viewtopic.php?f=47&t=9388&start=180
Beautiful fall day, sunny and warm, perfect time for a walk down our last real "neighborhood" street, Commercial Drive, so I wandered over to Joe's Cafe and met the Chief. Turns out we'd met before, or at least seen each other. He recognized me from Bernard Yankson's hearing last week. I recalled him being there, the row ahead of me. He seems a friendly personable guy, knew who I was but no issues with a potentially hostile Quatloos blogger sitting in on his session. Joe's is a two storefront cafe with a longitudinal dividing wall. The cafe is on the right with an equal sized essentially empty room on the left that can be used for parties, functions, and cafe overflow on busy days. The Chief had reserved this room for his talk. A bit of nostalgia, the Chief had two books with him. One was the law of contracts. The second was Smythe & Soberman's "The Law and Business Administration In Canada". That was my textbook for commercial/contract law at the University of British Columbia in 1968! As Mattie Ross says in the penultimate sentence of True Grit "Time just gets away from us".
While my description of events is fragmentary and disorganized I'm giving two excuses. Firstly, that is how it went. Digressions abounded and personal pet peeves kept things generally off topic. The Chief moderated with a light hand so things tended to go in all directions. Secondly I didn't take notes so I've probably already forgotten most of the various side-issues.
Chief said his sessions usually ran for five hours, I stayed for three. Ten of us in attendance. On introductions I told them I was Burnaby49. a poster on Quatloos. Nobody seemed to care. The moderator from Global F.A.C.T. Radio show that Mowe linked was there and there was a Dave who I think was David Smith from the program. Actually, apart from one guy, a far more laid-back group than I expected. The hyper guy was somewhat obsessed about some police confrontation from a few years ago that he couldn't let go. Seems like most of them had police issues, largely relating to no drivers licenses or insurance, but considered them really just background noise. Not hyper guy, still very much a live issue with him.
The purported theme was contracts and how a knowledge of contract law could give you an advantage in court but the discussion kept going down other rabbit-holes. One guy's focus was the Dragon Family and the SWISSINDO trust. One woman was a David Wynne Millerite so words loomed big in her world-view (it's all in the syntax). She had an almost obsessive parsing of the meaning of words, actually a common theme for the group. The chief tried to steer her away from Miller digressions but with limited success, she was constantly cutting in with definitions. She was also obsessed by our Motor Vehicles Branch and their death grip on the right to drive through drivers license. She said that she did not sign a contract to adhere to the Motor Vehicles Act when she got her license so the act doesn't apply to her. Since I was there as an observer I didn't get involved in these discussions, including the salient point that statutory acts do not require contractual acquiescence. She also followed the common belief (I don't know if it is part of Millerism, Hendrickson's CrackHeads live by it) that the word "includes" actually means "excludes everything but". She said that since the Motor Vehicles Act stipulates that an accident "includes" intentional collision then "of course" only intentional collisions are considered to be accidents under the act. Nobody else seemed to have the slightest interest in Miller so that kind of fizzled out.
Another woman was there because the only contract she had was with "the Divine" and she was trying to find a way to get her kids out of the slavery pact they were parties to by contracting with the state through birth certificates.
Words, and parsing their meanings, had a very large part in the discussion. Apparently pretty much any word that we think we understand now has a secret meaning apart from the apparent ones. The Chief explained to me that this was why he relied on old dictionaries. In the past words had their true meanings and were defined correctly before the powers that be obscured them. So old (and new) editions of Black's Law Dictionary played a significant part of their lives. One participant had just got an app for the latest edition and everybody wanted a copy. Convoluted wrangling about the true meaning of every word spoken in court and how you could bog down proceedings with objections that you didn't understand the actual words used.
So three hours of largely going around in circles without a true focus. More a chat group than a seminar; with hints and strategies how to contract out of anything that you didn't want to be invoved in (those pesky debts, criminal charges, that kind of thing). Also a lot of chit-chat about unilateral contracts, how you could impose fee schedules on police, debt collectors, etc. Chief had a story about putting signs in his car windows saying if anyone gave him a parking ticket this was an agreement they owed him a big fee. One paticipant, I think the Millerite, advised that you could get rid of police by telling them you refused to contract with them. Chief was also big on not giving authorities your name; you do that they Gotcha! All pretty much standard stuff we've seen before.We took a break towards the end of the third hour and I had one of Joe's sandwiches for a late lunch. A lot bigger than I expected and pretty much knocked me out. So I bailed at the start of the fourth hour and went home for a nap.
The participants also took up a good chunk of the time swapping war stories about this traffic stop or that run-in with the police. The Chief actually had very sensible advice on that point. To paraphrase, when you've got a bunch of guys with guns getting excited about your actions don't argue or escalate. Focus on your real response later. The quote below is from one of the Chief's comments from the Nanaimo Three thread and if he had any theme in his session it was argue all you want but be civil.
No, this is just a contract talk and verbal war zone. We will get into how to conduct yourself orally and get them to do some exercises. To many dont know how to address people or be civil. This is what i press upon everyone, be civil no one is your enemy so no need to be upset. I mean how do you expect to get result or anything if your pissed off and angry or considering everyone your opponent in life ?