Brilliance cannot survive in a world ruled by mendacity, muck, and malice.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

This is part three of a three-part series. For part one, click here. For part two, click here.

I and members of my family are minority investors in Dr. Kelly’s majority-owned company, fouRy LLC, or 4Ry. I have performed and will continue to perform, various services for 4Ry, for which I may be compensated. The opinions and analyses are mine alone. This blog post is neither a solicitation of investment nor an offer to sell securities. 4Ry is a Delaware Limited Liability Corporation and its trademark application is pending.

The guillotine is the most effective and humane way to execute someone. It severs the head and brain from the body; it’s quick and foolproof. Would that society’s ongoing attack on its own brain were so quickly effectuated. There would be an almost instantaneous regression back to the mindless miasma with which so many are comfortable, and that would be that. Unfortunately, the execution of creativity, invention, innovation, enterprise, and logic is death by countless brain excisions—each deeper than the previous one.

Continue reading “The Choice, Part Three: One or the Other”

Guest post by Dmitry Orlov

“Russia is ready to respond to any provocation, but the last thing the Russians want is another war. And that, if you like good news, is the best news you are going to hear.”

A whiff of World War III hangs in the air. In the US, Cold War 2.0 is on, and the anti-Russian rhetoric emanating from the Clinton campaign, echoed by the mass media, hearkens back to McCarthyism and the red scare. In response, many people are starting to think that Armageddon might be nigh—an all-out nuclear exchange, followed by nuclear winter and human extinction. It seems that many people in the US like to think that way. Goodness gracious!

But, you know, this is hardly unreasonable of them. The US is spiraling down into financial, economic and political collapse, losing its standing in the world and turning into a continent-sized ghetto full of drug abuse, violence and decaying infrastructure, its population vice-ridden, poisoned with genetically modified food, morbidly obese, exploited by predatory police departments and city halls, plus a wide assortment of rackets, from medicine to education to real estate… That we know.

We also know how painful it is to realize that the US is damaged beyond repair, or to acquiesce to the fact that most of the damage is self-inflicted: the endless, useless wars, the limitless corruption of money politics, the toxic culture and gender wars, and the imperial hubris and willful ignorance that underlies it all… This level of disconnect between the expected and the observed certainly hurts, but the pain can be avoided, for a time, through mass delusion.

This sort of downward spiral does not automatically spell “Apocalypse,” but the specifics of the state cult of the US—an old-time religiosity overlaid with the secular religion of progress—are such that there can be no other options: either we are on our way up to build colonies on Mars, or we perish in a ball of flame. Since the humiliation of having to ask the Russians for permission to fly the Soyuz to the International Space Station makes the prospect of American space colonies seem dubious, it’s Plan B: balls of flame here we come!

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The blathering that negotiation with Vladimir Putin is more dangerous than backing him into a corner would be laughably absurd if the consequences of the latter weren’t so potentially devastating.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

U.S. Conducts Airstrikes Against ISIS in Libya reads The New York Times’ August 1 headline, capturing virtually everything wrong with US foreign interventionism. Tracing the strands emanating from that headline regrettably requires a deep dive into an ideological and moral cesspool, on which Hillary Clinton luxuriates in a floating lounge chair, sunning herself and sipping a piña colada, evidently not put off by the stench.

What’s ISIS doing in Libya? It’s an offshoot of ISIS in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, which is an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq. That group was formed from an embittered core of Sunnis dispossessed of positions and property and jailed by the US government-installed majority Shiite government after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Al Qaeda’s family tree starts with the mujahideen in Afghanistan, who were backed by Presidents Carter and Reagan in their war against the Soviet Union. The goal was to draw the Soviet Union into a protracted and debilitating quagmire.

Continue reading “The Most Dangerous Candidate”

Facts and logic, or evolutionary hardwiring? The latter wins every time.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Have you ever won or lost a political argument? Have you or an opponent ever said: “Your facts and logic are overpowering, I have to concede that you’re right.” It’s never happened, has it? It doesn’t happen because politics has little to do with facts and logic. It’s anchored in emotions that take root in infancy and are so deeply ingrained they are undoubtedly part of humanity’s evolutionary code. No bond is more enduring than that between parent and child, and none is more laden with psychological baggage. While political argument will always be a frustratingly fruitless endeavor, you can at least understand why this is so, and perhaps avoid wasting your time.

The first lesson infants learn, evolutionarily hardwired, is that mom provides. She supplies the physical basics, and psychological sustenance as well. She smiles and coos, delighted by almost everything her baby does. “Mom,” as in mom and the apple pies she cooks, has a sacred, unrivaled place in the human conscious and subconscious. Insulting someone’s mother is an invitation to a fight. Whether you realize or admit it or not, the person that bore, gave birth, and nurtured you through childhood has a outsize presence in your psyche.

Continue reading “Mommy and Daddy”

QE, ZIRP, NIRP, helicopter money and all the other government and central bank hijinks have only one real purpose.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Who has the most to gain from low and negative interest rates? Obviously debtors. The world’s biggest debtors are governments, with the US government number one. Debt today is like a listing ship. The objective of governments is to get themselves to the part of the ship that’s highest out of the water—the bridge—and cram everyone else below decks, submerged. The ship will sink, but governments and their cronies will let the other passengers drown before they breathe their last.

The real purpose—the only one that matters—of governments and central banks’ machinations since the financial crisis has been to finance governments. The world stood on the edge of the debt contraction abyss. Debt had reached an unsustainable level. Economies could no longer bear the load of interest payments and principle repayment. The marginal value of most debt, particularly that which funded consumption, had gone clearly negative. Even the value of debt incurred to fund “investment” was dicey, since much of that investment was actually speculation in disguise: house flipping, leveraged mortgage security arbitrage, share buybacks, and the like. The financial crisis was the iceberg rending the hole in the hull. Since then, the hole has only grown.

Continue reading “No Lifeboats”

The most important issue Donald Trump has raised.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

This is Part 2 of Thank You, Mr. Trump. Link to Part 1.

Hillary Clinton; her friends, sycophants, and supporters in government, the media, and the general populace; the leadership of the Democratic Party, and the Republicans who have announced they will support her are desperately wishing that much of her past would just go away. During the 1990’s, the Clintons’ low-bar goal was to elude criminal justice for their many scandals. They never answered inquiries unless compelled, or proved their innocence. Instead, they besmirched the inquirers, floated conspiracy theories (conspiracy theorists are only kooks when they challenge the government, not when they’re the president and his wife), stonewalled investigations, threatened, blackmailed, hid or destroyed evidence, and fed exculpatory material to their friends in the media. Everybody then moved on, until the next scandal: lather, rinse, repeat.

The Clinton’s 1990s scandals never really went away, and they have added to them since then. Bill pals around with a pedophile billionaire who procures underage females for consensual and allegedly nonconsensual sex on his private plane and island. Hillary has Libya and the emails. Jointly they have the Clinton Foundation. The usual suspects have labored assiduously not to investigate these new scandals and keep the old ones down the memory hole. However, the stench persists, as stenches do, and many Americans have neither forgiven or forgotten. Trump pushed Clinton criminality to the forefront with one adjective: “crooked.” Only Clinton’s most blindly deluded supporters have called this one outrageous. Hillary is crooked, and Trump deserves credit for not avoiding the issue, as many Republican hopefuls did when they still had hopes.

Continue reading “Thank You, Mr. Trump, Part 2”