Mea Culpa: I should know better than to believe first reports.

Stack, it seems, did not set the house on fire with his family in it as first reported. From the Austin Statesman:

Hutchins said he was on the phone with 911 when a car pulled up just beyond the house. A woman and a girl who both lived in the house got out, Hutchins said. Neighbors believe that was Stack's wife and her daughter, who is about 12 years old. The girl was crying, and Hutchins said the woman looked distraught. They were believed to have spent part of the afternoon in a home across the street.

So, dear readers, I owe you and Stack an apology for believing first media reports. My prayers are with Stack's family. It appears now that he killed a 67-year-old IRS employee in the attack, as he is missing and two bodies were found in the wreckage of the building. My prayers are with his family as well.

But even with the correction of this falsehood on the part of the press, it does not materially change my critique of Stack's actions nor of the situation. Though I still insist that there must be no Fort Sumters if we wish to hold the moral high ground, I am realistic enough to know that there will be more kamikazes like Stack, driven beyond reason by the Leviathan's unconstitutional acts.

For there are no free lunches. As Mama Liberty has said, if they are worried about civil disturbances why don't they quit disturbing us? The FBI, in its haste, has proclaimed that "this was not terrorism." Yet I will tell you that every federal employee, and especially IRS agents, felt a tremor of terror when they heard of it. There is no defense against such attacks, just as there is no predicting which victimized taxpayer might resort to it.

There is a line from an Australian movie about the Tet Offensive in 1968, The Siege of Firebase Gloria, when R. Lee Ermey and his Marine Force Recon patrol come across a previously friendly village that has been slaughtered by the Viet Cong -- every living thing is dead, men, women, children (save one), even goats, dogs and chickens. One of the Sergeant Major's men expresses his horror at the savagery, saying that such conduct is madness. Ermey corrects him, "This is EFFECTIVE. Nobody's gonna get out of line in this valley again."

This is the seduction of evil, that it is easy and, in the short term at least, usually effective. It is also a principal building block of the lie of collectivism, that you have to break eggs in order to make a "new socialist man" omelet. Only we are talking about living, breathing people, not eggs. Some have made the comment on this blog that the IRS employees were "enemy combatants." No, they weren't. At least, not yet. We Three Percenters must remember, if for no other reason than that everyone else will surely forget it, that it is important when fighting the monster not to become a monster yourself. The Leviathan has set itself at war with the people, but we are not AT a shooting war yet. Not YET.

"When then?" I was asked yesterday. I replied that I did not know, but that we would recognize it when we saw it. So, too, would everyone else. Until then, we hold fire, prepare and await events.

But, if sending a shiver through employees of the IRS was Stack's intention, he got his wish. And given the years of anguish and yes, terror, that the IRS has inflicted on some of the citizenry in order to convince the rest of us to go on feeding Leviathan, how can this be seen as anything other than karma, as much as we disagree with and deplore it? I am certain there will be a small bump of agency transfers ("Say, they've got an opening in the GAO, I think I try for THAT. Nobody flies planes into accountants' buildings, except maybe Jihadis.") and early retirements.

Good for them if they do. It is never a bad idea to leave Sodom before the fire descends. For there will be more Stacks in the future. As much as I deplore that fact, it IS a fact.

Mike
III