Category Archives: Intelligence

NEW ESSAY (9/12/026) On Conservative Kvetching About Contemporary Western Civilization’s Superiority

Christianity, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Intelligence, Israel, Literature, Middle East, Morality, Natural Law, Propaganda, Terrorism, The West, War

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War is the West’s way in the world; war on civilians ~ilana   

NEW ESSAY is “On Conservative Kvetching About Contemporary Western Civilization’s Superiority.” It appeared on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com, anti-war, anti-state, pro-market.

You can find it on ilanamercer’s FPV Resistance on Substack, where we can also chat.
And, on IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

….Once-upon a time, I’d have said, more serenely, that when an American politician preaches about “the values that make our country great,” to quote Mrs. Clinton, and about “our ally Israel sharing these values,” to be spread far and wide, chances are they mean not ordered liberty, but a libertine order, where the Bill of Rights is subordinate to the Security-cum-Surveillance State apparatus, and any common-law traditions remaining are treated as living, breathing, mutating philosophical malignancies that must be made to second and reinforce the murderous apparatus just mentioned.

Without qualm, I’ll now venture that the contemporary version of civilization known as “western” has been repudiated to a great degree by the Axis of Genocide. “You can’t pull too many bricks out of that wall before it caves in,” to borrow from Louis Auchincloss (one of the great writers America once boasted).

The Axis of Genocide’s modus vivendi is instantiated across the West in every single institution of state and civil society. The “perpetrator block” encompasses nearly all western governments and the most powerful economic actors. Its military and civilian squadrons have not only adopted Israel’s inverted reality and morality, but have made it their own. 

The thing, the West, is in a state of putrefaction.

You’d think, then, that the conservative commentariat—many of whom rose through the military- or media-industrial-complex—would finally quell their yelling about “western civilization,” in the context of metastasizing, protracted western genocidal pursuits.

Not a bit. They continue to rabbit on about The (Christian) West vs. The Rest. They continue to figuratively remind us, with a sniff and a sneer, that The Rest once could not make iron or roll a wheel.

One notable exception to the warped rule, aside Jeffrey Sachs—a prince among intellectual and moral scullions—is Professor Stephan Walt, the intellectual in the famous pair that authored the seminal book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. 

During an August interview, Walt firmly but affably told Tucker Carlson that “people sometimes forget” about the “collapse” of norms against the use of violence, courtesy of the Super Power and its supremacist sidekick, Israel. In his words: …”

READ THE REST: 

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https://ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com

UPDATE II (10/8): THE TRUTH: Israel Suffered A Complete Collapse Of The State; The IDF Being Its Face

Affirmative Action, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Israel, Media, Military, The State, War

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Israeli intelligence assets could very likely have been compromised. Israel is a progressive society recruiting for representation, not merit. This Israel has learned from the best: America ~ilana

The IDF appears near-useless in defending its citizens, not unlike the US Army.

So much for flimsy fences, unmanned, AI-powered machine guns on the Gaza border and other clever high-tech resources. Post-graduate cleverness clearly is no match for fiercely savage, hands-on guerrilla warfare.

Hamas’s low-tech invasion across the Gaza border into southern Israel was also a clear demonstration of a complete failure of the State apparatus, the IDF being the face of the State. Bibi Netanyahu, the PM, is in hiding.

The most honest report, as I write, in the evening of October 7, comes from a relative, safe, thank G-d. Her words are the most truthful to date:

 

“Shock, betrayal, the crash of a dream; how could this happen? People are still without help or rescue. They turned to the media to call the army because there were terrorists in their homes and yards. It took hours, and the situation has still not changed much. Total chaos.”

To my question, “Has not a war room been set up and constant TV updates from the IDF and the PM’s office being broadcast?”
Reply: Nope. Nobody is talking to us. People are doing the work of the army. It’s like the Wild West.

News from channel N12 confirms (in Hebrew, or an Ebonics equivalent, the spoken language has so deteriorated) that images of children’s corpses are circulating the internet, but their parents know not where they are lying, in which Israeli morgue. “It’s 2023,” exclaims the TV panelist! “A nightmare!”

300 are dead; 1800 injured.

About living through the 1973 War I wrote in “Betraying Brave Boys”:

The Yom Kippur War Israel nearly lost. Israeli intelligence failed miserably. As is usually the case, the kids paid the price—a few hundred youngsters were stranded on the borders with no backup. They defended their posts heroically before being gruesomely slaughtered. Many were dismembered.

When that war ended, Remembrance Day swelled to include another 2,523 casualties—about one-tenth of one percent of the population was dead. Thousands more were wounded. The casualty estimates for Egypt and Syria were 16,000.

UPDATED (10/8): While the Hamas’s low-tech invasion was confined to southern Israel, the extent of the casualties is far greater than 9/11, as a proportion of a total population of nine-million souls.  The death count to date is 650; 2000 injured. 

UPDATE II: There are people who are incapable of seeing excellence such as in literature, for instance, because it originates in the wrong side of the political spectrum. This is an intellectual deformity.

Being wedded only to truth and immutable excellence, at least as I see them, helps me seek out the best sources without fear or favor. In this way I consolidate my idea of how, in the case of Israel, on October 7, 2023, the slaughter of over 700 of their citizens was enabled. 

To wit, Fox News is providing the worst rah-rah rubbish, proving itself unfit to my task. MSNBC, on the other hand, has some excellent sources. Richard Engel has always been one of my favorite foreign-policy correspondents. Former Bernie Sanders operative Simone, an obnoxious crumpet of a host, not ordinarily my cup-of-tea, asks probative questions. In an exchange with the awful John Brennan, these two lefties float a plausible theory:

Israeli intelligence assets could very likely have been compromised. Israel is a progressive society recruiting for representation, not merit. This Israel learned from the best: America.

 

 

NEW COLUMN: Subpar Submersible: Woke Will Implode, On Land And Underwater

America, Conservatism, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Intelligence, Natural Law, Technology

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Truth to tell, the Titan resembled nothing so much as a ‘Hold My Beer’ contraption, assembled with parts as good as you get from Home Depot

…a carbon fiber cylindrical hull, topped and tailed with Titanium hemispheres. Titanium glued to carbon fiber with an epoxy-type resin and fastened with bolts: Just image the iffy quality of joiners that meld dissimilar materials under the pressure of 376 atmospheres! ~ilana

NEW COLUMN is “Subpar Submersible: Woke Will Implode, On Land And Underwater.” It is a feature on WND.COM, The Unz Review and The New American

You can read it now on IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

… In hiring, Mr. Rush clearly prized the cool quotient over cool-headed competency.

OceanGate—which “sounds like a scam waiting to happen,” quipped engineer podcaster “Two Bit da Vinci”—was an outfit out of Everett, Washington. It had been aggressively marketing the Titan as a vessel fit for deep-sea exploration. Yet, rather than use a metal that withstands compression; for the main composite of their subpar submersible, the anti-white ageist brainiacs of OceanGate chose carbon fiber.

Some reports contend that “NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama helped build the lost Titanic submersible.” Charitably put, it is unclear how involved NASA engineers and the Washington State academic dumbassery were with Titan’s cool kids. Disavowals from NASA, Boeing and the University of Washington notwithstanding; on this count, I intuitively believe Titan CEO Rush. Daily Mail alleges that Rush “had hired interns from Washington State University who … boast[ed that] … a PlayStation remote was used to run the Titan.”

Rush chose to use consumer electronics for a high-reliability application! In all likelihood, however, the Sony PlayStation controller would have been the more reliable node in the Titan’s intern-devised electrical network.

For it is quite clear that systemic, institutional rot now defines American institutions, commercial, civic and state. My 2011 book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot; Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, warned, by way of an example, that ridding Eskom, a South African electricity public utility that once helped power the continent, of the best engineers—experienced white men—would plunge South Africa into darkness. So it has.

What is also clear is that the mission of the white-hating Deep-Sea techies of the Titan is shared by Deep Tech (aka Big Tech) in general: marginalize whites and the attendant issue of competency. …

… Contra Stockton Rush, when engineers in-the-know speak of the Titan; they speak of a lack of mechanical tests, an absence of a locator beacon; an indifference to the operational lifetime—namely cumulative, structural fatigue—of such an inherently rickety tube; all compounded by the submersible’s primary composite: carbon fiber. “Exotic in the world of materials,” carbon fiber is unsuited to the task of withstanding immense pressure.

… THE REST. READ  “Subpar Submersible: Woke Will Implode, On Land And Underwater” on WND.COM, The Unz Review and The New American.

UPDATED (6/24): He’d Never Hire ’50-Year-Old White Guys,’ Said Stockton Rush, RIP, Titan’s Submersible’s CEO. Oops.

Critique, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, Racism, Technology

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TITAN’S SUBMERSIBLE’S CEO STOCKTON RUSH, RIP, once declared that he,

“[D]idn’t hire ’50-year-old white guys’ with military experience to captain his vessels because they weren’t ‘inspirational.’ Stockton Rush, 61, added that … ‘anybody can drive the sub’ with a $30 video game controller.

OOPS. A bum’s rush.

“Speaking to CBS News in November,” Reports RT, “Rush explained that the vessel was entirely controlled with a generic bluetooth video game controller, which online sleuths discovered had a dismal reputation for reliability.”

From Matt Walsh—who else?—comes turgid psychoanalysis in the service of mindless WORSHIP. WORSHIP without distinction.

In a burst of Randian emotionalism, Mr. Walsh, an unsupple mind, rushed to praise adventure tourism in general, and the OceanGate submersible’s Titanic-bound endeavor, in particular.

Walsh scolded any who dared to be cynical—as I am of the masses who flock to, say, Mount Everest, turning Base Camp into a vast latrine, and making waste removal a major source of employment for local Nepalese and neighboring Chinese. Yes, how ennobling an industry is that for The Other.

Noble spirit? “Bold and daring” on the Everest? No. Crass, despoiling tourism.

First to summit were a white guy (not yet 50) named Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay. They embodied “different, bold, and daring.”

Nevertheless, scold Matt Walsh pules on tediously about critics:

These are people whose envy and dissatisfaction with their own mediocre, unimpressive lives have driven them to despise anyone who does anything different, bold, or daring. They take pleasure in failure because they will never have any successes of their own to celebrate.

The lives of Lilliputians like you and me dwarf compared to the grand life of CEO and pilot Stockton Rush, RIP, says Walsh.

The latest, via AP News

A submersible carrying five people to the Titanic imploded near the site of the shipwreck and killed everyone on board, authorities said Thursday, bringing a tragic end to a saga that included an urgent around-the-clock search and a worldwide vigil for the missing vessel.

Coast Guard officials said during a news conference that they’ve notified the families of the crew of the Titan, which had been missing since Sunday.

The sliver of hope that remained for finding the five men alive was wiped away early Thursday, when the submersible’s 96-hour supply of oxygen was expected to run out and the Coast Guard announced that debris had been found roughly 1,600 feet (488 meters) from the Titanic in North Atlantic waters.

“This was a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” said Rear Adm. John Mauger, of the First Coast Guard District.

* Image as screen pic courtesy Fox News

UPDATE II: For their abysmal endeavor, the anti-white ageist brainiacs of the OceanGate submersible used Carbon Fiber, rather than a metal that withstands compression. NASA engineers helped them. Systemic, institutional rot. Ridding the system of the best engineers is a bummer.

RELATED:

“Systemic, Institutional Rot: From Big Freeze In Texas To Fires In Cali,” Ilana Mercer, February 25, 2021

“When Merit-Based Hiring Is Deemed Racist, Bridges Fall Down,” Ilana Mercer, March 29, 2018

“Manliness (Not A Miracle) On The Hudson,” Ilana Mercer, February 13, 2009

As our reader points out in Comments, you would not see a brother, rich or poor, board such a “Hold My Beer” piece of engineered crap, assembled with parts as good as you get from Home Depot, in a basement—OceanGate workshop pics indeed do depict steps descending into what looks like a garage.

However, absent those old, musty, white men, the atmosphere was of giddy exuberance. So, there’s that.