Joe Stack, the age of the wayward rebel, and other notes on the news

To me, the most terrifying thing about the Joe Stack affair isn’t that another manifesto-writing rage killer made a suicide attack on a government building that wounded over a dozen people. It’s the fact that I agree with about 95 percent of what he had to say. That’s right – I have very little quarrel with what Stack wrote on his website before he got in his plane and rode into history. How can I disagree with statements like this:

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy.  Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all.  We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers.  Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”.  I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood.  These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my ‘pocket change’, and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time.  I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity.  This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their “freedom”.  Oh, and don’t forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn’t bill clients.

After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise.  The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren’t going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists).  This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect.

I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything.  Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”.  Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.

As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone.  The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government.  Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough).  In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.

You really should read the whole thing. It’s the most lucid, sensible essay written by a “madman” since Pekka-Eric Auvinen shot up that high school in Finland. You cannot read Stack’s words and honestly claim that he was insane. His actions were abhorrent, but his motivations were one hundred percent just and moral. He truly was a wayward rebel.

The usual suspects are going to try to write this off as the act of a mad loner, which is beyond laughable. Joe Stack was not an autistic loser. He wasn’t a asocial, sexually frustrated nitwit. He was a normal man with a normal job and a family. The only difference was that unlike most normal people, he got mad as hell and decided he wasn’t going to take it any more. Anyone who tries to claim he was nuts has proven that they are either completely clueless or morally bankrupt.

And Joe Stack will not be the last man to strike a blow against the system. Everyone knows that the government and Wall Street are colluding to rob the rest of us of every penny we have and laugh as we starve to death in the streets. Both political parties are in on the scam, as evidenced by the fact that the throne passed from Bush to Obama and not one damn thing changed. If the fat cats won’t curtail their avarice, their serfs will curtail it for them by murdering them in the public square to the delightful screams of the crowds. It’s already happening in Greece.

If President Obama doesn’t want the land of the free and the home of the brave to be engulfed in a wall of flame, he needs to start prosecuting every banker who defrauded the American people. Forget about bailouts – they should be given one-way tickets to the electric chair if found guilty. Bernie Madoff, the greatest criminal of the twenty-first century so far, should be taken out of his comfy cell and given a public hanging in Times Square, with his bloated, disgusting corpse used as a pinata afterwards by the people he swindled. Obama should be taking his cues from the Chinese, who have no qualms about executing white-collar criminals who threaten social stability. Of course, he probably won’t, considering he’s in on the whole thing.

I write these words not as a threat but as a warning. You can only beat a man so many times before he rises up to punch you in the face – and the American people have been flogged across the back too much by the elites. Even if there isn’t a full-scale revolt, people will still react by slowly disengaging from society politically, economically, and in other ways. Either way, the current system cannot last. The West is on its way out, and from the looks of things, not many people will mourn its passing.

Other views on the incident, from Talleyrand:

…with 20% of the able bodied male population out of work, with a good number of them feeling exiled from the sexual market place.  With despair seeping into their lives, I expect that more of this is going to happen.

A lot more.

Weekly.  Maybe even daily.

Silas Reinagel:

Today’s events are but a harbinger of what lies ahead. Having forsaken that end and those principles which were original set forth as the aims of the American experiment, there is a spirit of unrest in the air that is palpable. Revolution is not yet upon us, but perhaps it is not nearly as distant as some might think. Already I know of many who discuss their desire for anarchy rather than the present form of government. Some friends of mine are beginning to purchase weapons and train themselves in the use thereof. Another friend of mine, a philosopher, often asks how different people in our social circle would respond to revolution. As Thomas Jefferson prophetically declared: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” On this day we see that one man has spilt his blood for the sake of liberty. The yearning for freedom is something that is reawakening in the hearts of many, and there is little doubt that unless the government lessens its tyrannical grip on its citizens, there will be blood. We have nearly completed a full circuit in returning to many of the opinions and ideals espoused by the Founding Fathers at the birth of our nation. Either America must be politically cleansed and reborn, or it shall fall and be replaced. There is no other alternative.

Half Sigma:

I guess you can call [the manifesto] “producerist,” Which means that it will baffle liberals, because they find it hard to understand how someone who’s not a liberal can hate corporations more than liberals do.

And finally, Vox Day:

There is something deeply sick about a society that manages to transform intelligent, successful, productive members of society into felons and murderous suicides. The irony is that the more a man genuinely believes in justice and law, the more he truly believes that America is the Land of the Free, the more shattered he is when he is forced to confront the reality that the entire legal system is a facade designed to conceal the complete absence of justice and rule of law in American society.

…

Would you pay this woman to give you a handjob?

Well, you won’t get the opportunity, because she and four others have been jailed for the crime of giving dejected and tired men a little manual pleasure:

COLONIE– Five women who worked at two storefront massage parlors in the town face prostitution-related charges, including workers at Jasmine Beauty & Massage on Central Avenue, which was busted on similar charges three months ago.

“I don’t think Colonie is a hotbed for this type of thing, but we have to keep an eye on it or it can keep popping up,” said Colonie Police Lt. Robert Winn.

The other operation targeted during Tuesday’s undercover operation between Colonie police and the Albany County Sheriff’s Department was Red Rose Massage Parlor, 644 Loudon Road, located in a strip mall on Route 9.

The women, ranging in age from 47 to 54, offered “additional manual stimulation” to undercover officers for $40 on top of the $65 fee for a one-hour massage, Winn said. Most of the customers appeared to pay for the services by credit or debit cards.

Can anyone please tell me what these women did that was sooooo wrong? Our society is so morally debased it’s not like letting old Chinese ladies jerk dudes off for cash will somehow destroy the social fabric, and since it’s just handjobs, the moral orels can’t play the bogus public health card. I can imagine the type of man these girls dealt with – a middle-aged cubicle jockey who works a dead-end state job, with three kids, two ulcers, and a bitchy, nagging wife who blew up like the Michelin Man after saying “I do.” A guy who would have killed himself if it weren’t for the bottle of Jim Beam he keeps in his pantry to dull the pain of existence. That weekly happy ending from the kindly Asian lady with the small, fast hands and goofy way of pronouncing “Hello!” was the only joy he had in life, and now it’s gone.

Make no mistake, the war on prostitution is nothing more than the state’s attempt to artificially prop up women’s sexual market value. It goes hand in hand with IMBRA and other laws to restrict the supply of pussy. The silver lining here is that the war will soon end.

…

I’m not a huge fan of video games – they’re overpriced time-sucks that haven’t advanced literarily for about a decade. However, I’ve been playing Mass Effect 2 and loving it so far. Some hipster lameass who writes for Vice Magazine penned a pretty good review of the game, but I stopped dead when I got to this complaint he had about it:

The game’s biggest problem as I see it is this: Lack of gay romance options.

Because the player can choose so much of Shepard’s characterization—gender, appearance, history, attitude, aptitudes—the game encourages the player to identify strongly with their version of Shepard. I am not Tsuriko Shepard at all, but as a character I feel like she spontaneously assembled herself from parts presented to me. I have spoken to at least two gay people who, while playing ME2, have expressed frustration because in their own minds, the Shepard they created, and the Shepard they play, is gay—this may or may not be a choice they made, but only the result of the character assembling himself organically in their heads—only the game doesn’t present them the option to express this. It wouldn’t be a problem, except the game gives them the option to express almost every other element of the Shepard-personality they create. It’s an oversight.

Doofus McClueless quotes BioWare head honcho Ray Muzyka’s explanation as to why there are no gay “romance options” in the game, but the idiot is incapable of reading between the lines and figuring out the real reason: nobody wants to see two men getting it on. To those unaware, Mass Effect’s (and presumably Mass Effect 2′s, I haven’t gotten that far) relationship subplots end with Commander Shepard and his/her paramour having sex in the captain’s quarters. Since video games are marketed at straight men, and since straight men usually don’t like to watch two guys lubing up with Crisco and making the beast with two backs, it follows that no mass-marketed video game would feature homo sex. (Lesbian sex, on the other hand, is perfectly kosher. Yes, it’s a double standard. Get over it.)

Look for Mass Effect 2 to get the full In Mala Fide treatment when I finally get around to beating it.

Tagged as: Half Sigma, Joe Stack, Mass Effect 2, Silas Reinagel, Talleyrand, Vox Day