THE SOLUTION IS TO BAN SELF IMMOLATION

These dumb Europeans just need to learn from the American corporate/government fascist MSM. When an American man (Thomas Ball) self immolates on the courthouse steps in New Hamphire the MSM just doesn’t report it. Therefore, it never happened. Those who control the present, control the past.

2 + 2 = 5 or whatever the BLS says it equals.

Google Thomas Ball Self Immolation to see how many MSM outlets reported the story: ZERO

Two Spaniards Self-Immolate Due To Financial Problems

Submitted by Tyler Durdenon 01/05/2013 11:39 -0500

First it was a German, then an Italian, and now, two months, later, the European self-immolation wave has spread to the country that many expect will be the next one to follow Greece into effective debt default. El Pais reports that an impoverished 57-year-old man who set himself on fire in Málaga Thursday, and subsequently died of his injuries at Carlos Haya hospital. He had third-degree burns on 80 percent of his body and suffered a multi-organ failure. The victim, thought to be of Moroccan origin, had worked in construction for years but was out of a job now, said people who knew him. In the last few months he had been scraping a living with the small change he made guiding cars into parking spaces near the hospital, an illegal practice that is usually overlooked by authorities. The police, who have not yet located his relatives, are not ruling out the possibility of an accident just as the man was lighting up a cigarette. Just two minutes before the event, he bought a pack of cigarettes from a local newsstand whose owner asked him how he was doing.

“I don’t even have enough money for food,” he replied. The man is thought to have been homeless at the present time, and seemed even more depressed than on other occasions, said the stand owner.

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Several taxi drivers came to the rescue with their vehicles’ fire extinguishers when they saw the man go up in flames on a side street from the hospital. A few hours after being admitted into the emergency room there, he was transferred to a specialized burn unit in Seville, where doctors were unable to save his life.

He was the unlucky one – as BBC follows, another Spaniard also lit himself on fire on Thursday night, in the same city, but lived.

Another man is being treated in the same hospital apparently after setting himself alight in Malaga on Thursday.

The 63-year-old was found with serious injuries beside his burning car under a road bridge, police said.

No other details were given of that man but, according to Spain’s El Mundo newspaper, preliminary investigations indicated that the fire had been lit intentionally.

…

Spanish media have reported a number of cases in recent months of people facing poverty in the country’s recession killing themselves.

Considering it was an identical act of self-immolation in Tunisia that set off the Arab Spring in the winter of 2011, Europe has for shown far more resiliency to socio-economic collapse than many had expected, although this is not unexpected: after all, Europeans, and especially Spaniards, still have more to lose than gain by rising up against a reverse Robin Hood globalist system bent on taking from what’s left of the middle class and giving to the status quo banking oligarchy. Or so they think: the big strawman, is and for the past 150 years has been the welfare state myth.

Then again, now that Spain has almost drained its entire social security fund, and replaced it with worthless ECB repo material, i.e., Spanish bonds, will Spaniards finally wake up and realize that while they were snoozing, their government spent 90% of their pension and retirement money to prop up the Ponzi for one more year. And instead of committing suicide, or even patching up various symptomps, shouldn’t the people of Spain, and all of Europe, finally address the real underlying cause of their misery: a dysfunctional government, which contrary to indication, is merely a puppet in a banker-led globalist system?

If not, how many more people have to burn themselves to death before it becomes clear?

DOUG CASEY DOES SELF IMMOLATION & OIL

Doug should have been reading TBP and he would have known about Thomas Ball the day after it happened. He has the same questions I had. Why was this story completely ignored by the MSM. This convinced me once and for all that the corporate MSM is in bed with the government and will report whatever they are told to report and coverup what they are told to coverup. It is up to sites like ours to report the truth.

Doug also agrees that oil prices are headed to $200 a barrel. I disagree with his unconcern with fracking. He assumes that corporations will do the right thing, follow proper safety guidelines, and be good corporate citizens. That is ridiculous. They only care about short term profits and will use their armies of lawyers to fight legitimate claims by the poor people being victimized by their greed and incompetence.

Doug Casey on Self Immolation – Individual and National

(Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator)

L: Labas, “Dougas,” as we might say in Lithuania — sure is beautiful here! It’s 11:30 p.m. and the sun is below the horizon, but the sky is still smoldering. Where are you, and what’s on your mind this week?

Doug: It’s afternoon here in Aspen, a nice little communist town in the Rockies. From here the world seems to be turning as usual, but that’s only because the place is full of people who are so rich that they’re largely insulated from the real world, as are the parasites who live off them. We’ll have to talk about the politics and sociology of Aspen sometime. But out in the real world, the engines are grinding toward a halt on the American Titanic – but it’s still moving, so everyone thinks everything is fine. There are signs that the 2008 iceberg was bigger than the crew is telling us, however, for anyone paying attention. Did you hear about that man who set himself on fire in front of a courthouse in New Hampshire?

L: I did, but only through email from friends.

Doug: Yes, the same with me; we have the same friends. It’s truly shocking that a story like this got absolutely zero major media coverage, even though it went out on AP. In Tunisia, a fruit and vegetable street vendor sets himself on fire to protest his government making his life impossible, and it sparks a revolution that doesn’t even stop at his country’s borders. Something similar happens in the U.S. and no one even hears about it… at least not this time. In February 2010 there was a guy who crashed his plane into an IRS office: That did make the national news. But perhaps since then the word has gone out that these things shouldn’t be reported for fear of encouraging others, “national security,” or whatnot.

L: Thomas Ball wasn’t a fruit vendor, but a divorced man who apparently felt that the court system had put him in an impossible situation. [Editor’s note: Ball’s last statement is available online, subscription required.] I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it defies belief that every single major news editor across the country decided on his own that such a striking story wasn’t news.

Doug: I know. Not a lot surprises me anymore, but this truly is shocking. In my entire life I can only remember two previous instances of self-immolation. The first was that of Buddhist monks during the Vietnam war. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but it sure caught everyone’s attention.

L: Why did they do it? U.S. troops on the temple steps?

Doug: No, they were protesting the rule of Ngo Diem in the south, who was Catholic and giving them a hard time. The U.S., of course, was supporting the terminally corrupt Diem regime. When, I’d like to know, has the U.S. ever supported anybody but the worst criminal available in Third-World countries? The second instance was the one in Tunisia earlier this year that touched off the Arab Spring – which is far from over, by the way. Thomas Ball is the first case of it in U.S. history – first one I’ve ever heard of, at any rate – and it received no press whatsoever, outside of acknowledgement in the local papers. The Internet picked it up, of course, but to me it seems extraordinarily serious that an event like this can transpire and not even get noticed. Instead, the headlines were dedicated to such urgent matters as that stupid congresscreature, Weiner.

L: So, are you saying that the powers that be censored the story?

Doug: If they didn’t, it’s certainly further proof of how degraded society has become in the U.S. that something like this could go unnoticed. It’s appalling – disgusting, actually. And scary, on a couple of levels.

But get this: When I was in Dubai a couple of weeks ago, a guide I’d hired to show me around had heard of the event. It was big news there that everyone heard about – it was in all the papers. So you could make the argument that the average Arab may know more about what’s happening in the U.S. than the average American does. That’s a turnaround…

L: What were you doing in Dubai?

Doug: It had been a while, and I wanted to see how things had changed since the crisis. I also went to Israel, Egypt, and Lebanon. I’ll have some articles on my findings in the Middle East in the next few issues of The Casey Report. Obviously, the area being prime oil hunting ground, I was thinking about energy-related speculations a great deal. In practical terms, energy really means oil, coal, gas, and nuclear – green energy is nice, but hydrocarbons and nuclear are the only forms of mass power that can satisfy any need, anywhere, anytime. Most particularly oil. Developments in oil affect the Middle East, and developments in the Middle East affect oil.

L: Hm. Speaking of nuclear, we haven’t talked about that since our conversation on Fukushima, and there’s been time for new market trends to become visible. What do you think?

Doug: Well, as we speak, I see that the price of uranium is $54.25 per pound. It was about $70 before Fukushima, dropped to about this level, bounced back to the high $50s, and is now fluctuating in the low $50s, so it’s definitely cheaper than it was before. But it was over $140 a pound in 2007, so it’s much cheaper than it has already been in this cycle. On the other hand, it’s still roughly six times what it was at the end of the 1990s, when it bottomed around $9. That’s pretty good performance for a commodity. Still, I’ve got to say that I think it has a lot of upside yet ahead – although keeping track of prices in dollar terms is becoming ever more tricky, as the dollar itself fluctuates wildly – mostly down – and the official CPI statistics become ever more unreliable.

The reason I’m still bullish on uranium is because, as we said before – and Fukushima notwithstanding – nuclear power is still the cleanest, safest, and cheapest type of mass power generation available. I find it quite ludicrous that the Germans have announced that they will phase out all of their nuclear plants over the next decade. Where are they going to get the power to replace the approximately 22% they get from nuclear now? Windmills aren’t going to do it. Solar doesn’t have a prayer in northern Europe. Are they going to burn more coal? That’d be great for their environment.

L: Aside from pumping sulfur into the air, coal plants emit C-14 too, and that’s radioactive. Nukes emit less. Maybe they plan to wear thicker coats and eat more cold food?

Doug: There’s a lot of radioactive material released from burning coal, including uranium. Geothermal would be nice, but Germany is not Iceland. Maybe they think they can burn more natural gas, but that’s a greenhouse issue – although the whole greenhouse gas/global warming hysteria has always impressed me as something in between a political scam, a fraud, and a new age religion. But we covered that in a prior conversation; no need to beat a dead horse. Anyway, it seems to me that the global warming hysteria actually peaked a few years ago, and will soon be just another idiotic embarrassment everyone will be anxious to forget. Especially when another hysteria catches their attention.

L: The Russians would love to see the Germans burning more natural gas.

Doug: Of course. And they wouldn’t be shy about demanding political concessions as well as higher prices when they can shut off the pipelines to Europe in the middle of the winter. The Germans will get what they deserve. But then, most everybody eventually does. I’ve got no sympathy for them; stupidity is its own reward.

L: That would literally be a cold war. No need for ballistic missiles. Looks like national self-immolation on the part of the Germans.

Doug: Right – the German reaction is clearly political grandstanding pandering to hysteria. I wouldn’t count on the policy ever being carried through to completion, and wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see it reversed after the first winter when there’s not enough power to go around. They really have no other practical alternative… though they might try to finesse it by importing electricity from France, which produces over 75% of its power from nukes.

Meanwhile, that hysteria is certainly going to slow down nuclear power in the U.S., but as we said in our conversation after the disaster in Japan, world demographic trends leave no choice but to employ more nuclear power. That makes the current relatively low prices an opportunity.

L: In that context, we should probably mention that there was a flood in the U.S. midwest, and the Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant in Nebraska was flooded. A dike surrounding the plant was even breached, but there appears to be no sign of danger yet. Granted, the plant was shut down for maintenance at the time of the flood, but still, the thing seems to be taking the abuse as designed.

Doug: That’s right, and it bears reiterating that at this point, all of these operating plants are basically 40-year-old technology. Because of the hysteria and resultant government regulations, newer, better, and even safer designs have not been implemented. Almost all the reactors in use today are what are known as “Generation 2.” But there are probably two dozen Gen 3 and 3+ designs that could be deployed; and in a few years there will be Gen 4 units available. Some of these designs are extraordinary – from 10-50 megawatts, self-contained, with almost no moving parts, extremely small, low cost, and capable of being buried for a decade, until they need refueling.

L: So, buy uranium and uranium exploration stocks?

Doug: That’s one way to play it, and we do have a lot of exposure to uranium’s upside in our portfolio. Another, more ground-floor way to play it might be to look into thorium plays. As I understand it, thorium – element 90 on the periodic table – is actually better for power generation than uranium or plutonium. Nuclear scientists originally proposed it for power generation, but governments opted for uranium because it coincided with their weapons programs. As usual, government interference takes us down the wrong path.

L: [Chuckles] As usual. So, there’s an opportunity to invest in nuclear while it’s unpopular, and while it’s unpopular, that’s bullish for hydrocarbons.

Doug: Right. I subscribe to the peak oil theory. By that I do not mean that the world is running out of oil, but that the easy availability of conventional sweet, light crude is in decline. There’s plenty more oil to be found, but it’s a more expensive to process, heavy oil. Or it’s shale oil, or comes from tar sands, or it’s deep under the ocean, which has its own environmental issues and is neither cheap nor easy to produce.

Peak oil is a geological concept. It basically holds that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Now, philosophically, it rubs me the wrong way, in that I have total confidence that human ingenuity will find scores of ways to produce new hydrocarbon fuels – and lots of totally new energy sources in addition. Furthermore, the higher oil prices go, the more will be found – and the more it will be economized. So, in a free-market world, oil is a non-problem.

But we don’t currently live in that kind of world. In the meantime – let’s say the next 10-20 years – oil is an issue, for simple geological reasons. And also because, even though consumption has been basically flat in the advanced world for decades, consumption is going to grow radically in “Chindia” and the rest of the developing world. The biggest problem though is likely political, especially because of the increased political risk in the Middle East, where most of the world’s oil reserves are. You’ve got to be bullish on oil.

L: Even with the stuff at $100 a barrel?

Doug: Yes. I believe the odds favor it going to $200, even $250 a barrel before too long. I say that despite the fact I’m much more comfortable buying things when they’re manifestly cheap, and nobody wants them. But at the same time, it’s important to see the trend, and make the trend your friend. And I see no reason to believe this one is anywhere near an end.

L: Okay… But you’re also famous for predicting the coming – now started – Greater Depression. In a major, global economic reversal, wouldn’t energy consumption decrease, and hence prices drop?

Doug: That’s certainly a possibility, but China, India, and the rest of the Third World are marching, increasingly, to the beats of their own drums these days. The Greater Depression will definitely affect them adversely, but the enormous growth that has already gone on there won’t stop – despite the fact China has misallocated gigantic amounts of money in property. There could very well be a real revolution there in the next ten years. People forget that during one of the most turbulent periods in history, 1914-1946 – including, among other disasters, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II – the world economy expanded by something like 1.8% annually. That trend will continue at one level or another, even if there’s a truly massive upset in the global economy – which I fully expect. The countries of the world will compete in using more oil; China will greatly increase its imports. India even more so. The price will necessarily rise.

So, sure, there could be a dip, especially if there’s a big financial crash, but that would not change the major underlying trend. Long-term energy demand is not dictated by speculators or other financial factors; at heart it’s based on demographic and technological trends, and those are not going to change easily nor soon. Oil in particular supplies very dense and convenient energy. It will be superceded, but not soon.

L: So if oil and gas stocks retreat on bad news, back up the truck for more?

Doug: Exactly. And it seems to me that in today’s world, in which nothing is cheap, one thing that is relatively cheap and a good value is natural gas. The reason it’s cheap is that previous high prices spurred technological developments, such as horizontal drilling and hydrofracking, that have made huge resources of shale gas economic. This vast increase in supply has made natural gas cheaper – and the time to buy commodities is when they are cheap. You have to be a contrarian, buy what’s unpopular, and sell when it’s the flavor of the day. It’s like my friend Rick Rule says: You’re either a contrarian or a victim. That’s natural gas right now – it’s cheaper, in BTUs per dollar, compared to oil, than it’s been for a very long time.

L: But there’s some risk too, especially with scare stories circulating about fracking causing gas leaks and problems on the surface. A political response could crush whole swathes of gas companies.

Doug: That’s true, and it would be true even if the scare weren’t completely unfounded hysteria, as I suspect it is. It’s mostly the same people who are so hysterically anti-nuclear who are anti new natural gas technologies. These stories about flames coming out of your water faucet have nothing to do with fracking. First, it’s freakishly rare. Second, it can and does happen naturally, for the same reason you see oil (and gas) coming to the surface all over the world, or even marsh gas bubbling up from swamps. Fracking generally occurs thousands of feet under ground; drinking water tables are close to the surface; it theoretically can have an effect, but as a practical matter does not. But I don’t want to get into a discussion of that here. Marin Katusa has covered that ground, from all points of view, as you can see here.

The technophobes of the world are a costly nuisance to everybody. But the good news is that they only drive prices up more, much to the benefit of the companies which are not affected. So, the way to play this is not with any kind of blanket approach, but with well-selected companies that should do well, based on where and how they produce their natural gas.

L: Very good. And this time I don’t have to ask you about investment implications.

Doug: Great. I love being off the hook. We’ll leave it at that, then. Talk to you next week.

L: Sure, Doug, thanks for the insights.

Doug: My pleasure.

SIMON BLACK ON NEW HAMPSHIRE SELF IMMOLATION

The blogosphere keeping this important story in the forefront.

From Simon Black of Sovereign Man

New Hampshire Man Lights Himself On Fire To Protest America’s Decline

Late last week, Thomas James Ball reached his breaking point. Driven to desperation by a system that bankrupted him and destroyed his family, Ball walked up to the main door of the Keene County, New Hampshire courthouse, doused himself with gasoline, and lit himself ablaze.

Hardly anyone seems to have noticed.

Conversely, when a 26-year old Tunisian man lit himself on fire a few months ago after police confiscated the fruits and vegetables he had been selling without a proper permit, it launched a wave of revolution across the Middle East.

People were shocked into taking action… protests and riots swept the region and one regime after another crumbled.

Rather than sparking an “American spring” and shocking US citizens into taking their country back, though, Mr. Ball’s act of self-immolation seems to have been largely ignored. There has been scant coverage (and scant is being extremely generous) of Mr. Ball in the mainstream media, and what little coverage there is generally discredits the man as a troublemaker.

This is how the system’s gatekeepers have been so adroit at maintaining the status quo– by suppressing dissent, marginalizing the detractors, and distracting the populace with meaningless, irrelevant drivel.

Mr. Ball left behind a lengthy missive prior to his suicide, which covers a range of topics from political corruption to why the family court system in America is utterly disgraceful. He was, to put it mildly, a staunch advocate of violent change, and it’s clear he hoped a great deal of others would follow in his footsteps to literally burn the system down.

(Ball even left instructions for how to make a proper Molotov cocktail along with specific vulnerabilities of police stations in his area…)

Perhaps the most interesting part of his final post, however, was the observation that the United States is no longer a nation of laws; Ball described what he calls the ‘second set of books,’ which is essentially the collection of policies, procedures, and protocols that courts and executive agencies rely upon.

This includes police departments and other ‘enforcers’ across the country that come up with standardized responses to take judgment out of the equation. TSA agents, for instance, are only following procedure when they fondle children at airport checkpoints. Even the guys who drove the trains to the concentration camps were just following procedures.

Ball argued that the nation is now ruled by such procedures, even in such institutions as family court where judges (by policy) pass the buck down the line to mental health case workers.

His anger and desperation for this system, which tore apart his family and bankrupted his finances, led Ball to light himself ablaze at the local courthouse in a state whose motto is “Live Free or Die.” Ball chose the latter.

The next day, life went on in America. There was no shocking front-page cover story or award-winning photograph to spark a national debate… let alone propel droves of fed-up citizens to flood the streets demanding change.

Rather, the New Hampshire courthouse cleaned up his charred remains and meticulously scrubbed the floors to eliminate all trace of the event. 24-hour news networks ran a quick blurb in their scrolling tickers amid more important coverage of the Miss USA beauty pageant and President Obama’s Father’s Day plans.

In other words, business as usual… suggesting that if there is, in fact, going to be a fight for the soul of the country, it’s a long way off, and many more degrees for the boiling frogs who are stuck in the pot.

My assessment of this situation, however controversial it may be, remains very clear: the great faceless enemy that opposes us, irrespective of our country of origin, is the institution of government.

Over time, this institution has inserted itself into nearly all aspects of life, such that a man cannot so much as enjoy a pint of beer, discipline his children, ride on the train, go to the doctor, open a bank account, apply for a job, go fishing, or watch a sporting event without the heavy hand of government being involved.

This is a beast that feeds on citizens; the more it feeds, the larger it becomes and the hungrier it gets. Of all the solutions out there, including armed conflict, civil disobedience, self-immolation, active democracy, etc., the only one that truly destroys the beast is starving it– take away the feast of productive citizens and accelerate its collapse.

MAN DOWN

I knew I could count on Kunstler to address the New Hampshire story. He has his own interesting take on what it means to be a man in today’s society. This story is important. It reveals much about America. It reveals much about which direction we are headed.

Man Down

By James Howard Kunstler
on June 20, 2011 9:30 AM

Last week, in an incident that didn’t get much attention in the national news, a man named Tom Ball set himself on fire in front of the county courthouse in Keene, NH. He left a fifteen-page suicide note explaining his actions. He was angry at the state child protection bureaucracy and the courts after a ten-year battle over a child abuse charge that became, for him, a Kafkaesque struggle with cruel authority. The long suicide note he left was a thoughtful and disturbing indictment of the legal procedures now common across America that have had many unanticipated consequences – from breaking up families to homelessness – but it was also a grim comment on the condition of American manhood.

A casual Martian observer hanging around any convenience store in the “fly-over” zones of this nation must be impressed with the striking way that American men present themselves to the world. Forgive me for revisiting an oft-dredged-up theme – male costuming and adornment in our time – but I wouldn’t keep bringing it up if I didn’t think it was significant. On the whole, American men present themselves as savages. I think they do it because they feel very insecure about themselves – similar to the insecurity that prompts a politician to wear a flag lapel pin. Should there be any doubt that an elected official cares about his country? Or maybe we should ask: what kind of country produces such craven, weak, pandering elected officials? What kind of culture produces men who get themselves up like chain-saw murderers?

The same country that furnishes an endless diet of super-hero movies to pubescent males who are not expected to develop normal adult coping powers. The same country that supplies gruesome, sado-masochistic video games to occupy the idle hours of young men – and then lets them take those “skills” to some tilt-up bunker in Nevada where they sit in air-conditioned comfort and direct drone aircraft ten thousand miles away to incinerate suspected “enemies” in mud villages. (Sometimes “mistakes are made” and they blow up a wedding party or something – but the drone controllers still get to leave the bunker at the end of their shift and roll down the strip for a plastic tray full of burritos.)

This month’s WeinerGate was another instructive incident. Up-and-coming wonderboy politician revealed to be secret sex schlemiel, undone by “social media” – which turns out to have the unanticipated consequence of undermining the impulse control of supposedly grown men. Who knew? But what interested me more than Weiner’s pitiful dishonesty was the parade of women journalists on cable TV news who all agreed that poor Weiner’s downfall was yet another conclusive demonstration of how hopeless men are – not to mention that their male colleagues on-screen, Blitzer, King, O’Donnell, sheepishly agreed with them. This ceremonial posturing for moral brownie points in an extremely moralistic and puritanical culture does tend to obscure the reality that adult male humans are sexually alert in an inconvenient way that is not identical to the experience of females. Notwithstanding the evident insanity of Dominque Strauss-Kahn jumping the hotel maid, men sometimes make passes. American women cannot forgive them for this. Lesson: perhaps American men should not make such an effort to seek forgiveness. I am waiting, personally, for some Mark Sanford type (former South Carolina governor caught in “affair” with Argentine firecracker) to go before the microphones and say to media (and the voters), “this is none of your goddam business.”

Which brings me to the troublesome subject of gay marriage, which is lately up for debate in the legislature of New York State where I live, making it the public’s business. I have an unpopular view of it for men of my demographic (Democrat, Boomer). I’m not in favor of it. I don’t think it is a good idea. I don’t have empirical proof, but I suspect that unsettling such an age-old and fundamental social arrangement will produce strange unanticipated consequences that we are not prepared for. I don’t believe gay marriage is a genuine social justice issue. I think it is a bid for a kind of broad social approbation which does not require ritual enactment in law, and would be socially mischievous to pursue. Civil unions would cover the necessary legal issues. Otherwise, it is a case of unwarranted relativism, a Boomer weakness. Not all conditions or states of being in this world are the same. Some things are on the margins because they are marginal.

What fascinates me in the debate is the narcissism of Boomers, males especially, who advocate so earnestly in favor of gay marriage. Is it really about the law and social relations, or is it about making yourself feel good? Is it just more posturing for moral brownie points, for approval? Is your job and social position or maybe even sense of yourself at stake if you have a differing view?

I had an interesting experience with my last two books (World Made By Hand and The Witch of Hebron), which were set in a post-oil, post economic collapse American future and depicted daily life in a way that was quite unlike the way we live right now. I received a heap of criticism from female readers – including peak oil activists – full of consternation that I did not present female characters in the kinds of dominant valorized roles that are favored today: the post-oil equivalent of CEO, news anchor, CIA-Ninja warrior, Presidential candidate. What struck me was their complete failure of imagination. They could not conceive of male / female relations that were different than today’s, even in a world that had been turned economically upside down.

However, this was not inconsistent with the failure of American men to know how to act like men in this anxious moment of history. The choices are pretty unappetizing: be a jobless loser in a “Pray for Death” T-shirt with neck and knuckle tattoos, or a loser in a corporate cubicle, or a loser in that Nevada drone-control bunker, or a loser in the eyes of the family court, or a loser on cable TV. Tom Ball, the man who set himself on fire in Nashua, New Hampshire recommended something that sounded a lot like violent revolution, though his tone was eerily measured for someone about to commit the most desperate personally public act. I hope we don’t have to go through a convulsion in this land to find out how what it means to be a man.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“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. These are the people we pay good money to protect us and our families. And what do we get for our tax money? Collaborators who are no different than the Vichy of France or the Quislings of Norway during the Second World War. All because they go along to get along. They are an embarrassment, the whole lot of them. And they need to be held accountable. So burn them out.

In the last 25 years they have arrested one in six adults in this country and forced 25% of the men, women and children into homelessness. In 50 years it will be one in three adults arrested and 50% of the men, women and children ending up homeless. Most of our kids will live to the age of 68 years old. As bad as it was for you, your children will have twice the odds of it happening to them.

Some of you will say that 50% homelessness sounds absurd. But 25% is absurd and that is already here. There is no evidence that the police, courts, or government is planning to do anything different in the immediate future. And they will not do anything different until we make it so uncomfortable that they must change. Bureaucracy at its worst. So burn them out. This is too important to be using that touchy-feeling coaching that is so popular with business these days. You need to flatten them, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to be taught never to replace the rule of law. BURN-THEM-OUT!

Most of the police stations built in New England over the last 20 years are stone or brick. Fortunately, the roofs are still wood. The advantage of fire on the roof is that it is above the sprinklers. But even the sprinklers going off work to our advantage. There is no way they can work in a building with six inches of water. And I am certain we will disrupt their momentum once they start working out of a FEMA trailers. If they still do not get the message, then burn down the trailers.

The easiest way of burning a building is with the Molotov cocktail. It was invented by the Finns when the Soviets invaded in 1939. You fill a bottle with gasoline and stuff a rag in the end for a wick. You light the wick and throw bottle, It shatters on impact spraying gas everywhere and the wick ignites the gas. Simple, readily available, and effective. And only two things to remember.

First, use a glass bottle. Thinner glass is better than thicker glass. You want it to shatter on impact. When I was teaching a kid at the high school on the West Side Worcester, MA. threw a Molotov cocktail into his school. Fortunately, he used a plastic bottle. It burned about three square inches of carpeting. I had to laugh when I said to myself, “Thank God for dumb kids.”

Second, you need to tie the rag to the bottle. Nothing worse that throwing a Molotov cocktail, landing where you wanted it, and having it shatter perfectly. Then you noticed the wick had fallen out on the way to the target. No wick-no fire.

Some of these building will have brick faces and metal roofs. Just break a window and throw the Molotov cocktail inside. Carpets, furniture, computer plastic, even paint on the walls will burn. It is okay if the sprinkler goes off. I wonder if you can get hip waders over a gun belt?

We had a kid in my hometown that burned down the old junior high school. He walked up to the front door one night with a can of lighter fluid. The applicator on the end squirts the lighter fluid out. He squirted under the door and along the seams and lit a match. The kid took out the entire old part of the building. Why are kids so competent when it is something they should not be doing?

There will be some casualties in this war. Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.”

Thomas Ball

SHTF PLAN PICKS UP TOM BALL STORY

Gerald Celente’s description is fitting:

“When people lose everything, and they have nothing left to lose, they lose it.”

As the super rich powerful elite continue to ransack and pillage the remaining wealth of the middle class, we inch ever closer to people losing it en masse.

Man Self Immolates in Protest of Courts, Federal Government and the Death of The Rule of Law

Mac Slavo
June 18th, 2011

Tom Ball of New Hampshire set himself on fire in front of a Cheshire County family courthouse on Wednesday. The story has received very little attention from the mainstream media, likely because Ball provided the reasons and justifications for his act in a 15 page letter to the New Hampshire Sentinel just prior to his death, in which he unleashed a tirade against the US court system, police, child protective services, the US justice system and its arrest policies, and the Federal government.

From what we are able to gather, his ordeal began in 2001 with what he claims was an accidental injury caused to one of his children when the child was misbehaving. Ball reportedly slapped the child after having warned her thrice and she ended up with a cut lip. The child was not permanently or severely harmed, but the mother called police at the (forced) urging of a mental health practitioner and the state got involved. Ball was eventually found not guilty, but the story doesn’t end there.

Among other things, Ball attempts to explain in his letter what happened that night, and the events that followed for the last ten years, finally leading him to self immolation.

By some he will be referred to as a domestic terrorist for his calls of violence, by others as a revolutionary for his actions and call to arms, others still will dismiss him as a head case. This is, however, an important event and the people, as well as government and their agencies, should take notice.

Some excerpts from his letter to the Sentinel:

There are two kinds of bureaucrats you need to know; the ones that say and the ones that do. The bridge between them is something I call The Second Set of Books. I have some figures of the success of their labors. You and I are in these numbers, as well as our spouses and children. But first let me tell you how I ended up in this rabbit hole.

My story starts with the infamous slapping incident of April 2001. While putting my four year old daughter to bed, she began licking my hand. After giving her three verbal warnings I slapped her. She got a cut lip. My wife asked me to leave to calm things down.

When I returned hours later, my wife said the police were by and said I could not stay there that night. The next day the police came by my work and arrested me, booked me, and then returned me to work. Later on Peter, the parts manager, asked me if I and the old lady would be able to work this out. I told him no. I could not figure out why she had called the police. And bail condition prevented me from asking her. So I no longer trusted her judgment.

After six months of me not lifting a finger to save this marriage, she filed for divorce. Almost two years after the incident, I was talking with her on the phone. She told me that night she had called a mental health provider we had for one of the kids. Wendy, the counselor told my then wife that if she did not call the police on me, then she too would be arrested.

Suddenly, everything made sense. She is the type that believes that people in authority actually know what they are talking about. If both she and I were arrested, what would happen to our three children, ages 7,4 and 1? They would end up in State custody. So my wife called the police on her husband to protect the children. And who was she protecting the kids from? Not her husband, the father of these children. She was protecting them from the State of New Hampshire.

This country is run by idiots.

…

So let us talk about those bureaucrats that do. These are the ones that actually carry out the evil deeds. I like call them the do-bies.

Any one swept up into legal mess is usually astonished at what they see. They cannot believe what the police, prosecutors and judges are doing. It is so blatantly wrong. Well, I can assure you that everything they do is logical and by the book. The confusion you have with them is you both are using different sets of books. You are using the old First Set of Books- the Constitution, the general laws or statutes and the court ruling sometime call Common Law. They are using the newer Second Set of Books. That is the collection of the policy, procedures and protocols. Once you know what set of books everyone is using, then everything they do looks logical and upright. And do not bother trying to argue with me that there is no Second Set of Books. I have my own copies at home. Or at least a good hunk of the important part of it.

I got my Second Set of Books when I sued the Jaffrey NH police department. Under the discovery rule, I write them with the material I wanted and it would arrive in the mail a few weeks later. I got the Police Academy Training Manual. I got the Department’s Policy and Procedure Manual. I got the no-drop protocol that the attorney general sent to all his or her prosecutors. I even got the domestic violence protocols for the court system, one hundred pages worth. Once you read it the material, then you will know what the police, prosecutors and judges will do. They are completely predictable once you know what set of books they are using.

…

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, Sullivan, decreed that counseling was in order and they would decide when we would reunite. I told the judge that the decision on whether these two girls had a father or a fatherless childhood was not leaving this courthouse.

…

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. These are the people we pay good money to protect us and our families. And what do we get for our tax money? Collaborators who are no different than the Vichy of France or the Quislings of Norway during the Second World War. All because they go along to get along. They are an embarrassment, the whole lot of them. And they need to be held accountable. So burn them out.

In the last 25 years they have arrested one in six adults in this country and forced 25% of the men, women and children into homelessness. In 50 years it will be one in three adults arrested and 50% of the men, women and children ending up homeless. Most of our kids will live to the age of 68 years old. As bad as it was for you, your children will have twice the odds of it happening to them.

Ball also cites the rise of the Tea Party as evidence that insurrection in America is growing, reasoning that one of the primary reasons for why this is occurring is because the middle class is being wiped out. He promotes direct action against agencies of the government, expanding on his call to “burn them out,” by providing details on Molotov cocktails.

And for a possible explanation of why this story did not get coverage across the popular news channels, we need only look at the following set of statements from his letter:

There will be some casualties in this war. Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.

Now, nobody wants to get killed. But let us look at your life. You are broke after paying child support. She and the kids are not doing any better. None of you are middle class any more. You have no say in the kids education, their health treatment, you may not even have visitation with your sons and daughters. And everything you thought you knew to be true-the rule of law, the sanctity of the of the family, the belief that government was there to nurture your brood-all turned out to be a lie. Face it boys, we are no longer fathers. We are just piggy banks.

…

I only managed to get the main door of the Cheshire County Courthouse in Keene, NH. I would appreciate it if some of you boys would finish the job for me. They harmed my children. The place is evil. So take it out

Some where along the line I picked up the crazy notion that it is better to be dead as a free man than to live as a serf. The government needs to be a little more careful about what they teach in our schools.

Perhaps Tom Ball believed that his death would lead to a similar explosion of protests as those that occured in Tunisia after an act of self immolation by a street vendor whose livelihood was seized by police. Many point to this single act of desperation as the catalyst for the entire middle east movement of the last 6 months.

Whatever the case, Tom Ball’s experience was certainly not unique and he makes this clear in his statement to the world.

We are not advocating the violent activities being called for by Mr. Ball, yet we couldn’t help but think about a memorable trend forecast from Gerald Celente of the Trends Journal in which he said:

When people lose everything, and they have nothing left to lose, they lose it.

We saw this with the man who flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin, we saw it a couple days ago with Tom Ball, and we anticipate similar acts of protest and domestic violence in the future, likely with increasing frequency.

Hat tip Charlie, Zero Hedge, Activist Post, NH Sentinel

Author: Mac Slavo
Date: June 18th, 2011
Website: www.SHTFplan.com