Category Archives: Globalism

NEW COLUMN: Conservatives & Liberals Aligned With Greedy Developers & Multinationals Against The Homeless

Conservatism, Globalism, IMMIGRATION, Labor, libertarianism, Political Economy, Private Property

The hotter the housing market, the higher the homelessness ~ilana

The egalitarians have appropriated the anti-zoning argument. They now malign single-family neighborhoods in favor of promoting density, which is—wouldn’t you know it?—more expensive and thus more lucrative. It also jibes with the progressive climate agenda to corral as many people possible into rent-a-bed, pod-living arrangements. ~ilana

NEW COLUMN is “Conservatives & Liberals Aligned With Greedy Developers & Multinationals Against The Homeless.” It is currently featured on The New American, WND.COM, The UNZ Review, where the column led the page, and Townhall.com.

Now on IlanaMercer.com:  https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/03/conservatives-liberals-aligned-greedy-developers-multinationals-homeless/

Excerpt:

Trust the late, much-missed Anthony Bourdain, the Kerouac of cooking, to blurt out the truth when nobody else would as to the root causes of homelessness. Other than libeling the poor as mental drug addicts, the rest—conservatives and liberals in cahoots—call for denser development (as greedy developers lick their chops), and certainly none of those dreamy picket fences for the poor.

It is … more edifying to survey the special interests currently involved in the anti-zoning debate. Tellingly, these are the grubby interests of the developers, the realtors and the municipalities, hunkering after more property taxes. All are, inadvertently, protesting the idea of the “Single-family home that offers people a chance at traditional, white-picket fence home-ownership.”

Development fiends all hunger for the revenues that come from “dense housing,” namely “any housing that’s attached to another unit, often in taller buildings: apartments, condos, town homes, row houses.”

Against this background, it seems clear that the egalitarians have appropriated the anti-zoning argument. They now malign single-family neighborhoods in favor of promoting density, which is—wouldn’t you know it?—more expensive and thus more lucrative. Dense living also jibes with the progressive climate agenda to corral as many people possible into rent-a-bed, pod-living arrangements.

… READ NEW COLUMN here “Conservatives & Liberals Aligned With Greedy Developers & Multinationals Against The Homeless.” It is currently featured on The New American, WND.COM, The UNZ Review and Townhall.com

Now on IlanaMercer.com, where you can also get up to speed by reading Part I: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/03/slandering-homeless-mass-immigration-not-mental-disease-addiction/

 

UPDATE II (3/19): NEW COLUMN: Slandering The Homeless: Mass Immigration, Not Mental Disease & Addiction

Anti-Semitism, Economy, Globalism, IMMIGRATION, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Technology

NEW COLUMN is “Slandering The Homeless: Mass Immigration, Not Mental Disease & Addiction.” It is featured at The New American and The Unz Review.

Now on ilanaMercer.com: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/03/slandering-homeless-mass-immigration-not-mental-disease-addiction/

Excerpt:

… Big Tech must be quite pleased to see homelessness attributed exclusively, by the usual cast on TV, to addiction and mental illness—when, in fact, homelessness is driven, primarily, by the systematic and permanent eviction from the housing market of vulnerable, working-class people.

This is certainly so in Washington State. Homelessness in the Emerald City has been exacerbated by Big Tech and the other multinationals, for these stateless corporations are the major importers, into King County and the surrounds, of a high-tech, feudal elite that compounds the homeless quagmire.

If anything, the corporations that straddle the globe rely on immigration ignoramuses to perpetuate the single-cause theory of homelessness: addiction or mental illness.

However, even if drug addiction and mental illness are seen as necessary in causing homelessness, they are seldom sufficient. Substance abuse and mental anguish can, in themselves, be the consequence of other exogenous, existential and intractable circumstances.

Such as being priced out of your homeland’s housing market. For good….

THE REST…  Slandering The Homeless: Mass Immigration, Not Mental Disease & Addiction” is featured on The New American and The Unz Review.

Or, here https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/03/slandering-homeless-mass-immigration-not-mental-disease-addiction/

* Screen-picture credit

UPDATED (3/18):  Want to talk about the hypothesis I floated about homelessness? Here goes on Unz Review: ILANA is Jewish, so well of course, homelessness.

Sometimes bullies, stalkers, haters and plain asinine cowards have to be dispatched. Done:

https://www.unz.com/imercer/slandering-the-homeless-mass-immigration-not-mental-disease-addiction/#comment-5869708


UPDATE II (3/19):
Copious data against the mental illness/drug libel is here: “Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong” by Aaron Carr. It’s the artificially, ever-hot housing market!

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about

NEW COLUMN: Bar Meghan Markle From The Great Lady’s Funeral

Britain, Conservatism, Constitution, Democracy, English, Globalism, Nationalism, Nationhood, South-Africa

NEW COLUMN is “Bar Meghan Markle From The Great Lady’s Funeral.” It’s a feature on WND, Unz Review, and The New American.

It’s no secret I favor monarchy over mob rule, namely democracy aka mobocracy.

“From pundits on our side of the pond, however, the monarchy regularly draws nasty barbs. Trashing the British monarchy appears to be their way of asserting American exceptionalism. I wager that were the conservative, periwigged Englishmen who founded America to pounce back on to the ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ TV set—the only place they’d be welcomed, given their ‘Ultra MAGA’ bent—the founders, too, would favor the monarchy over the current American mobocracy.”

… consider the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the tawdry, quintessentially American saga they had inflicted on the queen. That the British monarchy stands for the last vestiges of ancient English tradition is not in dispute. But what do the Americanized Harry Windsor, formerly known as Prince Harry, and Meghan Markle represent? …

MORE on WND, Unz Review, and The New American.

A different measure of her Majesty was taken by British paleolibertarian and friend Sean Gabb. In 2012, Dr. Gabb dubbed Elizabeth II “Elizabeth the Useless.”

Brilliant piece, facts all new to me in “Sixty Years a Rubber Stamp” By Sean Gabb:

“The Queen has not sustained our national identity. … she has allowed many people to overlook the structures of absolute and unaccountable power that have grown up during her reign. She has fronted a revolution to dispossess us of our country and of our rights within it.”

“The Queen should have resisted the Offensive Weapons Bill and the Firearms Bill, that effectively abolished our right to keep and bear arms for defence. She should have resisted the Bills that abolished most civil juries and that allowed majority verdicts in criminal trials.”

“She should have resisted the numerous private agreements that made our country into an American satrapy. She should have insisted, every time she met her Prime Minister, on keeping the spirit of our old Constitution. There have been many times since 1972 when she should have acted. …”

“… she has acted only twice in my lifetime to force changes of policy. In 1979, she bullied Margaret Thatcher to go back on her election promise not to hand Rhodesia over to a bunch of black Marxists. In 1987, she bullied Thatcher again to … sanction South Africa. … MORE.

What are we to expect from Charles III?

Nothing, says Dr. Gabb, today.

He is old and stupid and possibly malevolent. Nor do I expect anything of William V, assuming he is ever allowed to succeed. George V was unfortunate in his progeny, and its quality has been dropping ever since. If all else had been sound, monarchs of low intellectual quality might not have been a problem – though I suspect it would always have had damaging effects given that our constitution is monarchical and in need of some ability at the top. But they were stupid at a time when intelligent monarchs were an essential safeguard against a political class that, since about 1940, has never risen above the worthless.

* Screen pic image via Sean Gabb.

Dying For Nothing Day

America, Globalism, Government, Hillary Clinton, Military, Neoconservatism, The State, War

A brave nation fights because it must; a cowardly one fights because it can ~ ilana (2003)

It is the habit on the Memorial Day weekend to thank uniformed men for their sacrifice. My sympathies go out to Americans who fight phantoms in far-flung destinations. I’m sorry they’ve been snookered into living, dying and killing for a lie. But I cannot honor that lie, or those who give their lives for it, and take the lives of others in America’s many recreational wars. I mourn for them, as I have from day one, but I can’t honor them.

I am sorry for those who’ve enlisted thinking they’d fight for their countrymen and were subjected to one backdoor draft after another in the cause of illegal, unjust wars and assorted informal attacks. My heart hurts for you, but I won’t worship at Moloch’s feet to make you feel better.

I honor those sad, sad draftees to Vietnam and to WW II. The first valiant batch had no option; the same goes for the last, which fought a just war. I grew up in Israel, so I honor those men who stopped Arab armies from overrunning our homes. In 1973, we came especially close to annihilation.

I can legitimately claim to know of flesh-and-blood heroes who fought so that I could emerge from the bomb shelter (in the wars of 67 and 73) and proceed with my kid life. I always stood in their honor and wept when the sirens wailed once a year. Every Israeli stops on that day, wherever he is, and stands still in remembrance. We would have died or been overrun by Arabs if not for those brave men who defended the homeland, and not some far-away imperial project.

But can we Americans, in 2013, make such a claim? Can we truly claim that members of the American military killed Iraqis or Afghanis or Libyans so that we may … do what? Remind me?

What I learned growing up in a war-torn region is that a brave nation fights because it must; a cowardly one fights because it can.”

Ultimately, it is “for the love of a brother-in-arms, and ‘Big Brother’ be damned,” explained Robert Glisson. This is why they of the “Patriot Guard Riders,” his band of brothers, truly fought. Men fight for one another and not for the causes imputed to them by the cowards who send them to battle.

The military is still a government job; a career path with huge risks. How fast the so-called small government types forget this immutable truth. From the appropriately titled Your Government’s Jihadi Protection Program (which the military has become):

“When Republicans and conservatives cavil about the gargantuan growth of government, they target the state’s welfare apparatus and spare its war machine. Unbeknown to these factions, the military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small. Conservative can’t coherently preach against the evils of big government, while excluding the military mammoth.”—ILANA (Your Government’s Jihadi Protection Program.)

AND, from Classical Liberalism And State Schemes:

We have a solemn [negative] duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty, and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because (supposedly) upholding the negative rights of the world’s citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—their lives, liberties, and livelihoods. The classical liberal government’s duty is to its own citizens, first.
“philanthropic” wars are transfer programs—the quintessential big-government projects, if you will. The warfare state, like the welfare state, is thus inimical to the classical liberal creed. Therefore, government’s duties in the classical liberal tradition are negative, not positive; to protect freedoms, not to plan projects. As I’ve written, “In a free society, the ‘vision thing’ is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a ‘visionary’ bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government (‘great purposes’ in Bush Babble), the poorer and less free the people.”

*Image credit