Category Archives: Technology

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.”

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

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

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

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.

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