Category Archives: The State

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.”

UPDATED (10/14): NEW COLUMN: Hamas, Israel And The Anatomy Of State Treason

Ethics, Foreign Policy, Iran, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East, Military, Morality, Neoconservatism, Relatives, Terrorism, The State, War

NEW ESSAY, “Hamas, Israel And The Anatomy Of State Treason,” has been published at The New American, The Unz Review and WND.COM. As you see from its headings—LOW TECH INVASION, MAGA AND ISRAEL, TREASON, DEPLOYING GIZMOS TO GAZA, GEOPOLITICS, TREASON IN THE HOMELAND—it is a wide-ranging analysis contextualized to the American homeland. This analysis is of the backdrop to the treasonous abrogation of Israeli citizens’ rights to life, liberty and property, by the security entities, the IDF and the Israeli intelligence community, who were entrusted to uphold these natural, G-d-given rights.

READ IT NOW ON IlanaMercer.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/10/hamas-israel-and-the-anatomy-of-state-treason/

Excerpt:

… TREASON

Witnessed in Israel on October 7 was the utter forsaking by the State of its most elementary—and only—obligations to the citizenry: Defend their natural rights to life, liberty and property.

Seventy-two hours on, and a top banana for the Israeli Defense Forces was blaming Hamas for duping Israeli “experts.” D’oh! Why of course: After all, it is expected that a blood-lusting cabal of satanical sub-humans would apprise targets of its comings-and-goings.

Ok, but if you’re deaf and dumb, why not heed Egyptian intelligence, whose officials now claim Israel ignored repeated warnings that “something big” was going down? Google the phrase “What went wrong?” and you’ll discover that the patsy press has received Israeli officialdom’s memo. The efforts of the State to deflect blame, to reject responsibility for treason, have begun. Thus was Danny Dannon, another top banana, recounting to BBC’s HARDtalk what terrible characters are the Hamasniks. D’oh! Again.

Stendhal, a French writer, said there was no hypocrisy in mathematics. Hamas is mathematically honest about what it wants to do to all Jews.

It is the custodians of Israeli security whose calculus is off. If you correctly think Hamas is so horrible, why had Israel opted to deploy gizmos to the border with Gaza?

DEPLOYING GIZMOS TO GAZA

As your columnist divulged in 2008, Israel opted for “Robo-Snipers” instead of flesh-and-blood men and women. The nation’s “19- and 20-year-old soldiers” were still deployed to the front—but virtually. They sit at a safe distance “behind computer screens,” waiting on “approval by a commanding officer” before “pushing the kill button.”

Yes, Israel automated the process of defense against Gaza, creating a set of “auto kill-zones” “by networking together remote-controlled machine guns, ground sensors, and drones along the 60-kilometer border.”

Gizmos are useless against the stuff of Gaza—and Latin America, for that matter. In 2005, with great enthusiasm from the Israeli Left, Gaza was given over to the dogs of war, Hamas and their avid constituents. Despite the fertile, coastal land they were handed, the precious ground water they sit on, and generous international assistance, the place soon went to the dogs. Egypt, Jordan and Israel are all terrified to open their borders to the seething snake pit that is Gaza.

It matters not whether you think the cauldron of cruelty that is Gaza created its inhabitants or whether it’s the obverse. The reality is that every nation in the region fears the Gazans. Nobody in the region wants immigrants from Gaza—although given the US Uniparty’s appetite for progressive, smug preening (aka treason); one can envisage Gaza being air lifted to America by the same Special Ops forces who rushed to import Afghanistan. In any event, hearth and home are best defended by men, military or militia, on the ground, carrying guns and grenades.

Besides, all defense systems are fallible and finite in their capacity. Air-defense systems fail. The Russians have the best possible air-defense system, yet they too, on occasion, are overwhelmed by barrages of British cruise missiles supplied to a flailing Ukraine.

If military experts were doing the work currently done by neophyte chicklet reporters; they’d explain, in newspapers like The Hill, that no defense system can intercept 3000 missiles lobbed all at once. Instead of military experts, alas, we have girls cutting-and-pasting from Wikipedia about Israel’s Iron Dome air missile defense system.

Digital docility was never going to ward off a hissing enclave like Gaza, where people, young and old, writhe in hate (watch the children of Gaza bully a Jewish little boy held captive).

GEOPOLITICS

… Not unlike the United States, Hamas aims to disrupt any productive, cooperative alliances arising out of the forging of regional powers in the Middle East, and has thus made its malign presence felt. …

READ THE REST … “Hamas, Israel And The Anatomy Of State Treason” can now be read, free of pop-up ads, satanical antisemitism, and other such grotesque spam, on ILANAMercer.com.  A warrior is unafraid of Little Men and their impotent hatred.

 

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

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

When Israel flattens Gaza, and it no doubt will, if only out of sheer impotence—the World, a wicked place, must remember the body of this young Jewish woman murdered, stripped, straddled, her leg likely broken, folded beside her thigh ~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.

 

 

The Gatwick Archipelago: Savagery On-The-Thames

Britain, English, Etiquette, Europe, Homeland Security, Racism, Regulation, The State, The West

In civilized Singapore, as opposed to savage Gatwick, ‘any airport staffer who even hinted at attempting such behavior towards the general public would incur serious jail time at best, and a good hearty caning at worst’

My Australian book editor, for whose integrity I can vouch, reports as follows from the freakorama war zone of London airport “security”:

After 20 years of enduring the chief “entertainment” spectacle offered at America’s biggest international airports – namely, the enthusiasm with which certain uniformed security guards molest as many female passengers as they can while still avoiding formal charges of sexual assault – I thought that I was pretty much inured to anything that modern airport culture could inflict upon hapless travelers. I was wrong.

Why was I wrong? Because until this morning, I had never been to Gatwick in London.

The difference between even the worst TSA behavior stateside, and on the other hand what goes on at Gatwick, is like the difference between a teenage street punk and an Obergruppenführer. No, Gatwick’s uniformed thugs don’t inflict their sexual advances on anyone. And no, unlike the original Obergruppenführers, they don’t hate Jews more than they hate anyone else. They prefer to spend most of their working hours screaming apoplectically, in some lunatic patois that bears scarcely any relation to intelligible English.

I had to chaperone through Gatwick an octogenarian female acquaintance with intermittent dementia. Naturally I did not expect that anything remotely resembling actual politeness would be shown to her or me. I merely expected that I would be able to comprehend the putative English of the bellowing bullies who snatched away our passports without the smallest suggestion of saying “please”, since after all they were too busy shoving and pushing my octogenarian companion from wheelchair to trolley (she is also too lame to walk more than a few steps unaided).

Curiously enough, each time I asked them a perfectly civil question about how long they planned on delaying our exit from the airport, and why they were treating us – along with numerous other passengers – like common criminals, their bellowing abruptly stopped. Perhaps they had been suddenly stricken with deafness. An understandable bodily reaction to hearing their own screeching voices over, presumably, decades. (They were not, shall we say, characterized by obvious youthfulness.)

Similar silences greeted my polite requests for the location of the airport’s Uber access. I formed the conviction that at present-day Gatwick, Uber is the equivalent of a clandestine abortion clinic in Ireland circa 1954. All the locals know about it, but not one will admit to it, although the Hibernian analogy might well break down when one remembers that at least the Irish – unlike the People’s Republic of Gatwick’s commissars – can speak English.

Altogether it took a scarcely credible two and a half hours between the time we disembarked at Gatwick (following a 23-hour flight from Melbourne) and the time that we finally found an Uber driver prepared to transport my octogenarian companion to her London hotel. It should go without saying that several of the most obviously insolent staffers wore jackets emblazoned with the words “Happy to Help.”

Why must this petty thuggery against complete and harmless strangers occur at all? Doubtless people like my companion and myself are, admittedly, just cradle-to-grave losers in the wider scheme of things.

Yet among the millions of Gatwick arrivals being subjected to Third World ululations are, it is safe to assume, foreign businesspeople lured to England by modish cant about post-Brexit London being “Singapore-on-the-Thames.” What possible self-interest can be served by treating these foreign businesspeople as if they smelled like Boris Johnson’s vomit?

Earth to Gatwickians: you can gargle all you like about post-Brexit London being “Singapore-on-the-Thames.” But you need to remember that in the actual Singapore, any airport staffer who even hinted at attempting such behavior towards the general public would incur serious jail time at best, and a good hearty caning at worst.

For my part, my own mind is made up. Never, once my current visit to the British capital is over, will I dream of setting foot in London again.

I note, incidentally, that Paris’s population is comparable to London’s. And heaven knows, France’s recent experiences of terrorism have been in every respect more horrible.

But not a hint of Gatwick-style insolence did I detect last February at Paris’s Charles De Gaulle Airport. There, every staffer treated me with unfailing civility and decency, although no-one could claim that my spoken French was more than adequate.

Are not Parisian airport officials sometimes rude, impatient, brusque? Indeed yes: when they want to be. Especially when they need to interrogate certain members of the flying population, whom the officials have good reason to suspect of unhealthy interest in Bataclan renovating.

What I have never seen the slightest suggestion of, in Paris, is the state of utterly unconscious,  generalized expectoration against the human race (I mean expectoration in the most literal, salivary sense) which is now the standard Gatwick default mode. France is a nation of realists, who perceive what disastrous public relations it would be if they gave all airport jobs to howling hoodlums.

One acknowledgment of contrition, nevertheless, I do owe regarding Gatwick. In a flash of impatience, when recounting the matter to a friend, I likened Gatwick to a zoo. This comparison was a disgusting libel on the animal kingdom, to which I hereby extend profuse apologies.