U.S. neocons have been promoting a war against Iran for over two decades. In a world with even a smidgeon of justice they would, best case, be straitjacketed and involuntarily committed, worst case, spend the rest of their lives in the kind of super secure solitary to which they want to confine Julian Assange.

Whatever respect the U.S. government once received as “leader of the free world” is gone, replaced by contempt and antipathy from the 7 billion outside the West’s golden billion. First Ukraine and now Gaza have coalesced the multipolarity movement led by Russia and China. Strengthening one’s adversaries and needlessly creating new ones are the opposite of rational.

What else can be expected from people who believe in a double-digit number of genders, all interchangeable? The federal government, academia, corporate America, and Hollywood are ruthlessly promoting doctrines whose essence is that people’s gender, sexual proclivities, race, and ethnicity are their most important attributes, not their ability, competence, ingenuity, productivity, judgment, or character.

Nasty old capitalism that rewarded the latter has been replaced by crony socialism that rewards the former. Hierarchies are filled with people who can’t even be said to have reached their level of incompetence. They were incompetent to begin with, but secured their positions because they ticked the right DEI boxes, mouthed the prevailing platitudes, and slithered their way up the ladder. Anyone who points this out is smeared and cancelled. Truth must be discarded if it hurts the wrong feelings and exposes the wrong agendas.

Pretend is the order of the day. So, Washington pretends: that it can have an empire when its military hasn’t won a war since 1945; that it can jump into two major wars and potentially two more and it will win them all; that the unrelenting immigrant flow and crumbling, dangerous cities aren’t hallmarks of the U.S.’s regression into the third world; that the death-trap medical system promotes health; that the debts it cannot pay and commitments it cannot meet can just keep piling up, and that the corrupt ruling class, riddled with incompetents with no real world experience or useful skills, heads stuffed with nonsense, is entitled to rule by virtue of its hypocritical preening and ineptitude. Meanwhile, the mainstream media peddles the official propaganda and pretends all is well.

How does one preserve one’s sanity amidst this pervasive lunacy?

You can act like a man (or woman, the only other gender), cherish what you are, and take responsibility for your own life. You can refuse to turn away from an insane world, seeing it for what it is, but holding to your own sanity with all your strength. You can refuse to pretend. To preserve your mind is to preserve your immortal soul; abandon either one and you abandon the other.

In The Gray Radiance, the main character, Nick Wozniak, contemplates soul, mind, God, and the insanity in which he finds himself. He’s in Saigon in 1968.

He felt a savage satisfaction in what he’d said. Franklins did their best to insulate themselves from such encounters. They lived in bubbles, and how often did you get a chance to pop one? God, how could you live like Franklin?

God. A concept that might be more than a concept. He was a twice-a-year—at most—Catholic and had never considered himself devout or faithful. God was an abstraction before whom you genuflected, prayed, sang, took communion, and put an offering on the plate. He got as much out of church as he would watching Indian tribal dances or voodoo rituals, and he put them all in the same category.

Yet, he couldn’t account for that strange feeling as he carried Quang in My Tho, the certainty that the boy would make it. Nor could he account for the conviction that he would find the truth about his father, that he had to do so. Both were the kind of things that God presumably would want to encourage. You’d think with God that actions spoke louder than genuflecting and the other folderol. You worshipped God by doing the right things, not just showing up at church. He couldn’t conceive of an insecure God, one who needed the folderol.

And you think he’d help you do the right things, if you asked him. Truth and wisdom—distilled truth—came to those who sought them. That was reasonable, and God would be reasonable. Humans had logic and reason and were created in God’s image. That would make God logical and reasonable, although not in ways that people would always understand. He had heard someone say—someone smart, but he couldn’t remember who—that man created God in his own image. A quick and easy dismissal for those who wanted it. Man had undoubtedly created a conception of God, as Nick was doing that morning. It didn’t logically follow that God didn’t exist, or that he hadn’t created man.

If God was logic, he was also justice. That the two went together seemed beyond argument; the books would balance. Even if there was no God, there was at least some justice because actions have consequences. Drink yourself stupid, and you throw up in the middle of the night. Your head aches the next morning. You could have been beaten, robbed, or worse after you passed out on the street. You were saved by a guardian angel, who would kill you if you didn’t play the devil’s game with Hendricks.

A collision with consequences was coming for the cohort running the United States government. They were drunk with power and corruption. Like all drunks, they kept drinking. You don’t murder the natives, destroy their country, prop up your gang of thieves, spew endless hypocrisy, then walk out of the bar to your cozy bed scot-free. You weaved down uncertain streets and dark alleys and were a sitting duck for all the enemies you had made. Sooner or later, they would get you.

There would come a time when Franklin and his ilk couldn’t just move on to a new set of lies. When retribution came, it would be Old Testament merciless. Nothing created hate like arrogance asserting its control but exempting itself from its own rules. Throw in pious crap about moral superiority, and you’ve got hate that’s passed down generation to generation, that neither forgets nor forgives. God knows crap when he sees it, and he doesn’t forget or forgive. He wouldn’t bless his children subjugating his children. This love of power was the root of evil. He’d bless the Golden Rule: his children treating his children as they themselves wanted to be treated.

Yes, indeed, Old Testament merciless.

There were different conceptions of God, but they all had one thing in common: God the creator. Humanity destroyed but it had also created every step of its own progress—life depended on it. To see something where there was nothing, to discover that which had been hidden, to plan and to build, to make your conception a reality; that was the spark of the divine, communion with God.

He finished his coffee, got up from the couch, went into the kitchen, and rinsed his cup. There was a bottle of Jack, almost full, by the sink. He poured it down the drain. He threw a bag of marijuana in the garbage.

His headache was gone. It was time to write—to create—his story of My Tho, Minh, and Quang. He’d write for a few hours and then go to the hospital to see Quang. He wasn’t sure how, but his path with Quang led to creation—to God—as well.

The Gray Radiance, Robert Gore, 2023

The battle against insanity is moral and spiritual. A snippet here and a snippet there of what you know to be true are lifelines; the mountains of lies are death. Two plus two will always equal four. The unremitting search for truth leads to its distilled essence: wisdom.

A collision with consequences is no longer coming for the cohort running the United States government; it’s arrived. Their frantic efforts to censor and suppress, their vicious cancellations, and their high-tech totalitarianism are to keep that reality—not so much from the populace they claim to rule—but from themselves. They cannot escape the misery and death they are imposing on everyone else.

The ultimate insanity is pretending that ignoring reality will change it. The ultimate wisdom is dealing with it. If you plod along the straight line path of facts and logic, holding to your sanity and what you know to be true, you won’t win the race, but that’s a race over the cliff. You will preserve your mind . . . and your soul. And you may be around to help start things fresh after the insanity extinguishes itself.

 

   

 

 

Robert Gore was born in 1958 in Livermore, California. He grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where both his parents worked for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His undergraduate education was at UCLA. He graduated in 1980 Summa cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a double major in economics and political science. He completed the JD/MBA program at UC Berkeley in 1984. He held part-time jobs at both UCLA and UCB. He is an inactive member of the California Bar Association.

Robert’s career in finance began in 1984 with a bank in San Francisco, trading municipal bonds. In 1985, he went to a Wall Street firm’s West Coast municipal bond office in Los Angeles as a bond trader. He developed its retail and institutional sales capabilities and after four years was promoted to manager of the region. 

In 1990, Robert went to a private partnership in Los Angeles serving a high-net-worth clientele throughout Southern California, as head of the firm’s fixed-income division. In 1991, he became one of the youngest partners in the firm’s history. His division was consistently among the firm’s most profitable, and in 2003 he was named to the executive committee. He wrote a market commentary that was distributed to the firm’s clients. He is a past president of the Los Angeles Municipal Bond Club. He made appearances on television and radio shows as an expert in fixed income securities and California municipal bonds, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register, and had a letter published in the Financial Times. 

In 2006, Robert warned of a looming housing debacle and financial crisis. He set up a proprietary trading desk to capitalize on the situation. His prediction was initially not popular with the firm’s financial advisors, but it ended up saving their clients a great deal of money. He retired from finance in 2012. 

Straight Line Logic began on WordPress in 2014. Robert has been a featured writer on The Savvy Street, an online magazine, and has been on alternative media websites Zero Hedge, David Stockman’s Contra Corner, Lew Rockwell, The Automatic Earth, The Burning Platform, and Western Rifle Shooters Association.

 

 

straightlinelogic.com