Potpourri

Brief touchdowns on a selection of current issues.

The Russians Appear To Have A Viable Vaccine...

...AS REPORTED LAST WEEK IN THE LANCET and elsewhere. Thus, it is past time for us all to get busy thoroughly embedding into the narrative the fact that such prophylactics are only for the coronaphobics. They are NOT to be forced upon, or even obnoxiously urged upon, anyone else-- because there is no rational justification for such a thing.

Remember, a vaccine protects the one taking it from the relevant pathogen. Once vaccinated, that person is no longer in danger from the feared organism, regardless of whether others are vaccinated, masked, whatever.

Once vaccinated, even the most timid coronaphobic lacks a pretext for attempting to selfishly control the behavior of others for the sake of the phobic's peace of mind, either through coerced vaccinations or through the masking, "social distancing", and so forth that have been demanded of everyone for months now.

EXPECT SOME PUSHBACK in the form of arguments that those who don't vaccinate impose a burden on the health care system (or create a danger of the health care system being overwhelmed with unvaccinated C19 "cases"). Be prepared to bat these softballs away.

Using the seasonal flu as a model offers a rebuttal for both arguments. The reasoning would be the same, since the flu periodically has hospitalization and death rates comparable to even the politically-inflated C19 numbers (and always comparable to, or greater than, the real C19 numbers). But because the flu hasn't had a related hysteria campaign put into place, no one will successfully sustain an argument for the same panic response.

Since the panic and "new normal"-required argument can't be successfully made to the American people as to the flu, it can't survive rational resistance when made in regard to C19.

As noted above (and shown in exhaustive and broadly-informative detail here), C19 is now shown by the data to be not only no more of a health threat than the flu. But the same data show that the C19 threat it is actually much less. After all the flu afflicts everyone, whereas people who are otherwise healthy or are under 65 are very nearly immune to C19, and under no threat of fatal outcome even if infected, without any treatments or precautions at all. See here and here.

The flu is easily handled by the existing healthcare infrastructure, and C19 proved to be just as easily handled. I imagine that many reading these words saw the same evidence of this as Doreen and I did, when a local convention hall was hurriedly converted into a high-capacity C19 hospital (to much grim fanfare), only to quietly be decommissioned a month later after never being needed to handle even a single case.

IF THE FLU DOESN'T SEEM a strong enough rebuttal tool, consider tuberculosis-- a disease which orphaned my father 86 years ago. TB is transmitted in the same way as flu or C19, comes in drug-resistant flavors, has no truly effective vaccine and killed 1.5 million worldwide in 2018, as usual.

And yet, we are and always have been comfortable with no mask-mandates, blanket immigration bans, or "sheltering in place" in response to TB. As with the seasonal flu example, the fact that we have managed just fine for all the past decades with the TB threat at hand and yet without draconian responses makes untenable any claim that C19 justifies such responses.

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IN ADDITION TO THE FOREGOING COMMON SENSE ARGUMENTS and the difficulty they present to those advocating universal vaccination mandates and more, there is a fundamental legal matter (or matter of principle and logic). No one is (or can be, if a viable society is to be sustained) under a duty to "protect others" in the sense involved in mandatory vaccine and isolation arguments (i.e., masking, "social distancing").

The range of things against which some members of society can be afraid-- or by which they can be distressed-- is limitless. This is why a functioning, sustainable society imposes nothing more upon members than prohibitions against the hindrance of another's exercise of his/her individual rights, roughly defined as those choices of action that can be taken without interfering with the similar freedoms of others.

As this definition is summarized by Thomas Jefferson: "Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others."

The only alternative to such a proper structure of society and its supporting governmental form is a war of all against all, at all times until it spirals into chaos and ruination. In this dystopian alternative, each seeks to impose on others whatever behaviors suit the imposer's agenda, or delusions, or cupidities-- usually by struggling to take command of the state and then use its power against the uncooperative.

That alternative is, in fact, the direct democracy under which whatever passion or lust seduces the majority-- however unwise or improvident-- is imposed upon everyone, at the price of prosperity as well as liberty. Our brilliant and deeply-educated Founders (and their intellectual heirs) strenuously warned us against this mistake:

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

-John Adams

"Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.

-John Marshall

"A Democracy is the vilest form of Government there is."

-Thomas Paine

"[D]emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

-James Madison

"A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way. The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty."

-Fisher Ames

"We have seen the tumult of democracy terminate . . . as [it has] everywhere terminated, in despotism. . . . Democracy! savage and wild. Thou who wouldst bring down the virtuous and wise to thy level of folly and guilt."

-Gouverneur Morris

"[T]he experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived."

-John Quincy Adams

"A simple democracy . . . is one of the greatest of evils."

-Benjamin Rush

"In democracy . . . there are commonly tumults and disorders. . . . Therefore a pure democracy is generally a very bad government. It is often the most tyrannical government on earth."

-Noah Webster

"Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state, it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage."

-John Witherspoon

...which is not only NOT provided-for by our Constitutions but is prohibited thereby, as acknowledged by even the otherwise odious and ardent lover of government power, Alexander Hamilton:

"We are now forming a republican government. (Liberty) is found not in "the extremes of democracy but in moderate governments. . . . If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy."

We will do well to listen, and promptly chuck overboard notions like "responsibility to protect", with a cannonball strapped on tightly.

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THERE'S ONE ADDITIONAL POINT TO MAKE about a Russian vaccine: To the degree it becomes apparent that people like Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci will not end up with vaccine $billions in their pockets because the Russians are going to get that business, instead, the relentless drumbeat for universal vaccination will fade away.

That drumbeat has never been about health-- as shown above (and by anyone's common sense), the only people for whom vaccination is appropriate are those with phobias or special vulnerabilities due to existing conditions of co-morbidities and/or extreme age, and in either case as a choice made by the affected party. The push for universal vaccination has always just been a ploy by which some hope to acquire money and power.

So, follow the news about the Russian vaccine closely (it's already being given to folks in Moscow) by attention to honest (non-US MSM) reporting, and when appropriate, make a lot of noise about this being the end of the "vaccine hunt". Step in and denounce the jingoistic smears and insults and other reflexive and calculated Russia-bashing sure to issue forth from agenda-driven interests on both the left and the right.

Again, as with the rest of the C19 contrivance (and as with most other hobgoblins), take the prospect of advantage for the well-connected off the table and the flogging of the hobgoblin fades away.

Plus, we'll get the additional benefit in this case of putting a bullet in the insane and even longer-running drumbeat of Russia-bashing by which THAT hobgoblin-flogging funnels huge piles of public money into the pockets of the vastly-overgrown and steadily more dangerous military-industrial-congressional complex. A nice twofer.

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Regarding Riots, Looting And Property Destruction

JUST A QUICK THOUGHT on this item: It seems to me that those facing damage to property or person at the hands of the "protestors" in various places around the country are well-equipped by the facts to act in any fashion minimally to moderately necessary in defense of either.

In the places to which I refer, the local governing authorities, including the police, have stood down, meaning that no protection is to be had from that quarter. Such circumstances seem exactly those contemplated by the legal doctrine, 'Quod est necessarium est licitum', that is, "What is necessary is lawful".

This doctrine will be especially helpful in grown-up states which recognize that no free and sovereign human being is under a valid obligation to retreat in the face of aggression against his or her person, property, or another individual. But I think it would be hard to argue against it anywhere that the police have been told to let the crazies carry on unhindered.

TAKING IT A STEP FURTHER, I think the same doctrine would stand defenders of public property, such as statuary and so forth, in equally good stead, since such property is community owned and thus each member of the community is possessed of an interest. Further, the mere authority of any citizen to exercise the police power in the presence of a criminal act being committed applies in this case (and the others mentioned here), as well.

Certainly all of the above would be true in regard to my vote if I were on the jury judging anyone acting rationally in circumstances described above...

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Does Everyone Understand That "Cases" Doesn't Mean Sicknesses?

ANOTHER QUICK NOTE: I hope that everyone is on top of the fact that the "cases" of C19 being tallied and used as the pretexts for continued "lockdowns" and testing regimes and all the rest of the C19-hysteria-claptrap are NOT instances of people sickened with C19. Rather, these are instances in which evidence of the virus is found-- in most cases with no actual illness manifesting at all-- and sometimes even just evidence of a prior encounter with the virus indicated solely by the presence of antibodies.

In other words, these "cases" do NOT represent or imply any burden on the healthcare infrastructure whatever, nor any portent of fatalities to be added to the existing numbers.

IT'S TRUE THAT WHEN TEST RESULTS INDICATE an active presence of live virus the affected party is capable of spreading the same unthreatening condition to other people, but so what? This is of no greater significance than discovering the prevalence of the common cold virus.

The essence of this critically-important point is distilled in the fact that the majority of the current testing is done on people exhibiting no symptoms whatever. People exhibiting no symptoms-- that is, people who are "asymptomatic"-- ARE NOT SICK.

Treating such people as grounds for continued hysteria about the virus which is manifestly harmless to those persons is an act of insanity. And the discovery of large numbers of such people is hardly a valid basis for persisting in the wholesale violation of Americans' liberties and the continued erosion of the American economy...

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One Last Thing...

LEST WE FORGET:

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The Only Thing You Really Get Out Of Wearing A Mask:

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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, Georgia, Louisiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota "Lockdown" Liberty Keys

How Stupid Do They Think We Are?

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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.

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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".

Continued...

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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?

Continued...

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

-Ezra Pound

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Did you know… …The US may be the only country in the world where people working in the non-federal private sector must commit perjury in order to owe and pay ‘God’s things to Caesar’? If you work in the private sector, stop falsely swearing that your private-sector earnings are federal “income”1. Perjury is a crime. Exercise the law’s provision for protecting your private-sector earnings from the 154-year-old2 indirect excise known as the federal income tax. Rebut fraudulent allegations made by your payers regarding the legal nature of your work and the earnings derived therefrom, so that you pay only your fair share. Join the hundreds of thousands of honest, law-abiding Americans who have been doing so for more than a decade. Learn how for free at losthorizons.com. 1--“We must reject… …the broad contention submitted in behalf of the government that all receipts—everything that comes in—are income…”. United States Supreme Court, So. Pacific v. Lowe, 247 U.S. 330, (1918) 2—The income tax in the United States was first instituted into law on July 1, 1862, during Lincoln’s presidency under the excise laws of the United States. The preamble to the 1939 Internal Revenue Code traces its roots to this original income tax law. LostHorizons.com

Get this flyer as a printable .pdf here

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

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Other Voices:

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

The Stalinist Trial Of Julian Assange. Whose Side Are You On?

by John Pilger

When I first met Julian Assange more than ten years ago, I asked him why he had started WikiLeaks. He replied: “Transparency and accountability are moral issues that must be the essence of public life and journalism.”

I had never heard a publisher or an editor invoke morality in this way. Assange believes that journalists are the agents of people, not power: that we, the people, have a right to know about the darkest secrets of those who claim to act in our name.

If the powerful lie to us, we have the right to know. If they say one thing in private and the opposite in public, we have the right to know. If they conspire against us, as Bush and Blair did over Iraq, then pretend to be democrats, we have the right to know.

It is this morality of purpose that so threatens the collusion of powers that want to plunge much of the world into war and wants to bury Julian alive in Trump’s fascist America.

In 2008, a top secret U.S. State Department report described in detail how the United States would combat this new moral threat. A secretly-directed personal smear campaign against Julian Assange would lead to “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”.

The aim was to silence and criminalize WikiLeaks and its founder. Page after page revealed a coming war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and democracy.

The imperial shock troops would be those who called themselves journalists: the big hitters of the so-called mainstream, especially the “liberals” who mark and patrol the perimeters of dissent.

‘Due Revenge’

And that is what happened. I have been a reporter for more than 50 years and I have never known a smear campaign like it: the fabricated character assassination of a man who refused to join the club: who believed journalism was a service to the public, never to those above.

Assange shamed his persecutors. He produced scoop after scoop. He exposed the fraudulence of wars promoted by the media and the homicidal nature of America’s wars, the corruption of dictators, the evils of Guantanamo.

He forced us in the West to look in the mirror. He exposed the official truth-tellers in the media as collaborators: those I would call Vichy journalists. None of these imposters believed Assange when he warned that his life was in danger: that the “sex scandal” in Sweden was a set up and an American hellhole was the ultimate destination. And he was right, and repeatedly right.

The extradition hearing in London beginning this week is the final act of an Anglo-American campaign to bury Julian Assange. It is not due process. It is due revenge. The American indictment is clearly rigged, a demonstrable sham. So far, the hearings have been reminiscent of their Stalinist equivalents during the Cold War.

Today, the land that gave us Magna Carta, Great Britain, is distinguished by the abandonment of its own sovereignty in allowing a malign foreign power to manipulate justice and by the vicious psychological torture of Julian – a form of torture, as Nils Melzer, the UN expert has pointed out, that was refined by the Nazis because it was most effective in breaking its victims.

Cowardice in Canberra

Continued...

Click here to read the rest of this article

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

Afterword

WHAT IS BEING DONE TO JULIAN ASSANGE-- and what has been done to him for years-- is appalling and shameful and worthy of outcry and uprising just as a crime against one good man. But it is doubly worthy of all these things as a crime against all of us, for the object of the assault on Assange is to put a blindfold on the sovereign American people and keep them from being able to exercise oversight of their public servants.

In that latter aspect, the assault on Assange is an act of treason, meant to subvert the Constitutional structure of government in America.

BUT OF COURSE, the assault on Julian Assange and the American Constitution is neither, if no one stands up and says so. That's how this sort of thing works.

Just as rights and authorities unexercised wither away into impotence over time, so, too, crimes of the state which are not denounced become mere blips on the landscape constantly receding into invisibility in the rear-view mirror.

HERE'S THE THING: Julian Assange has acted on our behalf, at huge personal cost. If we don't stand up for him (not to mention for the right of anyone to expose misdeeds of the state), we are shamed and despicable, as well as fools of the first order.

Let it not be so.

Follow the latest events in the pretense of an extradition "trial" as reported here, here and here. See my comments and analysis of certain key issues in the legal arguments which I posted soon after the first week of this farce back in February, here.

Make some noise.

And as part of that noise use the assault on Assange and on the Constitution to awaken others to the desperate need to defund and thereby shrink the Leviathan state.

We should not have to be constantly putting out the fires of state misbehavior, and the way to that happier condition is to take away its firewood.

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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 LHC 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?