The November 18, 2019 Lost Horizons Newsletter Mid-Edition Update...where real knowledge intersects with real Americans!***
Only One Thing Can Prevent CtC's Revelations From Crushing LeviathanThat Achilles' heel? Those revelations not being spread quickly enough to enough Americans.
I OFTEN STRUGGLE WITH THE MYSTERY of why CtC is not at least as widely-known as, for instance, Edward Snowden's revelations. After all, CtC's revelations concern abusive government behavior of far more acute significance to every single American.
As important and wrong as they are, most people would be at a loss to show how they have been victimized in any personally-practical way by the systemic Fourth Amendment violations revealed by Snowden. What CtC reveals, on the other hand, is the 100% concrete, completely quantifiable, indisputably-improper daily impoverishment of every American virtuously resorting for his or her well-being to "economic means" rather than "political means".
The former is a matter of principle. It's hugely important, of course, and merits all the attention and outrage Snowden's courageous whistleblowing has prompted.
But the latter is as immediate, as intensely personal and as serious as a heart attack. (Indeed, in many ways literally so. Think, for instance, of cases in which the extractions accomplished by the "ignorance tax" scheme hold a victim or his kids back from the level of health-care that otherwise would be within reach. Or when they keep a future accident victim driving a less-safe car. Or when they finance abuses of people in foreign lands who thereby become enemies of all Americans.
And so on, and so forth.)
Furthermore, CtC's revelations actually include the quick and easy remedy to the immediate, acute and ubiquitous harms perpetrated by the ignorance tax scheme-- a remedy that will also solve the problems Snowden revealed, when individually-implemented by enough Americans.
That remedy has been implemented steadily by tens of thousands of American men and women for more than 16 years now with fully-documented, mind-blowing success. The $billions recovered or retained over the course of 500,000+ invocations of CtC's revelations emphasize the complete accuracy of those revelations, and that the scheme by which so much harm is done by Leviathan is, in fact, just a scheme-- and completely vulnerable to the well-instructed attentions of the brave and the free.
Continued...*****
Have You Encountered A Commentary (Or Commentator) Criticizing US Involvement In Ukraine (Or In Bolivia; Or Its Abuse Of Julian Assange; Or...)?Did you know what to do?DID YOU? Did you promptly buttonhole that commentator, present him or her with
this little two-page document explaining that they must spend the five minutes to read it because it presents the thoroughly-proven actual and exclusive solution for the problem they decry?
That's what you should have done, and what you should do in the future.
The more passionate your interlocutor, the more passionate should be your response to him or her, up to, and including (should it come to this):
Continued...*****
A Nice Story From An Old Email And From A New OneA treasure hunter produces some treasure of his own.I RECEIVED AN EMAIL THE OTHER DAY containing the text of my newsletter email of May 8, 2014. The newsletter email had begun with an excerpt of a story sent to me by a happy warrior shortly before that date.
My latter-day correspondent told me he had found the old email in his
state group archives and asked if by chance I had the rest of the story posted so he could read it all. Although my currently posted archives don't go that far back, I dug around in the older files and found the rest of the story, which I sent along with my compliments. The next day, the little bit of trouble to which I had gone was well and truly repaid when my correspondent sent his very virtuous reply.
Here, then, is the original posted story from the May 9, 2014 Newsletter, complete, followed by the reply I received, which I hope everyone will read:
Dear Pete,
I have some great experiences I would like to share with you, as well as let you post them where you would like on your website.
I wrote you about two months ago when my fiancé and I were trying to buy a house and studying the best way to get around providing proof of “income” from tax returns that had been requested to approve the loan. Right before we started this process, I had filed my fiancé's return correctly, as well as sent in the paperwork to request a refund of the taxes his company had withheld during the past year. My fiancé had been in the military, so we were getting a VA loan for our house. I was a little concerned about this process, just because it was the first time I'd done it and I didn't know if being a government loan would mean we would get harassed more. I wasn't sure I knew enough yet to be able to fight it in this time-constrained deal.
Continued...*****
Regarding the Power Of ImpeachmentIt's not what many folks like to imagine or argue...The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
United States Constitution, Article II, Section IV
PRETTY SIMPLE WORDS, in that section above. But a lot of folks misunderstand them nonetheless, and incorrectly imagine that some kind of crime needs to be proven in order to validly impeach a federal office-holder. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The reason for the misunderstanding is that people typically translate old language styles into modern meanings, when those styles incorporate words still in use today. In such cases we easily forget that 232 years ago, the words, though spelled and pronounced the same, had different or more nuanced meanings.
"Misdemeanor" is a good example. Today "misdemeanor" is a term endlessly put in front of modern Americans as simply the lesser category of criminal offense than its "felony" counterpart. Any other meaning of the word-- such as the one in use when the Constitution was written and ratified-- is pushed out of the modern mind.
"High crimes" is quirkier, in that we don't formally call felonies "high crimes". But we think of them that way, in part because of the relevance of "felonies" in modern criminal law practice to "misdemeanors". Because the latter is an actual criminal category which, in that context, means what might well be called "low crimes", it is easy to translate "high crimes" as being another way of saying "felonies".
Under the influence of these modern usages and associations, then, today's eyes can readily imagine "high Crimes and misdemeanors" in the Constitution to mean (and be confined to) actual criminal offenses. But it is not so.
Continued...*****
Other Voices:
'The Blob: Still Chasing After Pax Americana'After all the failure, they still look at our wars in the Middle East as some kind of golden age. Observations by Andrew J. Bacevich, with an important afterword by Yours Truly.
Continued...*****
Plus,
Illuminating Anniversaries For This Week!
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