A Noteworthy Event

[alexamenos]

The tragic tale of Thomas Ball may be nowhere to be found in the mainstream news, Wikipedia may have deleted his page, but suicide by self-immolation as an act of political protest in these United States is nonetheless a story worth keeping out of the memory hole.



When the State Breaks a 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.

...

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.

[bernardos70]

In a way, it sort of reminds me of that juvenile court in which the judge had deals with the juvenile penitentiary to incarcerate as many juveniles as possible. It's a different way to turn those people into walking bundles of cash.

[mcsluggo]

uhm... yeah... that piece wasn't written with an agenda at all.

[Smiles]

wrongs have been committed by cps types stepping in when they shouldnt have. no argument there. but i worked with women & children who were abused, even tortured, by their father-figures (occasionally the other way around)...& quite often cps/ courts dont interfere when someond certainly should. just reporting abuse is often difficult, & it may take months for anyone to investigate (if they do). the one time i sat in on a court case, the judge appeared to doze off during any testimony related to the mothers "side", & this wasnt an unusual attitude among judges/ leaders in that town.

in our cases, the kids didnt go into the foster system since they had their moms. i am trying to figure out how anyone mightve made a bundle of cash from our clients. maybe it was the section 8 housing the moms qualified for? or the job training? oh wait, those forms of aid didnt hinge on getting rid of the batterer.

all that being said, i did lobby perry to veto that bill (in '09? '10?) with language giving cps agents the right to decide to take kids if they think its best - without even a judges approval, or an investigation, etc. that basically made it legal for them to repeat what happened at YFZ Ranch...or even take a kid on a single family level. i have been out of this loop a while now, so i dont know the latest.

the case you mentioned does sound like the worst kind of loss & tragedy. i am sorry it happened. btw, if there was no way to convict the father of abuse, then the kids wouldnt be taken from the mom. she can only be an accessory if she allows proven continued abuse....