Joseph Andrew Stack
Since an airplane hit an Austin, Texas, business building Thursday morning, bits of information have started to emerge about Joseph Andrew Stack, the man believed to happen to be its pilot.
What little known of Mr. Stack, a software engineer in his 50s, develops from a note he published on his software company’s website. The site has since been removed at the request of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It lays out an individual history of financial ruin and levels complaints in the US government, its tax system, and health care. It ended with language suggesting its author would soon die and was signed “Joe Stack (1956-2010),” as well as Thursday’s date.
“If you’re reading this,” the note begins, “you’re no doubt asking yourself, ‘Why did this have to happen?’ In reality that it is complicated and is coming for a long period.”
Stack attended a Harrisburg, Pa., engineering school in the 1970s and lived on “peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge),” the manifesto reads. In school, it says, he developed an appreciation for independence plus a distrust of “big business.”
To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn’t notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out.
On the note’s conclusion, Stack says that he ultimately resolved that “violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”
An electronic bread-crumb trail, pointed out by the Business Insider, reveals that Stack began his manifesto Tuesday night using Microsoft Word and revised it 27 times. It was posted online just a few hours before authorities say he crashed his plane into Austin’s Echelon complex.
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