Author: Robert Gore

  Evil is in a topping formation.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Evil is completely dependent on the good it attempts to destroy. When good discovered fire, invented the wheel, and started planting seeds, evil invented government. Evil produces nothing, it only commands, coerces, enslaves, destroys, and murders. Gigantic tombs loom over Egypt’s desert, built by slaves millennia ago, monuments to rulers’ vanity. A single farmer working the Nile’s alluvial soil produced more than any pharaoh, yet the former had to send a portion of his crop to the latter.

Nothing has changed since then. How do the production and lives of the good become the property of evil? Force, fear, and fraud are the usual answers, but they can’t be the entire answer. Rulers and their military and police forces are always vastly outnumbered by the ruled. Revolts have brought down countless governments. Yet, why have most people down through the ages not revolted but endured the force, fear, and fraud? The trick is to get the ruled to assign their right in their own lives to the rulers, acting as the purported agent of a collective.

Continue reading “Shorting Evil”

How’s that lesser-evil thing working out?

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

As el gato malo recently observed, there are two types of Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS. One afflicts a subset of those who don’t like him; one afflicts a subset of those who do. Among the afflicted, mere mention of his name evokes either foaming-at-the-mouth rage or enraptured paroxysms.

Continue reading “Much, Much More Than Trump”

Refuse to pretend. Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

“Nobody does. The crowd never thinks. People are only comfortable in a pack, and they’re most comfortable in one that’s racing off a cliff.”

Deacon Bainbridge to Daniel Durand, The Golden Pinnacle, Robert Gore, (2013)

The pack is racing off a cliff. There is a vast complex telling them that they are not, and that they won’t be hurt when they smash on the rocks below.

How does the human mind deal with the contradictory? One way is through discovering facts and rational analysis to resolve the contradiction. A vaccine is presented as safe and effective. However, its legal status shields its makers from legal liability for any vaccine-induced injuries. Why would legal immunity be necessary if the vaccine is safe and effective? The rational person questions the premise of safety and effectiveness, and either foregoes the vaccine until further data confirms the premise, or foregoes it permanently if it doesn’t.

Continue reading “The Institutional Insanity Complex”

Would-be rulers embrace a moronic oxymoron. Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic.

The Houthis stymie 12 percent of the world’s shipping. Israel has bitten off more than it can chew and is desperately trying to maneuver the U.S. into a broader Middle Eastern engagement and years of pointless war. In Europe, farmers and truckers are protesting and blocking roads over climate change measures and other grievances. In the U.S., a governor ignores a Supreme Court decision and receives support from 25 fellow governors.

At the recently concluded confab at Davos, the world’s would-be rulers conferred on how they would rule the world. How quaint. They’re going to rule a world that’s spinning out of their, or anybody else’s, control. A Russian politician, Konstantin Dolgov, coined a phrase for the oxymoronic pipe dream that prevails in Washington, Davos, Brussels, and Tel Aviv: “The Americans need controlled instability to realize their own plans.” Dolgov noted: “But this instability has long been out of Washington’s control.”

Continue reading “Controlled Instability”

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Just say no.

Some things are simpler than they appear. During the past few years, countless words have been spilled that ask and try to answer the seemingly complex question: What in the hell is wrong with these people? How do we get Russiagate, COVID hysteria, killer vaccines, vaccine mandates, George Floyd riots, rigged elections, the January 6 travesty, Biden, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, open borders, runaway debt, suffocating regulations and taxes, elite pedophilia, war in Ukraine, war in the Middle East, Trump’s show trials, woke, DEI, and a plagiarist puff-ball promoted to president of a once prestigious Ivy League institution?

Continue reading “Spoiled Brats”

Many institutions have no convincing justification for their own existence.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Western civilization is characterized by its institutions. Its foundations have been government, organized religion, the military, science, technology, business, academia, media, art, and entertainment. Institutions have been bulwarks of order and have enabled Western civilization to reach unprecedented plateaus of achievement and prosperity. Now, they’re under assault and crumbling, which has been often noted and decried but usually not analyzed or understood as the outcome of an epochal transition.

Institutions have been the victim of their own success. The Industrial and Information Revolutions have put goods, services, wealth, data, and choices in billions of hands in what amounts to an historical blink of an eye, less than two centuries. The average American lives better and longer than royalty did back in monarchy’s heyday and has more personal power. Kings and emperors of yore could order people around and toss them in dungeons, but they couldn’t hop on the Internet and communicate with someone on the other side of the planet or hop on a freeway and journey five hundred miles in a day.

Continue reading “The Transition”

Grow up!

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

The lessons many of us took from playgrounds are helpful in analyzing war, although war, being humanity’s stupidest activity, is less excusable and less interesting than playground dynamics. Grownups, after all, are supposed to be wiser and more mature than kids. Realizing that most aren’t is one of those rites of passage into adulthood.

On the playground you’ll find one or more bullies, who terrorize the weaker, smaller kids. The bullies tend to form their own clique. Their victims try to stay out of their way, but bullies gotta bully. The victims quickly learn that appealing to adult authority is guaranteed trouble. While bullies may be reprimanded or otherwise punished, they have ways of dealing with upstarts and snitches, and their revenge is always disproportionate.

Continue reading “Lessons From the Playground”

We’re fighting a faith that’s lasted for centuries.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

A pervasive foreboding has enveloped the world, a feeling that we’re on the verge of something traumatic and epochal. The feeling has been stoked by overlords at the World Economic Forum and other globalist groups, promising us a miserable future, ostensibly to fight germs and changing temperatures, but actually to institute global governance and totalitarian control. That the overlords no longer hide their agenda, and that their bleak program has made the remarkable headway it has, hints at some sort of sinister, unrecognized force at loose in the world. Some say it’s satanic, though the world has been here before.

Continue reading “Heresy”

There has to be a return to first principles.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Imagine you are the leader of an extraterrestrial force sent to conquer planet earth. Your force orbits the earth in a gigantic starship. You do not know what defenses earth has, but back on your planet a strategy was devised to maximize your chances of conquest. Although your starship has powerful weapons, it will not attack the earth directly. That would give its position away, and if it goes down the mission is over. However, your ship will serve as a mother ship for thousands of smaller daughter ships. The daughter ships have surveillance and attack capabilities, but they are coordinated from the mother ship and are of little use if it’s destroyed. Remarkably, the daughter ships propagate, sending out their own daughter ships, who in turn can send out their own daughter ships, ceaselessly multiplying the earth’s attackers.

Continue reading “Take Out the Mother Ship”

Banging one’s head against the wall is not a wise strategy.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Russia and China head an alliance that poses the first direct challenge to the American empire since its inception at the end of World War II. Their strategy has been to follow Napoleon’s advice—not interrupting the U.S. government while it makes mistake after mistake—and to pursue the opposite of its hapless policies. Their power waxes; American power wanes.

August 29, 1949, the day the Soviets detonated their first atomic weapon, was the beginning of the end of the American empire. The U.S. government’s unrivaled power lasted four years and 23 days, from when it dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Soviet bomb gave the world a counterweight to an American nuclear monopoly.

Continue reading “The Alliance”

Deplorable ants will make the picnic a living hell. Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Part One

What scares the powerful are those willing to die in defense of principle. Our rulers are cowards, and they can’t begin to understand devotion to any principle beyond self-aggrandizement, if that can be called a principle. The very existence of such devotion is a moral rebuke. It fills the powerful with one of humanity’s most loathsome emotions: the hatred of the virtuous for their virtue.

Guns are the endpoint in a chain of practical precepts straight from the American Revolution. The biggest threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is government, whose force can only be met with counter-force. The powerful have no respect for your rights, but they do for your firearms—you might fight back. Those firearms are the last bulwark against the planet’s most dangerous institutions and psychopaths. If you let them take your guns, it will allow them to take everything else. Both sides know it. Only one will acknowledge it.

Continue reading “Ants at the Picnic, Part Two”

This article was first posted on Straight Line Logic on Memorial Day, 2015. It will be published every Memorial Day for as long as SLL continues as a website.

You don’t fight for your country, you fight for your government.

The Golden Pinnacle, by Robert Gore

On Memorial Day, America remembers and honors those who died while serving in the military. It is altogether fitting and proper to ask: for what did they die? Do the rationales offered by the military and government officials who decide when and how the US will go to war, and embraced by the public, particularly those who lose loved ones, stand up to scrutiny and analysis? Some will recoil, claiming it inappropriate on a day devoted to honoring the dead. However, it is because war is a matter of life and death, for members of the military and inevitably civilians, that its putative justifications be subject to the strictest tests of truth and the most probing of analyses.

Continue reading “In Memoriam, 2023”

Enough ants can kill an elephant . . . or a globalist conspiracy.

Guest post from Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Bullets and blogs are the ants at the globalist picnic, and they may prove just as hard to eradicate. It’s a war between decentralized and centralized power, and it’s not a layup for the latter. At a picnic, you can spray pesticide to eradicate the ants, but it ruins the outing. Who wants to eat hamburgers and hot dogs that taste like Raid®? In like vein, globalist efforts to exterminate the ants may leave the world a smoking ruin.

At best, government is a protection racket that offers security to its citizens from external and internal violence and criminality at an acceptable cost. At worst, which is most of the time, the biggest threat of violence and criminality comes from government itself—extortion, fraud, theft, corruption, brutality, and murder.

Propelling Donald Trump’s insurgent candidacies in 2016 and 2020 was a critical mass of people who distrust and despise the Corruptocracy. That critical mass knows uniparty criminals are leading the country into a ditch and they threw a hand grenade into politics as usual.

Continue reading “Ants at the Picnic, Part One”

When the slaves revolt, they will seek the blood of their masters.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

In 2013, a century after the establishment of the Federal Reserve, I published The Golden Pinnacle. The novel’s hero is Daniel Durand, a Wall Street banker. Chapter 27, “Fools’ Gold,” features Daniel’s testimony in 1913 before a House of Representatives subcommittee against legislation under consideration that would establish the Federal Reserve. Eleanor is Daniel’s wife and Tom and Alexander are two of his four sons. As the current banking crisis unfolds, I won’t have much to say that will add in any meaningful way to what I said in “Fools’ Gold”. Why repeat myself? Perhaps I’ll just keep linking back to this post. Please share in whole or in part with attribution and a link back to this post.

Continue reading “Fools’ Gold”

There are grounds for hope. From the ruins of impending collapse there will be some who reject collectivism and are committed to rebuilding on a foundation of individual rights. How they will protect those rights and whatever territories they stake out are what theoretical physicists sometimes call “engineering problems.” One advantage they’ll have, though, as the brain standard constituency—they’ll be smarter than their adversaries. Attention, imagination, and intelligence will be keenly focused on building from the ruins and protecting what they’ve built.

Continue reading “The Brain Standard, Part Two”

Three steps forward, two steps back; so humanity advances.

Guest Post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Part One

Ideas are the foundation of the brain standard, one of which is that only individuals have rights. This cuts through the collectivist dreck that passes for thought among most of the world’s so-called intellectuals. The variations of collectivism all disguise nothing more than brute force hiding behind propaganda. Their inevitable failures stem from their essential flaw: those that control the collective claim rights that negate those of the individual.

There are grounds for hope. From the ruins of impending collapse there will be some who reject collectivism and are committed to rebuilding on a foundation of individual rights. How they will protect those rights and whatever territories they stake out are what theoretical physicists sometimes call “engineering problems.” One advantage they’ll have, though, as the brain standard constituency—they’ll be smarter than their adversaries. Attention, imagination, and intelligence will be keenly focused on building from the ruins and protecting what they’ve built.

Continue reading “The Brain Standard, Part Two”