"For The Good of the Party"

The Party comes first: Soviet dissidents are unloaded at Lubyanka.

 

"... the Party hands out to you no prospect of reward.... We propose no bargain and we promise nothing. There is a passage in your journal which impressed me. You wrote: `I have thought and acted as I had to. If I was right, I have nothing to repent of; if wrong, I shall pay.... You were wrong, and you will pay, Comrade Rubashov."

Party interrogator Gletkin explains to loyalist Rubashov why the best interests of the Party require his liquidation, from Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon. 



"My least-favorite phrase in the English language," former Republican congressional candidate Brian Miller sighed with weary disgust, "is `for the good of the party.'" 

Miller, chairman (at least for now) of Arizona's Pima County Republican Party, made the mistake of assuming that the interests of the Party were best served by defending individual liberty. That's why he protested the May 5 murder of Jose Guerena by a SWAT team in a widely circulated e-mail entitled "We Are All Jose Guerena."


"While an investigation is still underway to determine the facts immediately surrounding the killing, it is my hope that this tragic event will lead to a renewed discussion of the policies that routinely lead to heavily armed and militarized local police invading private homes and a renewed interest in the civil liberties codified in our Bill of Rights," wrote Miller. 

Mr. Miller dispatched that message in the quiet confidence that he had done nothing wrong, and no cause to repent. His comrades in the Party Committee, however, insist that he is guilty of inciting "distrust of Pima County law enforcement agencies." 

In a free society, "law enforcement" wouldn't exist, although the presence of peace officers would be tolerated. Conditionally. In a constitutional republic, public demonstration of distrust toward "law enforcement" would be considered a token of conscientious citizenship. In the American Soyuz, however, criticizing "law enforcement" is akin to engaging in "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." To that supposed offense, Miller added the even more grievous sin of undermining the interests of the Party. Acting on dubious procedural grounds, the Committee demanded Miller's resignation.

The Bolshevik faction of the Pima County GOP does its duty.

 "Mr. Miller's statements regarding the SWAT raid have created serious problems for our elected officials, money raising efforts and have divided the Party," fulminated the commissars in a public rebuke. "Mr. Miller was given repeated opportunities to either mend these fences or resign his position, and has chosen to do neither."


As committee member Brian Brenner explained: "This is solely about the interests of the Pima County Republican Party." Nothing else is -- individual liberty, the preservation of the rule of law, or even the integrity of the constitutional framework for which Republicans express such pious reverence -- is consequential.


"For these people, it's all a big money machine," Miller complained in an interview with Pro Libertate. "We live in Arizona's only Democrat-majority county, and the entrenched Republican establishment here has become comfortable with the status quo. Sure, they never actually win, but they are comfortable and secure. The last thing they want is for people seriously committed to individual liberty to start shaking things up."


Miller, who describes his political agenda as "progressively less government until we get to none," hasn't gotten along well with the torpid, self-satisfied Old Guard in the Pima County Republican Party, and his critics were eager to exploit Miller's measured but critical comments about the killing of Jose Guerena.

"About four days after I sent that e-mail, we had an emergency committee meeting in which a representative of the Tucson Police Officers Association" -- the local police union -- "laid into me for about an hour about how I had called policemen `murderers,'" Miller recounted. "I hadn't actually used that term; I had described the incident as leading to the `wrongful death' of Jose Guerena"

The commissar from the police union reacted to that description by telling Miller, "I never want to hear anything like that coming out of your mouth again." Miller, an Air Force reservist, replied that he would always defend the principle of citizen oversight of the police, just as he supports civilian control of the military.


"You have no right to criticize law enforcement," insisted the police union official. "You've never been in law enforcement." That comment, Miller says, "really lit up the room," startling even some of his critics on the committee -- but not enough, alas, to get them to re-examine their priorities.

"Within 24 hours," Miller recalled to Pro Libertate, "the TPOA contacted every elected Republican, and every Party official, and told them to muzzle me." This demand carried considerable weight in a Party apparatus controlled by people who defer reflexively to anyone clad in the habiliments of the State's punitive priesthood. As Miller puts it, the old-line Republican leadership will always "bend over and grab their ankles when ordered to by the `public safety' unions." This is particularly true in Tucson, where police unions and their allies "scream bloody murder anytime there's hint of cutting back on personnel or benefits."


Tucson was one of the first cities in Arizona to experience the impact of the housing bubble's collapse. Like many other municipalities, Tucson was faced with the deadly combination of plummeting home prices, accumulating foreclosures, and depleted revenue streams. As is the case elsewhere, the highest priority of the political class (including the real estate and financial service interests that had absorbed the local economy during the bubble) was to retain the loyalty of the legions. 

Thus in 2009 Tucson unveiled Prop. 200, the "Public Safety First" initiative, a measure that would have required the hiring of hundreds of additional police officers over a five-year period at an estimated price of $157 million. Owing to the huge and growing municipal budget deficit (which had climbed to $51 million by 2010),this most likely would  have required cutting back, or abolishing outright, every other program or "service" that didn't involve "public safety" -- that is, the exercise of government-licensed compulsion on behalf of the wealth-consuming class.


"People don't feel safe in the city of Tucson," quavered Colin Zimmerman of the Tucson Association of Realtors (TAR), which promoted Prop. 200. "They don't feel safe in their homes. They don't feel safe in the schools. Businesses don't feel safe and don't want to relocate here."

Brandon Patrick, who organized the ultimately successful effort to defeat the measure, insisted that the TAR was peddling the purest piffle. "The suggestion that there's more need than ever before for police is nonsense," Brandon told the Tucson Weekly shortly before the election. In fact, crime rates in Tucson -- as was the case elsewhere in Arizona -- were down dramatically 


When Tucson's tax victims refused to consent to another assault on what remained of their wealth, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords intervened on behalf of the armed tax-feeders by arranging for the city to receive a $12.3 federal grant from the "Justice" Department's "Community Oriented Policing Services Hiring Program" -- which is why the same police union that wants Brian Miller's head on a charger endorsed the incumbent Democrat for re-election in 2010. (It's also worth noting that Clarence Dupnik, the Sheriff who presided over the SWAT team that murdered Jose Guerena, is also a Democrat.)

The Regime's police state stimulus program was enough to pay for fifty new taser-toting donut molesters. Keeping them on the staff, however, meant a sales tax increase that would siphon at least $40 million a year from the productive sector. That measure, too, was voted down. 

"You'll get tyranny and LIKE IT!!!!"

As is the case in nearly every significant American city, Tucson's municipal oligarchy grew fat during the Fed's housing bubble, and is now desperate to keep the "Public Safety" bubble inflated by any means necessary. This helps explain why Miller's carefully modulated public criticism of the needless death of Jose Guerena, and militarization of police in general, provoked the wrath of Tucson's ruling caste: Parasites of that kind are increasingly dependent on federal "public safety" subsidies. 

It simply won't do for a Republican leader to abet doubts about the wisdom of the architects of the Homeland Security State, and the mouth-breathing armed minions who carry out their orders. This is true even when a pack of armored plunderers invades a home, guns down a young father in front of his terrified wife and toddler, and then deliberately allows the victim to bleed to death when timely medical assistance would have saved his life.


Despite the escalating campaign to oust him as chairman of the Pima County GOP, Miller makes a compelling case that he's accomplished exactly what he was elected to do.


"I was elected to raise funds, bring in young voters, and expand our outreach to Hispanics," Miller told Pro Libertate. "We've had great success on all three fronts. What's happening now is in part an ideological clash, and perhaps more importantly the manifestation of a generational divide between more libertarian-oriented young professionals and the old-line conservatives who have traditionally run the party" -- what might be called the "Judge Smails" constituency. 


As anyone familiar with the film Caddyshack will recall, Judge Elihu Smails was the embodiment of insular, conformist, country-club authoritarianism. The essence of what passed for his character was revealed in an off-hand remark the Judge made to Danny Noonan -- the film's central character -- while delivering a patronizing rebuke to the flawed but essentially well-meaning young man: "I've sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn't want to do it -- I felt I owed it to them." 



There is a kind of person on whom the irony of that comment would be lost. It is the same kind of person who, in contemplating the murder of Jose Guerena, would instinctively sympathize with the assailants, rather than with the victim, his traumatized widow, and his fatherless children. That personality type -- to which I've given the name "punitive populist" -- is well-represented in Republican politics not only in Pima County, but nation-wide. 

Such people are disinclined to tolerate so much as a tremor of principled activism on behalf of individual liberty -- even when, as is the case in Pima County, acting on principle would also provide a partisan advantage.

It's interesting to consider this question: What if, rather than condemning police militarization in principle, Brian Miller had used the death of Jose Guerena to fashion a partisan attack against Sheriff Dupnik? If he had insisted that this was a case of power being in the "wrong hands," rather than an object lesson in the evil of State power as such, Miller most likely wouldn't have become the target of the purge. Instead, he committed a sacrilege against the sanctified purveyors of lethal violence, and must now be expelled in disgrace --- for the good of the Party.

 While supplies last, I'm sending a copy of Global Gun Grab to anyone who offers a donation of $10 or more. Please use the PayPal button below, or contact me directly (WNGrigg[at]msn[dot]com) for snail mail instructions.  Thanks so much!

I discussed Brian Miller's confrontation with the Bolshevik faction of the Pima County GOP during the second hour of last week's edition of Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network. Go here for the archives.

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Drug War's Einsatzgruppen

General Colin Powell's Doctrine of the U.S. Armed Forces is that the United States should be the `meanest dog in town' to frighten a potential enemy.... When force is used, it should be with `overwhelming strength and no half-way measures.' In law enforcement, these principles are routinely applied in both field and tactical operations. ... Law enforcement [application] of the Powell Doctrine is clear: have overwhelming and superior resources available, primarily as a deterrent, but use them decisively when needed. --

Career Law Enforcement Officer Edward "Tad" Leach, "Applying the Powell Doctrine to Law Enforcement," Police Chief magazine, October 2001 (executive summary) 


Einsatzgruppen (German) -- "Special task forces" composed of police, military, and intelligence personnel deployed to target and eliminate people identified as "anti-German elements" by the National Socialist regime.



The invaders who murdered Hampton, Virginia resident William Cooper swiped about $900 in cash. They seized his gun collection. They took the Lexus from his driveway. By some oversight they neglected to extract the gold fillings from his teeth.

While they made off with a decent haul, the robbers were doubtless disappointed that they couldn't locate the large stash of illicit prescription drugs they had expected to find. They had the luxury of tossing the home at leisure without worrying about being interrupted by the police -- on account of the fact that they were the police. 


William Cooper, a 69-year-old retiree who suffered from the familiar variety of afflictions attendant to age, was startled awake on the morning of June 18 by two men who had barged into his home with their guns drawn and ready. Since he lived in a neighborhood in which home invasions (of the non-State-sanctioned variety) were commonplace, Cooper slept with a loaded handgun on his nightstand. He made an entirely proper but regrettably ineffective use of that weapon in an effort to repel the intruders, and was gunned down in his bedroom. 

The police raid was triggered by an unsubstantiated tip from a still-anonymous informant that the NASA retiree -- who walked with a cane and, according to his neighbors, never seemed to have any visitors -- was illegally selling prescription drugs from his home. After they murdered Cooper, the police found about two-dozen different prescription drugs in the home, including various painkillers and medications for blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes. 

Newport News Daily Press photo

 An apparatchik with the Hampton PD insisted that the lethal home invasion had turned up "evidence" of illegal drug dealing. Someone not required to lie for reasons of professional convenience would admit the obvious: The victim of this needless home invasion was simply a sick, helpless old man who made extensive use of his Medicare Part D benefits. Now that he's dead, the people responsible for killing him are permitted to keep the stolen property as "proceeds" from alleged narcotics dealing. 

The lethal June 18 assault on William Cooper's home was carried out under the supposed authority of Virginia's Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Task Force (PNETF). 

The "Asset Forfeiture Addendum" to the PNETF's most recent "Memorandum of Understanding" specifies that "TASK FORCE investigations should result in the seizure of forfeitable assets." It is also expected that the plunder will be distributed "in a fair and equitable manner," with a little more than one-third going to the city governments of Hampton and Newport News, a little less than a fifth going to the State Police, and the rest being lavished on the "Peninsula  Association of Commonwealth Attorney's Association" (redundancy in the original). At least some of the boodle would be used to cultivate other informants, as well.


To understand what really happened in William Cooper's home on June 18, it's useful to imagine the murdered retiree's body surrounded by police, prosecutors, and local politicians who pick over his lifeless form like a colony of vultures. The cash is divvied up, with Hampton and Newport News getting about $300 apiece, the State Police receiving roughly $180, and the local prosecutors laying claim to about $120. For taking the lead in the heist, the Hampton Police Department is permitted to keep Cooper's car and gun collection, to use or liquidate as it sees fit.

As this is a "civil forfeiture" action, it's not necessary to prove that Cooper actually broke any law. And since he's dead, he can't contest the forfeiture action in court. If police had conducted an actual investigation, rather than staging a home invasion robbery on the pretext provided by an unsubstantiated tip from an unknown informant, they and their cohorts wouldn't have been rewarded with this modest haul.

The Gilbert SWAT team, as depicted on its website.

Gilbert, Arizona resident Ross Taylor was fortunate enough not to share William Cooper's fate when the local counter-narcotics task force staged an assault on Taylor's home. 

This has to be considered a species of miracle, given that the raiding party consisted of at least a dozen masked commandos who were clad in riot gear, packing assault rifles, and obviously eager for an opportunity to put a boot on someone's neck. 

The throng of armed tax-feeders that laid siege to Taylor's home consisted of five undercover officers and seven from the criminal apprehension team. As the Phoenix New Times reports, the police raid came in response to a tip from the guy who installed Taylor's satellite TV system, a collectivist drone with the soul of a Stasi informant who who spied a tiny amount of pot in the house and did his duty. As an overture to the assault, the raiders cut power and water to the targeted home, presumably to prevent anyone inside from disposing of the purported contraband. 

Taylor had just purchased his home at the time of the raid. Three employees of a local moving company were present when the stormtroopers arrived; they were handcuffed and detained for more than an hour while the raiders interrogated Taylor and ransacked his house.  

As it happens, there was marijuana in Taylor's home, but it wasn't contraband. Taylor is a card-carrying medical marijuana patient who is permitted, by what the Arizona government presumes to call the "law," to own up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana. 

Taylor patiently explained these facts to the bellicose bullies who were holding him at gunpoint. When he showed one of the SWAT operators his state-issued medical marijuana card, the masked invader told him, "I don't even know if you're supposed to have this card," referring to a lawsuit filed by Jan Brewer's administration against Proposition 203 (the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act), an initiative that passed last November.


Under the terms of that statute, as elucidated by the Arizona Department of Health Services (DHS), those who qualify for medical marijuana cards "can obtain medical marijuana from a dispensary, the qualifying patient's designated caregiver, another qualifying patient, or, if authorized to cultivate, from home cultivation." (Emphasis added.) 


Taylor told his unwanted visitors that he had purchased the marijuana from another card-carrying medical marijuana patient. He was informed that this meant he wasn't legally in possession of the marijuana, notwithstanding the fact that the text of the statute and the DHS guidelines explicitly permit transactions of that kind. 


According to Gilbert PD press flack Sgt. Bill Balafas, "no one is licensed to sell [marijuana] and no dispensaries are open, yet." Actually, the statute itself, as the DHS admits, effectively licenses anyone with a medical marijuana card to distribute pot to other qualified users.

The agency itself was required to begin issuing permits for marijuana dispensaries at the beginning of June. However, Gov. Brewer instructed Arizona Attorney General Thomas Horne to order the DHS to disobey the law by  refusing to accept applications for businesses seeking to open dispensaries. This was done to buy time while Brewer filed a federal lawsuit to overturn the voter-enacted medical marijuana law. 



Misguided conservatives who depict Jan Brewer as a champion of "states' rights" aren't likely to take note of, or be troubled by, her overture to Washington to practice nullification in reverse by intervening to suppress a voter-enacted measure liberalizing the state's marijuana laws. 

The Brewer administration's stated reason for seeking an injunction against the law is a fear that state employees would be subject to prosecution for violating federal anti-drug ordinances. That legal argument was supplied by "Keep AZ Drug Free," the pressure group that opposed last year's marijuana initiative. (It's worth pointing out that the organization's name encompasses the patent falsehood that Arizona, or any other state, is and can be kept "drug-free.") A more honest assessment would lead to the conclusion that in Arizona, as is the case everywhere in the Soyuz, state and local law enforcement agencies have been subsumed into the federal Drug War apparatus -- and that the political elite aren't willing to end that lucrative arrangement. 


The Arizona Criminal Justice Commission,  which is "responsible for granting millions of federal and state dollars" to police agencies, has designated support for narcotics task forces, along with related asset forfeitures, as its "first priority." The Commission's current "State Strategy" for "Drug, Gang and Violent Crime Control" is commendably barren of idiotic prattle about making, let alone "keeping," the state drug-free. It acknowledges that Arizona "is the arrival zone for most drugs smuggled into the United States"; that marijuana "remains readily available and is considered the most widely used illegal drug throughout the state"; that "cocaine is readily available throughout Arizona, and that the same is true of methamphetamine. 


The policy objective of the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission -- as is true in each of the other fifty federal administrative units called "state governments" -- is not to eliminate the narcotics trade, or even to abate it in any dramatic way, but rather to transmute it into a reliable source of revenue for the political class and its armed auxiliaries. Toward that end, the Commission in Arizona, with the help of plundered money provided by Washington, created sixteen state "drug task forces" in 2007. Those task forces have "a permanent institutional tie" with the Attorney General's Office of Financial Remedies.

Arizona's coercive sector has benefited tremendously from "the overwhelming success of the asset forfeiture [program] in Arizona," boasts the Commission. In the year following creation of the sixteen state counter-narcotics task forces, revenue from asset forfeitures more than doubled -- from $19,576,626 in 2006 to $40,297,456 in 2007.

As Tom Barry of the Center for International Policy observes, the Commission's strategy document leaves the impression it "is a drug war agency, not one dedicated to finding ways to improve criminal justice in Arizona." Once again, this is typical of law enforcement nation-wide: "Whether at the state or county government level, the war on drugs is the main prism through which criminal justice and law enforcement agencies view crime and violence."

What this means, of course, is that "local" police agencies are essentially support systems for a plundering army that is literally waging war against the people in the guise of narcotics enforcement. In fact, a good case can be made that these paramilitary task forces -- or, to use the proper German translation, einsatzgruppen -- are carrying out the precise role that would be played by the dreaded blue-helmeted UN "peace enforcement" units that haunt the imagination of many "law and order" conservatives. 

Which is the more urgent threat -- UN "peacekeepers" Congo...

The idea of a UN "Peace Force" was made official federal government policy in the 1961 State Department Document entitled "Freedom from War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World." 

That proposal, also known as State Department Document 7277, outlined a three-stage program through which the United Nations would be "progressively strengthened in order to improve its capacity to assure international security and the peaceful settlement of disputes." All national governments would be required to provide military personnel and assets to empower the UN, which -- as British author Simon Tisdall reminds us, was always intended to be a "war-fighting machine," rather than a forum for peaceful resolution of disputes.

The Orwellian locution employed to describe this function is "peace enforcement." The ongoing mission in Libya, which Mr. Obama refuses to describe as "hostilities" (meaning, one supposes, that they must be considered "kinetic military congenialities"), offers a perfect example of how the 7277 program works in practice: The president, invoking the supposed obligation to uphold the "credibility and effectiveness of the United Nations Security Council," committed personnel and resources to an aggressive war without congressional involvement of any kind. Once again, that is how the international component of the "Freedom From War" program functions.

In the domestic realm, "Freedom From War" dictates that each national government maintain a centralized, militarized "internal security force." In the intervening decades, many American critics of the UN have speculated that this element of the 7277 program mandated the eventual occupation of the country by Blue Helmet-wearing foreign troops. What has actually happened is that American police forces have been transformed into a domestic army of occupation in the service of a UN-administered program of "global drug prohibition." 

The framework for global prohibition, interestingly, was also unveiled in 1961 -- the UN's Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. As a recent report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy (a body that includes several former high-ranking UN functionaries, including former Secretary General Kofi Annan) points out that the UN and the U.S. government, working through the International Narcotics Control Board,“have worked … to ensure that all countries adopt the same rigid approach to drug policy – the same laws, and the same tough approach to law enforcement.”

This was described as a campaign to create a "drug-free" world -- just as the "Freedom From War" proposal was allegedly intended to abolish international military conflict. In practice, of course, both of those initiatives were actually intended to consolidate the power of a permanent international Power Elite, as well as to expand its ability to regiment and plunder productive society. 

... or militarized police at home? (Note the tally of "kills on the APC.)

It was in the mid-1980s that the federal government began the practice of confiscating money and property as narcotics "proceeds" through civil asset forfeiture. Washington effectively globalized that practice through Article V of the 1988 Vienna Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which dictates that signatory nations "adopt such measures as may be necessary to enable confiscation" of money and property designated as "proceeds" of the narcotics trade.

The U.S. government has eagerly tutored other countries in the use of "non-conviction-based" confiscation -- that is, seizure of property from people never found guilty of a crime.

All of this did exactly nothing to mitigate the problem of drug addiction, let alone put an end to it. It did, however, dramatically amplify the profits enjoyed by both the private sector criminals who distribute narcotics and the immeasurably more vicious political criminals who are their obvious -- albeit usually unacknowledged -- business partners. 

Fifty years after the UN -- which has always been an instrument of the Anglo-American Power Elite -- called for a "drug-free world," the narcotics trade is the world's largest cash business. According to Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN's Office of Drugs and Crime, during the 2008 global financial meltdown, laundered proceeds from drug trafficking kept the international banking system liquid until the official counterfeiters at the Federal Reserve could take over. 

Historian Charles Burris refers to the beast created by "the massive covert intersection of governments, financial institutions, and organized crime in the international narcotics trade" as the "Narcosaurus." Its bloody footprints can be seen everywhere from the opium fields of Afghanistan  (which are guarded by U.S. military personnel) to the doorways of people like William Cooper and Jose Guerena -- innocent Americans murdered by the Drug War einsatzgruppen in their own homes.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

When the State Breaks a Man

"How much does the State weigh?" Josef Stalin asked an underling who had been ordered to extract a confession from an enemy of his regime. Stalin understood that, given enough time, agents of State-sanctioned cruelty can break any man.


Thomas J. Ball, who committed suicide by self-immolation on the steps of New Hampshire's Cheshire County Courthouse on June 15, was a man who had been broken by the State. A lengthy suicide note/manifesto he sent to the Keene Sentinel, which was published the day after his death , described how his family had been destroyed, and his life ruined, through the intervention of a pitiless and infinitely cruel bureaucracy worthy of Stalin's Soviet Union: The Granite State's affiliate of the federal "domestic violence" Cheka. 

Ball and his family were casualties in what he calls a federal "war on men." He wasn't exaggerating -- and he has a lot of company.

The federally subsidized domestic violence industry operates a bit like the hypothetical Von Nuemann Machine: Placed into a material-rich environment, it will sustain and replicate itself by destroying and assimilating everything within its field of influence. One useful sci-fi example is the robotic Planet Killer from the Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine" -- an immense, funnel-shaped engine of destruction propelled by the remnants of the worlds it destroys (according to one deutero-canonical source, the Planet Killer uses the same material to generate replicas of itself). 

That monstrous device was "self-sustaining as long as there are bodies ... for it to feed on." The same is true, of course, of the State and all of its components -- including what Dr. Baskerville calls "The Divorce Regime."

As Baskerville points out in his horrifying study Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, "it is no exaggeration to say that the existence of family courts, and virtually every issue they adjudicate -- divorce, custody, child abuse, child-support enforcement, even adoption and juvenile crime -- depend on one overriding principle: remove the father." When a family is broken up, each child "becomes a walking bundle of cash" -- not for the custodial parent, but for a huge and expanding population of tax-fattened functionaries who "adopt as their mission in life the practice of interfering with other people's children." 


Thomas Ball, like millions of others, learned that the people who choose this profession have an unfailing ability to exploit even the tiniest opportunity to invade a home and destroy a family.

One evening in April 2001, Mr. Ball suffered a momentary lapse of patience with a disobedient four-year-old daughter and slapped her face. He left the house at his wife's suggestion. When he called her a short time later, he learned that his wife -- "the type that believes that people in authority actually know what they are talking about" -- had called the police, who told her that her "abusive" husband wasn't permitted to sleep in his own home that night. Ball was arrested at work the following day. Under the conditions of his bail, he wasn't allowed to ask his wife what had possessed her to call the police. 

Years later Ball would learn that if his wife hadn't called the police and accused her husband of abuse, she would have been arrested as an accessory -- leaving the children at the mercy of New Hampshire's utterly despicable Division of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF). 

Dot Knightly, who tried vainly for years to win custody of three grandchildren seized on the basis of spurious abuse and neglect accusations, recounts how a DCYF commissar contemptuously batted away both her pleas and her abundant qualifications to serve as a custodial caretaker: "Nobody gets their kids back in New Hampshire. The government gives us the power to decide how these cases turn out. Everyone who fights us loses." 

Despairing over being wrested away from everyone he loved, Dot's grade-school age grandson Austin -- who had literally been dragged screaming from his grandparents' home -- tried to commit suicide. This led to confinement in a psychiatric hospital and involuntary "treatment" with mind-destroying psychotropic drugs. For New Hampshire's child-snatchers, the phrase "nobody gets their kids back" translates into a willingness to destroy the captive children by degrees, rather than allow any successful challenge to their supposed authority.

The instant the police intervened in the domestic affairs of Thomas Ball's household, his family's destruction became inevitable. The officers were required -- not by law, but by official policy that followed profit incentives created by Washington -- to make an arrest. In a similar fashion, and for the same reason, prosecutors are forbidden to drop domestic abuse cases under any circumstances. 

Ball recalled that he was eventually found not guilty, much to the visible disgust of the be-robed dispenser of official injustice who presided at the trial. But this made no material difference: His wife -- who divorced him six months after his arrest -- was now a consort of the State, his children were its property. His innocence notwithstanding, Ball was given an open-ended sentence of serfdom -- and the prospect of being sent to debtor's prison -- through government-mandated "child support" system. Furthermore, he wasn't permitted to see his children, despite the fact that a jury had found him innocent.

"I lost visitation with my two daughters when I got arrested. One was the victim-the other was the witness. After a not guilty, I expected to get visitation with my girls. But the divorce judge ... decreed that counseling was in order and they would decide when we would reunite." 

The policy options that are rewarded by federal subsidies don't include allowing an innocent man to reunite with his children. Consigning him to the State-aligned "domestic counseling" industry -- which was apparently co-designed by August Mobius and Franz Kafka -- is a much more profitable alternative.


"Judges routinely use our children as bargaining chips," Ball explained. "Get the adult into counseling, continue the case for a year, and then drop it. This will open up the docket for the new arrests coming in next week. These judges that use our children are not honorable. Which is why I never use the term 'Your Honor' any more. I just call them judge."

Ball's experiences, once again, are all but identical to those endured by millions of others. Dr. Baskerville offers a potent and infuriating summary:


"A parent [generally a father] whose children are taken away by a family court is only at the beginning of his troubles. The next step comes as he is summoned to court and ordered to pay as much as two-thirds of even more of his income as `child support' to whomever has been given custody. His wages will immediately be garnished and his name will be entered on a federal register of `delinquents.' This is even before he has had a chance to become one, thought it is likely that the order will be backdated, so he will already be a delinquent as he steps out of the courtroom. If the ordered amount is high enough, and the backdating is far enough, he will be an instant felon and subject to immediate arrest."


The sinews of this system are the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OSCE) and its state-level affiliates. Some idea of the scope of the Regime's war on fathers is found in this comparison: In 2007, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the spearhead of the "war on drugs," employed a total of 4,600 armed field agents; the OSCE at the time boasted more than 60,000 enforcement agents, all of whom are permitted to carry firearms under the "Deadbeat Parents Enforcement Act." 


When brought to bear against an isolated individual, the weight of this State apparatus will eventually destroy the victim. With each year, Ball's financial condition deteriorated and he became deeply mired in intractable despair. By the time he ended his life on June 16, Ball was a 58-year-old Vietnam Era Army Veteran who had been unemployed for two years. Owing to the fact that he couldn't pay the amount of child support extorted from him, Ball was quite likely going to be sent to jail on the following morning.

His only consolation, the company of his children, was sadistically withheld from him. The unfathomably arrogant and completely unaccountable functionaries who did so are people who have learned how to monetize the misery of the innocent.


Ball's manifesto is a work of tortured eloquence. Rather than being the chaotic outpouring of a deranged personality, the letter is cogently organized, laden with impressive amounts of detailed research, and admirably epigrammatic. The lucidity Ball displayed in explaining his decision to kill himself by the most painful method imaginable underscores not merely the depth of his despair but also of the entrenched corruption and viciousness of the people who had demolished his family. 


The leitmotif in Ball's letter is the phrase "Second Set of Books," a phrase that refers to the "policies, procedures and protocols" actually followed by bureaucrats and their enforcers in defiance of the "First Set of Books" -- that is, the federal and state constitutions. 

"You never cover the Second Set of Books your junior year in high school," Ball pointed out. That because we are not suppose to have a Second Set of Books." The Second Set of Books contain writings that are too holy to be inspected by mere Mundanes. Those of us who don't belong to the Sanctified Brotherhood of Official Coercion are required to behave as if there is some continuing relevance to the First Set of Books. Maintaining this official fiction is necessary in order to convince the credulous -- well, those who pay attention to such matters -- that it is possible to receive redress of grievances through the same system that has aggrieved them.

Like millions of other victims of the State's "domestic violence" apparatus, Ball came to understand that the system cannot be reformed from within:


"On one hand we have the law. On the other hand we have what we are really going to do-the policies, procedures and protocols. The rule of law is dead. Now we have 50 states with legal systems as good as any third world banana republic. Men are demonized and the women and children end up as suffering as well. So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses. The Second Set of Books originated in Washington. But the dirty deeds are being carried out by our local police, prosecutors and judges." 

Tunisian martyr Mohamad Bouazizi shortly before his death.

 Rather than voting them out, Ball insists that it is necessary to "Burn Them Out" through arson attacks on the appropriate bureaucratic facilities. 

He hoped that his self-immolation would be the symbolic spark that would ignite that revolution --  just as a similar desperate act by Tunisian street vendor Mohamad Bouazizi sparked a nation-wide rebellion against the fetid dictatorship ruling that country.

While I hope that God has granted rest to Ball's tortured soul, and pray for the comfort of his family, it must be said that his proposed strategy is as tragically mistaken as his suicide. 

Rather than attacking the architectural manifestations of the State, we should withdraw from contact with it. In other words, don't call the police under any circumstances, and insulate your family, to the extent possible, from any contact with "welfare" bureaucracies of every kind. This will mean being prepared as parents to take appropriate evasive action when one of the State's tentacles reaches out, with malign intent, in the direction of one's children. It also means being prepared and able to employ purely defensive force where all other alternatives have failed. 


Human beings have an instinctive, primordial fear of fire. Burning to death is a prolonged agony in which pain receptors operate at full capacity. The torment Thomas Ball experienced was sufficient, in his mind, to eclipse the horrors of death by fire. 

On the same day that this tortured man poured gasoline on his body and struck a match, pundit Ann Coulter used her syndicated column to emit a thick stream of snotty abuse at Rep. Ron Paul and others who insist that the State must be removed entirely from any role in regulating or overseeing marriage and the family.


Hey, Ann-- do you get the point now? 

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Dum spiro, pugno!