In the “Epilogue: On Globalism & Giving,” I round up by juxtaposing global integration with regionalism and localism, and spotlighting the last inspirational capitalist heroes of international standing. I hope to leave the readers with thoughts about charity, grace and what distinguishes The Good Giver from the Showy Giver.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK

Analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, as mentioned, is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of The Paleolibertarian Guide (TPG) compendium. The TPG’s polemical impetus is analytical in nature. The framework of this and future works in the series will systematically demonstrate that analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science—and liberty itself.

To wit, certain propositions in life need no “empirical evidence” for their validation. If anything, the constant insistence on scientism is in itself evidence of a deep corruption of reason. While solid empirical data are never to be dismissed, these are supplemental to a solid philosophy of science.

Derived from the Aristotelian method, the method I follow, Austrian-School thinking, is based in the laws of reason. To the extent that research contradicts reason, to that extent research is rubbish. The idea that science without the philosophy of science is nonsense comes alive for readers in Chapter 2: “COVID’s Cartel Of Cretins,” where, vivid and fun examples of a priori truths are provided.

THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON of this volume and those to follow is how to repatriate thinking outsourced to the expert class. For, these days, the simplest of logical deductions often appear to evade the ordinary man or woman.

The cognitive class, a managerial malignancy now glommed onto the Managerial State, will often cloak itself in the raiment of “science” and is instrumental in generating consensus. The insidious Expert Class that shapes and manages perceptions about public affairs I see as an extension of James Burnham’s Managerial State.

New Yorker James Burnham (1905-1987) began his intellectual odyssey as a Trotskyist before abjuring Marxism altogether and becoming a passionate anticommunist. He coined the phrase “managerial revolution,” which was extremely influential in the 1940s, and which served as the title of his bestselling book, one that had a marked impact on Orwell’s philosophy.

Lilliputian Man now finds himself pinned down like a butterfly, incapable or unwilling to derive and arrive at the truth without outsourcing his thinking to some authority or another. Restore we must the ancient philosophical notion whereby some things are simply axiomatically true (or false, for that matter), for it has profound ramifications for liberty.

A free-thinking people does not outsource thinking—the very business of life—to anyone.

 

 

UPDATE (2/25/024): Who knows what this means? Still, a nice category in which to be No. 1, in New Releases however fleetingly: Ethics & Morality.

UPDATE II (3/13/024): I’m buoyed to report that today, March 3, The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is No. 31 in the category of “Best Sellers in Philosophy Criticism.”

PODCAST: Oh, What Wonderful Wars: The West’s Lying Warlords

Affirmative Action, China, Communism, Conservatism, COVID-19, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Republicans, Russia, South-Africa, Technology, The State, The West, War

THE LIVE HARD TRUTH PODCAST, March 7, 2023, with David Vance and myself, was a great deal of fun. It is definitely worth postponing all midday appointments for. We go deep.

I question US belligerence against China whilst being buoyed by African resistance to US foreign policy diktats. David exposes Covid lies and distractions peddled by the spineless media. AND MUCH MORE.

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