Rearranging The Deck Chairs While The Titanic Sinks

A much worse than useless response to state government defiance of the law.

WHILE I WAS GETTING DRESSED SATURDAY MORNING, Doreen brought me coffee, along with the highlights of what she had seen on the morning news while puttering in the kitchen (as she always does, bless her heart). Her big story that morning was Michigan's "Governess" Gretchen Whitmer (as Doreen likes to call her) seething over a decision by a federal judge the day before in LIFFTI v. Whitmer overruling the Governess's threat of sanctions against gym owners if they dared to exercise their rights, open their doors, and attempt to survive.

It's nice to see Gretchen Whitmer "seethe". But the fact is, Whitmer's not really angry at all, or, at least, hasn't anything to really be angry about.

The ruling in the case is handsomely-written and well-reasoned within the context of the particular arguments made by the Plaintiffs. (This praise leaves aside an unfortunate reliance by the court on a very bent 1905 case-- Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 29 (1905). In that case, a poorly-briefed(?) Supreme Court upheld a community-wide coercive vaccination program, failing to recognize that those declining vaccination put only themselves at risk and such refusals could not, therefore, be said to present a "public health emergency" even if such an alleged emergency could properly be deemed a valid justification for otherwise violating anyone's personal sovereignty.)

But the LIFFTI ruling enjoins prosecution of the Plaintiffs for reopening their businesses only on the grounds that Whitmer's order keeping them closed is arbitrary, in light of the permitted re-opening of other businesses within Michigan. It even specifies that the Plaintiffs may only re-open incrementally and under protocols and other limitations specified by Whitmer in regard to other re-openings which she has already "permitted".

In short, the ruling, while doubtless very welcomed by the Plaintiffs and doubtless very annoying to Whitmer, actually embraces (or in any event, leaves undisturbed) the fundamental proposition that Gretchen Whitmer can legally dictate the closing of gymnasiums and fitness centers (or anything and everything else), and punish those who defy her diktats. It is that fundamental-- and fundamentally wrong-- proposition that needed a slap-down by the court.

Instead, that fundamentally wrong and very dangerous proposition-- which is, in fact, an existential threat to the American Experiment-- is given cover by this misdirected suit and its misdirected ruling.

AS THOSE PAYING ATTENTION HERE know perfectly well, Gretchen Whitmer, like other governors, is expressly-- and in no uncertain terms-- prohibited by the state Constitution from devising, issuing and enforcing orders like those under consideration in LIFFTI v. Whitmer. Not one of Whitmer's "executive orders" purporting to impose requirements or prohibitions on people in Michigan-- business owners or anyone else-- is legally valid.

Michigan's Constitution vests law-making (legislative) power-- that is, the power to impose enforceable requirements or prohibitions-- exclusively in the legislature, in Article IV, section 1 and Article III, section 2, with only two very narrow and specific exceptions (all bracketed clarifications and emphases added):

Article IV, § 1 Legislative power:

Sec. 1. Except to the extent limited or abrogated by article IV, section 6 [providing for an Independent citizens redistricting commission] or article V, section 2 [allowing the governor to rearrange or reassign functions with the legislatively-established executive branch, subject to approval by the legislature where having the character of law], the legislative power of the State of Michigan is vested in a senate and a house of representatives.

Article III, § 2 Separation of powers of government:

The powers of government are divided into three branches: legislative, executive and judicial. No person exercising powers of one branch shall exercise powers properly belonging to another branch except as expressly provided in this constitution [in Article IV, sec. 1, shown above].

In law, "substance" always rules over "form". The devising and issuing of commands to the general public, disobedience of which can be punished by the state apparatus in any way whatsoever, is the making of laws, even if the products are called "executive orders". Executive branch officials are prohibited from such legislating, except as expressly authorized in the Constitutions to which they have sworn fidelity.

Any basis-- even an enactment of the legislature itself-- on which the governor (or any executive branch agency or official) claims the power to devise, issue and enforce commands directed at any or all of the general public -- whether such commands are labeled as "Executive Orders" or otherwise-- is manifestly unconstitutional and void, per the foregoing simple and straightforward legal facts. The governor and all other executive branch officials are prohibited from being given, having, or exercising any such power.

No commands so devised and issued can be lawfully enforced by anyone. No commands so devised and issued can be lawfully upheld by any court to which the foregoing points of law are presented.

Even businesses operating with state-issued licenses are not subject to such edicts or vulnerable to adverse consequences in regard to such licenses for ignoring Whitmer. There can be NO punishments of ANY KIND for disregarding orders which governors are Constitutionally-prohibited from issuing.

The General rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose; since unconstitutionality dates from the time of it's enactment and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it. An unconstitutional law, in legal contemplation, is as inoperative as if it had never been passed. Such a statute leaves the question that it purports to settle just as it would be had the statute not been enacted.

No repeal of an enactment is necessary, since an unconstitutional law is void. The general principles follow that it imposes no duties, confers no rights, creates no office, bestows no power or authority on anyone, affords no protection, and justifies no acts performed under it.

16 Am Jur 2d, Sec 256

PLAINLY (ONCE YOU THINK ABOUT IT), arguing in a lawsuit that this order or that order is unreasonable, or unfair, or arbitrary is a tacit admission that the issuance of the orders generally is authorized. Celebrating the outcome of such a suit-- even an outcome that favors the aggrieved target of the orders-- is a tacit admission that the issuance of the orders generally is authorized.

Further, both poison the minds of those who consider the legal standing of such orders in future. Faced with a history of court challenges concerning such orders, anyone taking up a related issue is going to look to those cases first for guidance as to the state of the law and for shortcuts in their own research and argument formulation. After doing so, no one is going to think, "Hey! Maybe these earlier litigants failed to look deeply enough. Maybe they missed a more fundamental, more powerful, and more ultimately dispositive and enormously more important rule-of-law supporting bedrock argument."

Instead, such future litigants are going to follow the same path as those that came before, making the same harmful admissions and further cementing into the public mind and into the legal landscape the notion that state governors have the rightful power to issue edicts like Whitmer's. The courts are going to be afflicted in the same way.

The principle of Constitutional primacy is thus undermined; just as rights which are not exercised wither away, so, too, does the superiority of the People's law over that of those the People elect to administer their law. The LIFFTI case is itself an example of how this goes.

After all, the otherwise competent lawyers bringing the suit failed to look to and argue from the plain Constitutional provisions laid out above. This happened because those in the legal profession make use of the tools with which they are familiar, and no others.

As Constitutional primacy goes un-deployed, courts become more and more likely to entertain workarounds to that primacy. They come to have in hand an ever-greater basket of precedents addressing situations similar to those before them from which to craft solutions in which Constitutional rule is sidelined-- and they don't WANT to bring Constitutions into the mix. Nobody in government likes Constitutions. Constitutions are not rules they make for themselves-- Constitutions are the rules we impose on them, and under which they chafe.

SO, GRETCHEN WHITMER MAY BE SEETHING a bit, but she ought to be gnashing her teeth and tearing out her hair. She SHOULD have had her ass handed to her, and she would have had if the litigants in LIFFTI had taken the proper argument into a state court. Or if ANY litigant challenging Whitmer's unilateral, Constitutionally-prohibited orders has done so.

One good thing comes from the LITTFI ruling, though, of which everyone should take note: the court there does a great job of establishing the standing of every business-owner in Michigan to bring suit even before any enforcement action is brought against them.

Y'all heard that, right?

"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle."

-James Madison

NOTE: A concise presentation of the state Constitutional prohibition on "executive orders" like Whitmer's in Michigan (and those of the governors of Texas, Virginia, Kentucky, Wyoming and Georgia) can be found at this link. I will be happy to consult with any competent lawyer seeking to bring suit against these outrageous edicts.

I really hope I hear from one or a dozen or a hundred such lawyers while bringing these suits will still make national news-- which means before all the edicts are lifted by those who have presumptuously issued them. If we're going to defend Constitutional primacy, it has to be done while that primacy is under visible attack.

Otherwise, no one will be allowed to notice, no one will learn anything from the effort, and no national or even state-wide dialogue will take place by which the lesson is fleshed out and comes to be widely owned.

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A Few Bits Of Dryrot That Have Caught My Attention This Week

Call it a deskchair forensic analysis of an ongoing crime scene...

GEORGIA IS EMBRACING A DEGREE OF MADNESS, it would appear. For one thing the state is poised to enact a "hate crimes" law-- a law meant to punish people for thoughts of which the state disapproves.

As noxious as some points of view may be none are more so than those embracing the notion that any American government can properly attempt to suppress points of view it finds unwelcome, whether by direct censorship or by turning its stink-eye on expressions of the disfavored views, which it will attempt to detect and sanction.

It would be better that everyone growl and spit at each other in the public square in perpetuity than that any minority be compelled to "get their minds right" and conform in their thinking to the majority view by relentless fear of punishment for exposing any hint of the disfavored view-- in writing or any form of public speech-- over a generation or three. "Hate crime" laws are a long-term "re-education camp" approach, and have no place in this country.

LET'S KEEP IN MIND that any and all actual harms committed by anyone upon anyone else are already criminal even without "hate crime" laws. The "hate crime" component merely makes it possible to ascribe "wrong thinking" to such an act as well, perhaps based on something one had posted on Facebook ten years prior.

The result over time is suppressed expressions, which eventually means suppressed thought, as well.

The fundamental wrongness of this dynamic is ironically illustrated by a mammoth expression of either blind stupidity about the point above or gross hypocrisy within the Georgia "hate crimes" bill itself. The legislation seeks to enhance punishments for acts purportedly motivated by the target's exercise of rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.

First among those rights, of course, are the holding and expressing whatever views one wishes. Under the terms of the act, then, it would appear that anyone who deploys "hate crime" sanctions against anyone else would himself be guilty of a hate crime...

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Georgia's bill is being imperiled in its chances of passage by a Republican-backed effort to add police as a specially-protected-victim class under the proposed legislation, which would make criticism of those who enforce the state's edicts (whether lawful edicts or unlawful ones) a dangerous practice, which can thus be expected to whither away over time.

Can the addition of all government officials to the protected classes be far behind? Why would it not be as proper on the list as the police who merely carry out the will of such officials?

Georgia is named in honor of the British King George who issued its colonial charter in 1733. Maybe now it is really George Orwell whose namesake it has become.

***

IF I WEREN'T THE WISELY-CYNICAL PERSON I have become after 65 years of watching spin-doctors and other propagandists' work, I would be mystified as to why some MSM are now capitalizing "black" when referring to African-Americans (and yet are not doing the same when referring to "whites"...). It is as though the descriptor "black" has become, for these pathetic panderers to opportunistic racism-baiters, an honorific.

One must imagine this bizarre and unseemly new practice to be mere "virtue-signaling" obsequiousness (or the pretense of an implicit mea culpa, as in, "I have been racist in my heart; I will absolve myself by exalting the victims of my thought crimes as extra-special Black people in future to balance out my slate!"). But one must also imagine that this practice will surely exacerbate the already considerable distortions of the political landscape on the subject of race relations in the wake of the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis in late May.

One must also wonder why the same sycophants in the MSM don't capitalize "gay" and "trans" and other desciptors concerning other "grievance-heroes" of the politically-correct universe.

***

MUCH IN THE NEWS LAST WEEK was the June 15 ruling by the Supreme Court in the consolidated case reported as Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia. In that ruling it was held, among other things, that people afflicted with gender dysphoria, a psychological aberration in which a victim's actual gender is rejected by the diseased mind, are protected from being fired because of the condition under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many folks are all atwitter over that part of the decision in particular.

Aimee Stephens, the plaintiff in the case involving gender dysphoria, had been hired as a funeral director in a Michigan funeral home. Having fallen into the depths of his disease, Aimee began cross-dressing at work, in violation of a dress-code policy with which he had agreed to comply at time of hire, and was terminated for doing so.

Disingenuously, Stephens argued-- and the Sixth Circuit and the Supreme Court bought into the proposition-- that his termination was due to his being "transgender"-- that is, due to Stephens self-"identification" as a woman. The Supreme Court even claims that the company for which Stephens worked did not dispute this assertion.

However, this is a contortion of what I have seen of the arguments by R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Home. What I have seen of those arguments (concededly some years ago when the case was in the lower courts) indicate that Stephens was neither fired because he was a man, nor because he imagined himself to be a woman. Nor was Stephens fired even because he really WAS a woman, as some who cruelly enable this malady would have it.

Instead, Stephens was fired because he presented to the business's customers what could be reasonably expected to be a very off-putting visible manifestation of a mental disease. That is, Stephens was fired for behavior harmful to the funeral home for which he worked.

It is obvious that Stephens would have been fired for coming to work dressed as a little boy just as quickly as he was fired for coming to work dressed as a woman-- making clear that while "sex" (or "gender identity") might have prompted or been involved in his aberrant behavior, it did not, itself, have anything to do with the termination.

BUT I'M NOT ACTUALLY WRITING ABOUT THIS CASE in order to address the pathologies of social, political and legal norming of folks with dis-integrated minds, however harmful that may be. My real issue with this case is the proposition-- seemingly unchallenged and undisturbed-- that the federal government has any Constitutionally-harmonious authority to determine who can be fired by a private business, and/or for what, as a matter of upholding the civil rights of any person.

Properly analyzing that errant proposition is beyond the scope of this brief commentary, though. For the moment I will have to content myself with pointing out that for 177 years such authority escaped all notice, and that in 1964, no amendment was made to the U.S. Constitution by which such an authority may have arisen.

The United States certainly has a duty to police its OWN violations of civil rights, against which violations it is expressly barred by the Constitution. But the government cannot punish a private actor from abridging another's civil rights, by, for instance, refusing to publish that other's words in his newspaper.

Just so, the government has no authority to punish a private actor from failing to behave as though any particular person has a right to a job in his business, or a perpetual right to that job once hired save only if termination is on grounds approved by the state.

The government may pass a law preventing its own agents and offices from exercising such hiring and firing liberties. But it cannot prevent private actors from doing so-- indeed, such an effort to prevent is a violation of the rights of its target to at least his rights of association, to the enjoyment of his property, to the pursuit of his happiness, and to make and enforce contracts, and to abstain from entering into contracts.

Stay tuned-- there will be more on this at another time.

The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.

-John Adams

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.

-Woodrow Wilson

(...a stopped clock generally, but caught here at one of those two times per day...)

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CURRENT CONTENTS OF THE HYSTERIA SUPPLEMENT

A Collection Of Facts To Help With Clear-Thinking About Anxieties And Policy Choices

An Entertaining Lesson In Proper Analysis Of Scare Stats

A Rebuttal Of Discouraging Responses To The Emergence Of A Cure For Covid-19

Another Well-Taken Analysis And Debunk Of Scare Stat Fallacies

Draft Legislation For Compelling Hysterical (Or "Crisis"-Exploiting) Political Units To Stand Down

It's Time To Post A Reward For Information Leading To...

Hydroxychloroquine And Azithromycin Are Again Proven To Cure Covid-19-- This Crisis Is, And Must Be, OVER!

So, How Many Michiganders Have Died Thanks To Gretchen Whitmer's Worship Of Centralized Bureaucratic Authority?

Productive Economies Are Not Factories That Can Be Stopped And Then Simply Restarted

As The Panic-Mongering Collapses, Watch For A New Scam

The Very Dangerous Pathologies Of Continued "Sheltering In Place"

Michigan Rallies To Oppose C19 Edicts While The Data Debunk The Government's Pretexts

Actual C19 Fatality Rates By State

Some Observations Regarding Any Government's Alleged "Emergency Powers"

The Ongoing Effort To Leverage Months of Conditioning Into Residual Despotism With Bogus Fatality Figures

The Michigan, Texas, Virginia, Kentucky, Wyoming and Georgia "Lockdown" Liberty Keys

WATCH THE VIDEO below. All the way through.

It is an hour of truth power, by which you will come to understand the falseness of the alleged C-19 death toll by which the panic and all its attendant evil is being sustained.

As you watch keep in mind that New York, in which this whistle-blower worked and on which she concentrates, is responsible for fully 25% of the supposed C19 deaths making up the current scary national total. Other states like Michigan, for instance, which have engaged in the same vile practices exposed here, have kicked in other big chunks of that total.

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*****

Remember 'War Games'?

THIS VIDEO PROJECTS THE PROGRESS of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. It's frightening, as it should be, as well as sobering and instructive. My only criticisms are, first of all, that it fails to account for the imbalance that will now be present in any such exchange due to the new Russian hypersonic weapons.

Secondly, the video fails to account for China's contribution to the exchange against the US, which is a virtual certainty. China knows that if Russia goes, and the US survives, it goes soon after. So, that will not be allowed to happen.

See important related comments here.

*****

The Entire Legal And Practical Truth About The Income Tax In Three Short Sentences

Focus on these simple points and you can teach anyone the truth about the tax.

1. The income tax is an excise.

2. Excise taxes are taxes on the gainful exercise of privileges.

3. You probably didn't earn your money by exercising any taxable privilege (or earned very little that way).

Inarguable (and nowhere disputed) proof of the first two statements above can be found concisely spelled-out in this little 7-page document. Whether the third is true for any particular person can be determined by consulting this guide to understanding "income-taxable privilege".

*****

Daft And Despicable Deniers

What the hell is wrong with these people?!

CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE how abysmally stupid someone would have to be to continue to doubt or deny that CtC has revealed the actual, complete and insurmountable truth about the income tax in light of the overwhelming mountain of historical, legal, practical and logical evidence to the contrary? (Not to mention the outright lies and even ludicrous hoaxes the executive and some corrupt members of the judiciary have been caught at in desperate efforts to conceal the truth...)

Plainly any such denier must either be abysmally stupid or be an abysmally corrupt government official or other person who sees him or herself as benefitting from the lies about the tax by which America has suffered for 75 years now. Isn't this true?

*****

"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him."

-Ezra Pound

*****

Get this flyer as a printable .pdf here

Get this flyer as a multi-piece printable .pdf here

*****

Other Voices:

Important guest observations and commentary with an important afterword by Yours Truly

Julian Assange In Limbo

by Patrick Cockburn

Julian Assange​ was running WikiLeaks in 2010 when it released a vast hoard of US government documents revealing details of American political, military and diplomatic operations. With extracts published by the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País, the archive provided deeper insight into the international workings of the US state than anything seen since Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971. But today Ellsberg is celebrated as the patron saint of whistleblowers while Assange is locked in a cell in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison for 23 and a half hours a day. In this latest phase of the American authorities’ ten-year pursuit of Assange, he is fighting extradition to the US. Court hearings to determine whether the extradition request will be granted have been delayed until September by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the US he faces one charge of computer hacking and 17 counts under the Espionage Act of 1917. If he is convicted, the result could be a prison sentence of 175 years.

I was in Kabul when I first heard about the WikiLeaks revelations, which confirmed much of what I and other reporters suspected, or knew but could not prove, about US activities in Afghanistan and Iraq. The trove was immense: some 251,287 diplomatic cables, more than 400,000 classified army reports from the Iraq War and 90,000 from the war in Afghanistan. Rereading these documents now I’m struck again by the constipated military-bureaucratic prose, with its sinister, dehumanising acronyms. Killing people is referred to as an EOF (‘Escalation of Force’), something that happened frequently at US military checkpoints when nervous US soldiers directed Iraqi drivers to stop or go with complex hand signals that nobody understood. What this could mean for Iraqis is illustrated by brief military reports such as the one headed ‘Escalation of Force by 3/8 NE Fallujah: I CIV KIA, 4 CIV WIA’. Decoded, it describes the moment when a woman in a car was killed and her husband and three daughters wounded at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Fallujah, forty miles west of Baghdad. The US marine on duty opened fire because he was ‘unable to determine the occupants of the vehicle due to the reflection of the sun coming off the windshield’. Another report marks the moment when US soldiers shot dead a man who was ‘creeping up behind their sniper position’, only to learn later that he was their own unit’s interpreter.

These reports are the small change of war. But collectively they convey its reality far better than even the most well-informed journalistic accounts. Those two shootings were a thousand times repeated, though the reports were rare in admitting that the victims were civilians. More usually, the dead were automatically identified as ‘terrorists’ caught in the act, regardless of evidence to the contrary. The most famous of the WikiLeaks discoveries concerned an event in Baghdad on 12 July 2007 during which the US military claimed to have killed a dozen terrorists. But the incident had been filmed by the gun camera of the US Apache helicopter that had carried out the shootings, and the people it targeted were all civilians. Much was known about the killings because among the dead were two local journalists working for Reuters. It was known, too, that such a video existed, but the Pentagon refused to release it despite a Freedom of Information Act request. Appalled by what the video revealed about the way the US was conducting its war on terror, and appalled by the contents of the thousands of reports and cables it was stored alongside, a junior US intelligence analyst called Bradley Manning, who later changed her legal gender and became Chelsea Manning, released the entire archive to WikiLeaks.

The video still has the power to shock. The two helicopter pilots exchange banter about the slaughter in the street below: ‘Ha, ha, I hit them,’ one says. ‘Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,’ the other says. They have mistaken the camera held by one of the journalists for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, unlikely though it was that armed insurgents would stand in the open in Baghdad with a US helicopter hovering overhead. They shoot again at the wounded as one of them, probably the Reuters assistant Saeed Chmagh, crawls towards a van that has stopped to rescue them. When the pilots are told over the radio that they have killed a number of Iraqi civilians and wounded two children, one of them says: ‘Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into the battle.’

Continued...

Click here to read the rest of this article

...and then proceed to the afterword below...

Afterword

SO, LET ME PUT THIS IN THE MOST concise terms possible: I would trade every single adversary, persecutor and denigrator of Julian Assange into prison in exchange for his release, and consider the deal an incalculably positive gain for America and the world. Clear enough?

I stand foursquare with Thomas Jefferson, in his remark that, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

By this observation Jefferson was speaking of real newspapers-- independent, courageous, informative and honest, or so I take it. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are the gold standard for such journalism in this century-- meant to inform and empower the people against the corruption and danger of the secretive state, as nicely encapsulated in Cockburn's quote of Robert Lowe from the NYT in 1852.

The enormous good Assange has done even just in the brief window he had before the attacks on him began in 2010 and while trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy is the direct reason the US swamp population hates, fears and wishes to crucify him.

Assange has shone a bright light upon these vile creatures, both through the 2010 document and video dump and his subsequent revelations of DNC corruption in favor of Hilary Clinton at the expense of Bernie Sanders, the Vault 7 Releases-- and who knows what else that has yet to appear? The monsters want Assange destroyed, both to pay him back for their embarrassment and unwelcome sense of vulnerability and as a deterrence to other truth-tellers and ugly-secret-revealers.

I WRITE OFTEN ABOUT ASSANGE because with him rests a great deal of our security in our liberties. If Julian Assange is shut away and others like him are thereby deterred into silence, we resume the status of mushrooms-- kept in the dark and fed shit.

Mushroom people are the furthest thing from sovereign and self-governing; indeed, mushroom people are serfs at best, however much they may harbor delusions about being free. Mushroom people won't ever see the emails and memos exchanged between officials responsible for all the C19 bs with which we've been "locked down" and seen our economy and way of life ruined this past spring.

Mushroom people won't ever see the real records of concerning the "Russiagate" assault; or the truth about the bogus claims of Bashar Al Assad using chemical weapons; or the real backstory of the assassination of Quasem Soleimani.

I WANT TO SEE ALL THOSE THINGS, AND MORE. You should, too.

Defund the state.

If we can't put all of Julian Assange's persecutors in prison, we can at least put them on the street, where they can do no more harm.

Don't just close your eyes and dreamily smile at the thought. Get up and make it happen.

Spread the knowledge you already have about the true nature of the income tax. The simplest way to do this is to share this little document with everyone you can, in every way that you can.

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A New Policy

I HAVE DONE MY BEST to lead this country to liberty from the mis-applied income tax. I have labored hard. I've shed a lot of sweat, a fair bit of blood and more than a few tears. But I seem to be pretty poor at that kind of work.

When I have asked all of you for what I firmly believe is a necessary resource to move the ball downfield and give all of us the best chance at justice and an end to the assault on the rule of law-- simple testimonial videos requiring nothing from any of you but the phone in your pocket and three minutes of speaking from the heart-- I have had only a handful of people answer my call.

I CAN'T KEEP GOING THIS WAY. I have to be able to turn my attention away from writing new persuasive or skepticism-addressing articles week after week, and toward research, analysis and educational presentations that will benefit everyone already in this community. I need time to do some suing, and to bring together the resources and talent toward that end.

As said, it is my firm belief that your testimonial videos are the resource that I need to make big things happen, and they are unquestionably the thing I need to allow me to turn my attention away from trying to get horses to drink at the waterhole to which I have led them. Your words, in your great numbers and all in your own different ways, will do that better than anything I write possibly could.

And yet, you are not providing them. This, despite my having been asking you for them for many years now.

Therefore, with enormous reluctance, I am making portions of this website restricted access only. People have been urging me to do this for years now, telling me I should impose a charge to access my work-product, so as to enable me to keep producing.

I have never been inclined to charge fees for access. I ask for donations, and will continue to do that, and if they do not come, then I will conclude that my work is of no value to anyone, and I will close shop.

But I now WILL charge a special something for access to some key portions of that work.

Opening selected pages on losthorizons.com comprising higher level legal resources now requires the submission of qualifying testimonial videos, as discussed, described and demonstrated here. The videos must be accompanied by scans of a recent educated filing along with responsive documents from the IRS, whether in the form of a check, a notice identifying and reflecting the filed return, or "return" and "account" transcripts for the year for which the return was filed. Names must be shown in full.

Similarly, if an email comes my way asking for guidance or assistance, I had better already have your video posted.

I HATE TO PLAY IT THIS WAY. But I want to win.

I'll tell you a story from when I was coaching my kids in soccer. Both of my kids at a certain age in their careers had run into a wall common to all but the very exceptional. They had gotten to be pretty good, and they wanted to enjoy the benefits of their hard work. But the arrival of this interest coincided with a new self-consciousness which made them reluctant to risk failing and looking foolish. So, they were hanging back from seizing the main chance when it appeared, and driving for the goal.

My solution was to post on the wall of our dining room a couple of simple points about self-discipline, the chief of which is this: You can't score a goal if you don't take a shot.

That's how it is here, too. If you don't stand up, you are laying down, and you'll never score that goal.

Here is what my kids live by now, in their own version of that lesson. I hear it from them all the time as they excel (accompanied by the sound of a father's breast swelling with pride): Go hard, or go home.

You, too. Go hard, or go home. Send those videos.

Do I ask for a lot? I want your victories to post, your financial support, your efforts at spreading the word, and your beautiful faces and inspiring words, too. It IS a lot.

But it's not too much. I'll let Thomas Paine explain:

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price on its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”

Fear nothing but God.

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What Makes YOU A Warrior For The Truth?

We each have our reasons, and our story. It's time, and it's needed, for you to share yours with the world.

P.S. READ EVERYTHING THAT FOLLOWS, CAREFULLY AND THOROUGHLY!!

"The day we see truth and do not speak is the day we begin to die."

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

What does it for you?

Selected Features From Recent Editions:

An Existential Threat Is Eating Away At America

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A Few Words About The George Floyd Murder

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David Denning Shares His CtC Story, And His Shining Spirit

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Other Voices: 'German Report Denounces C19 As 'A Global False Alarm''

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"Lockdown" Liberty, And Its Larger Message

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On The "Chinese Virus" Spin Machine

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Other Voices: 'Trump Derangement v. Trump Enablement'

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A Salute To Three True American Heroes

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The Hysteria Supplement-- Updated!

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A Salute To Three MORE True American Heroes

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Other Voices: 'What Happened to the Land of the Free?'

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The Current State Of The Covid-19 "Crisis"

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The Hysteria Supplement-- Updated!

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Another Characteristically Law-Defying Ruling By The Sixth Circuit

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Other Voices: 'Trump Should Sign An America First Stimulus Plan'

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Victories To Chase Away The "Lockdown" Blues!

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The Hysteria Supplement-- Updated!

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An Especially Important Anniversary This Week

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Other Voices: 'Bill Gates Crosses The Digital Rubicon...'

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A Clarification

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The Hysteria Supplement

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Why Did Everyone Miss The Very Shiny Pearl I Tossed Out Last Week?

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Other Voices: 'Punishing America's Enemies'

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April 4, In Manchester, NH! Be There!!

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The First 2019 Victories Are Posted!

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Celebrating The Irish

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A Few Calming Stats On Covid-19

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BREAKING NEWS: A Cure For Covid-19 Has Apparently Been Found

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A Testimonial Video Taking A Novel Tack

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Other Voices: 'Where's The Liberal Outrage Over Tulsi?'

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A Great New Video

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Tom Bottaro's Engaging 'Truth In Ten Segments' Paper Has Been Upgraded

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Other Voices: 'Mike Pompeo's Latest Delusions'

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Time To Post A Few More Victories!

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On Shrinking Leviathan

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Other Voices: 'The New Totalitarians'

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Food For Thought

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Darryl Cooper Shares Around The Empowerment He Has Found

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An Outstanding Supreme Court Petition

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A Harmless Payment Statement

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Other Voices: 'The Establishment Doesn't Fear Trump, And It Doesn't Fear Bernie. It Fears You.'

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A Great Opening Victory For 2020

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Other Voices:

How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda; On "Normal" In A Nation-State; and Who's To Blame For Flight 752?

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So, What Do You Think? Is It Getting Serious Enough Yet?

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A Great New Video Sharing A Lot Of Inspiration And A Fistful Of Victories

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Other Voices: '2020 Vision... US Opens New Year With Act Of War'

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So. It's "Tea Party" Day...

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What I Want For Christmas

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A Few Words About The Brilliance Of The Founders

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Other Voices: '5 Infuriating Takeaways From The 'Afghanistan Papers'

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How We Get To Real Victory-- An Outstanding State Group Shows The Way

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Another Fine Victory For An Excellent Warrior Couple

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Keep Your Eyes Clear

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Other Voices: 'Media Looks Away As House Approves Warrantless Spying'

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Only One Thing Can Prevent CtC's Revelations From Crushing Leviathan

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Have You Encountered A Commentary (Or Commentator) Criticizing US Involvement In Ukraine (Or In Bolivia; Or Its Abuse Of Julian Assange; Or...)?

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A Nice Story From An Old Email And From A New One

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Regarding The Power Of Impeachment

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Other Voices: 'The Blob: Still Chasing After Pax Americana'

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So, You're A "Tax Professional" And You Come Face-To-Face With The Truth...

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A Few Words About Hypocrites For Assange

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Other Voices: 'Wikileaks Exposes OPCW Falsifications Of Evidence'

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A Victory Post By Special Request

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Some Further Comments On The 'Kestin' Ruling

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Steven Miranda Shares Victories And Inspiring Words

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Snowden Is The Man... But He's Wrong

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The Art Of The Squirrel

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Overcoming The Roadblocks To Getting A Real Person On The Phone At The IRS

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Other Voices: 'Impeach All The Presidents'

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Remember 'War Games'?

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An Especially Pleasing Victory

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Steve Stackelhouse On Learning And Using The Liberating Truth

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Dealing With "Frivolous" Threats

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Bringing The Cleansing Storm

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A Great Set Of Victories-- With A Message

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Fake "Fake List" FRP Hoax Assaults

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Another Criminal Practice By The IRS

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A Very Serious Question For Everyone

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Why CtC Is The Only Remedy To Leviathan

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Thwarting Judicial Corruption With 'Constitutional Avoidance' Doctrine

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Why Congress Will Never "Just Pass A Law" Enacting The "Ignorance Tax"

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See Prior Editions In Their Entirety:

Newsletter Archives

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Get All Newsletters As They Are Published:

Newsletter Delivery Options

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BTW, Don't Miss These Items Of Interest:

Regarding State Group Membership

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The Educated American's Tax Filing Flow Chart

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Why Are You Not Doing This?

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Project Paradigm-Shift

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Test Your "Income" Tax IQ!

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A "Pragmatic" Perspective On The Tax And The Rule Of Law

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And Hey! Don't miss the great stuff in the main page of this edition!

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The upgraded Fifteenth Edition of CtC Is Now Available!

Btw, a copy of CtC from anywhere except the link above may not be a current edition. CHECK. It matters. Also, there ARE no e-book, Kindle or .pdf versions of CtC. Don't get taken in by efforts to sell you-- or even give you for free-- any such thing.

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A Very Serious Question For Everyone

One that is very hazardously going unanswered...

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Want to get these Lost Horizons newsletters delivered to your inbox? Click here and subscribe to the group. Leave all options at their default settings. Done!

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A Wise Warrior With An Uplifting Message

DODON LA VIGNE, a long-time warrior and real American grown-up, shares a nice and inspiring testimonial on what CtC has done for him for over nine years now:

"Like a muddied stream or a polluted fountain is the righteous man who gives way before the wicked."p>

-Proverbs 25:26

"A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves."

-Edward R. Murrow

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See Who's Been Lying About The Tax

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How Do You Know When The State Is Lying?

An old joke, but in regard to this deceiver, not a laughing matter at all.

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““When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith.

-Abraham Kuyper

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Assessing The Damage From The Misapplication Of The Income Tax

Man, are young Americans getting ripped off...!

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them, and these will continue till they have been resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress."

-Frederick Douglass

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A Michigan Version Of The "Watching The Watchmen" Amendment Has Been Proposed

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Poisonous Pieties

Now click here to learn the truth about the myths that have kept you from knowing the truth about the income tax

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Trolls Against The Truth: A Dis-Information Campaign

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A Few Good Folks With Good and Important Things To Say:

Find this film on YouTube at youtu.be/K0CYo57I3ks

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WANTED! Your Article!!

Sharpen those quills, people!

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Why Aren't People Suing?

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Give Yourself A 30% Raise: A New Flyer

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The Crime of the Misapplied Income Tax

There IS "A Law" By Which You Can Be Made Liable, And This Is How It Works

Now Learn How To Be Master Of The Situation

See the Proof

Photographed on 1-70 in Missouri. America is waking up.

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Get this graphic as a printable/postable/mailable .pdf

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Test Your "Income" Tax IQ!

CtC WARRIOR SanDiegoScott has put together a great little 20-question quiz to test your knowledge of the law regarding the United States "income" tax. Test yourself, test your friends and family! Test your accountant and tax attorney, and help them learn the liberating truth!!

Click here to take the test

Find more quizzes here

Set a brushfire-- E-mail this newsletter to a friend

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CtC Videos And Audio Resources

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"Never must thou take up a false cry, or join hands with the guilty by giving false witness in their favor. Never must thou follow with the crowd in doing wrong, or be swayed by many voices so as to give false judgment; even pity for the poor must not sway thee when judgment is to be given."

-Ex-Exodus 23:1-3

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