My Adventures with a Freeman

[Burnaby49]

You're quite right that religion is an acceptable topic as long as it's utilized as at least a partial basis for a subject's sovereign beliefs. As you note Belanger is an excellent example of that. However you're also right that you are straying past this religious use exemption in your last post since it covers Ash's beliefs even when unconnected to his claimed sovereign beliefs. If his claimed beliefs (as you say an Eid-only Muslim) aren't used as justification or basis for sovereign behaviour then they don't fit in Quatloos.

Belanger is fully compliant with the Quatloos religious exemption. His position is that a professed member of his made up church, the Church of the Ecumenical Redemption International (“CERI”), can exempt himself from whatever laws he doesn't want applying to him and can extinguish any debts through the application of the King James bible as Belanger interprets it. Anyone can join and have Belanger make him a minister. It hasn't done him much good personally, he's a divorced welfare bum living from hand to mouth, but it still resonates with the suckers. I'm currently writing two new Quatloos topics, one where a Belanger follower is suing various government actors for $100,000,000 for violating his religious rights (arrested for squatting, you weren't aware it could be so lucrative) and another trying to get out of repaying his mortgage. Both are current lawsuits heading to their inevitable ends.

I've written about CERI for years, I believe this is the first discussion on the topic I participated in;

http://www.quatloos.com/Q-Forum/viewtopic.php?t=9261

But I can't do better than recommend his assistance to the Volks, helping them to get foreclosed on their mortgage, as an example of how he weaves CERI into get-out-of-debt scams. The Volks, a couple who defaulted on their mortgage, became instant CERI members and allowed Belanger to guide them all the way to their eviction from their home. It's a classic example of Belanger's scam;

http://www.quatloos.com/Q-Forum/viewtop ... 48&t=10123

[grixit]

I've never come across a 'TPTB are behind KJV' conspiracy theory anywhere else

I know of one: in the Caribbean, there are some people who refer to the KJV as "The White Man's Bible", because it omits the Apocrypha, which contains a story considered to encourage revolts against slavery. Actually the original KJV did have the Apocrypha but it was dropped on, i think, the third revision. What i have never seen is any fmotls, who are always claiming that the current system makes them slaves, taking up this idea.

This btw, is a perfectly acceptable way to refer to religion, namely how it is used, or not used, by the folks we observe. What would be out of bounds would be discussing the canonicity of the Apocrypha.

[longdog]

I know that the forum rules here forbid discussing politics and religion

I wouldn't worry about it. Here in the UK forum we seem to interpret that rule as "No political or religious bun-fights" rather than no discussion of politics and religion at all. It seems to work OK.

[Tevildo]

I'm reminded of a rather fractious week I spent in California about 20 years ago with a similar inverted conspiracy theorist - he believed that NASA (yes, the well-known anagram of Satan, implementors of the moon landing hoax, the globe Earth hoax, and other corrupting and enslaving lies of the Vril) were the good guys, and whose free-energy plans had been supressed by Big Oil and TPTB.

It wasn't actually the most irrational of theories, but perhaps this isn't the time to go into detail.

[sue858]

I think the following would be covered by the ‘Belanger exemption’, since in essence I’m just asking, “If laws made in the usual democratic manner aren’t valid, what criteria would be required to make a valid law?” Which is a legitimate question to ask when talking about Freemanism.

I asked Ash what gave (his version of) the Common Law the authority which Statute Law lacked. After a lot of blather aimed at skirting around actually answering the question, he settled on Common Law being the closest thing we currently have to ‘God’s Law’. It was really God’s Law which Ash believed to be the One True Law™; all that guff about Admiralty and Common and Statute Law was just a distraction from the real point at hand.

"OK," I asked, "If you believe that God’s Law is enforceable, why do you believe that Statute Law is completely unenforceable even though parts of it reflect God’s Law?"

After a lot of back-and-forth - neither of us seemed to understand what the other was getting at - we finally hit on an example which made my point in a way Ash understood, and allowed Ash to respond in a coherent (as far as Freemanism goes) way. The example was drink-driving.

Ash shared his attitude towards motoring offences with the other Freeman types, right down to their favourite distinction without a difference “Travelling vs Driving”. As such, Ash believed that drink-driving isn’t really illegal. “But drinking alcohol is against God’s Law,” I pointed out. “If you’re drink-driving, then you must have been drinking, and therefore you’re already guilty of violating God’s Law. From a certain perspective, drink-driving is just a subset of the crime of drinking alcohol. So why do you object to people being prosecuted for it?”

Ash’s answer: he objected to God’s Law being applied selectively. He would fully support total prohibition of alcohol; he objected to the government allowing people to consume alcohol when it suited the government’s purposes (i.e. when a lot of tax was being paid on it) then banning its use under certain circumstances according to their whims. In Ash’s view, God’s Law is an all-or-nothing deal; it should be implemented in its entirety. Unless and until that happened, only the 3 Freemanist Laws (Do no harm, Commit no fraud, Breach no peace) could validly be applied. I never got a straight answer as to why those 3 Laws were valid even in the absence of the implementation of the entirety of God’s Law; Ash’s answer, as far as I remember, was something like “Common Law blah blah blah Magna Carta.”

In short, Ash supported a Theocracy. There could be no middle ground; if we weren’t to live in a theocracy, then we must live in Freetopia. Now, there are some non-religious Freeman out there who refer to ‘Natural Law’ rather than ‘God’s law’. Plus it seems like a lot - perhaps even most - of the Freemen who talk about ‘God-given rights’ and such are referring to a vague Deistic God. I don’t expect any of them to support the implementation of a theocracy. But what about the Belanger types? When they advocate the replacement of our current legal system with (their version of) God’s Law, do they really mean that? How do they reconcile wanting the law to stay out of their lives as much as possible with wanting to implement God’s Law - which in many respects is more restrictive than current secular law?

Thank you Burnaby for the heads-up that I’m veering down a treacherous path. I wanted to say this one more thing (about Ash - and other religion-based Freemen - ultimately supporting an even more restrictive theocracy), and now I’m done with religion. There was a lot more I could have said, but thinking about it most of the rest of what I thought of as being an ‘intersection’ between Ash’s religion and his Freemanism was more of an overlap with his General Conspiracism (for example, believing that one of TPTB’s main aims is to trick us into committing idolatry; this ‘explained’ their motivation behind things like planting symbols in pop music and encouraging us to ‘worship’ fiat currency). Since, despite my best intentions, I’m already on dangerous ground, I’ll refrain from posting about all of that. I won’t post any more about religion.

My next post will be either ‘Ash fiddles his meter’ (as promised but postponed before) or ‘Why Ash insured his car’. Perhaps I’ll do both together, since in a way they’re linked, but that would make for a very long post so I’ll probably break them up.

[Burnaby49]

But what about the Belanger types? When they advocate the replacement of our current legal system with (their version of) God’s Law, do they really mean that? How do they reconcile wanting the law to stay out of their lives as much as possible with wanting to implement God’s Law - which in many respects is more restrictive than current secular law?

Speculating on how Belanger's followers reconcile their religious beliefs to their secular lifestyles and goals is essentially irrelevant to Quatloos because it's irrelevant to them. It's my opinion that, by and large, Belanger's followers are about as religious as my neighbour's dog. The ones that come to our attention are invariably new acolytes who have joined for a specific secular purpose and ascribe to those beliefs that Belanger assures them will realize that purpose. The Volks wanted to stop the bank from foreclosing on their mortgage. Belanger told them that as CERI ministers they could realize this. Thomas Peterson didn't want to pay his taxes and the Canada Revenue Agency was after him so he became a CERI minister because Belanger told him ministers didn't have to pay tax. As far as Peterson was concerned Christianity was just another potential tax loophole.

This is why Belanger goes on and on in his videos how it doesn't matter how recently his converts joined. Brand-new converts who just joined CERI are true ministers of Christ and can require the government to give them their full rights to practice Christianity as Belanger interprets it. His whole church is based on transactional events. He has no actual church as we'd generally understand the term. No congregations, just ministers. No set required study or religious education, just Belanger's verbal bestowal of ministerial status. CERI has no church structures or organization, all it has is Belanger. His 'ministers' last for just as long as it takes them to realize Belanger is peddling fool's gold then they are gone. In the Volk's case so was their house.

Thomas Peterson is a good example.

http://www.quatloos.com/Q-Forum/viewtop ... =48&t=9829

Peterson had a history of trying to avoid tax before he joined CERI. He lost a house in 1995 for refusing to pay property tax. That showed true stupidity because you can't avoid property tax since your property is located in the municipality trying to collect but it shows his anti-tax extremism. He was having income tax problems, he'd been assessed and collections was after him. He tried fake negotiable instruments to pay off his taxes and also unilateral contracts. When these didn't work he suddenly found Jesus and became a CERI minister. He started yammering Belanger's belief that since the Income Tax Act of Canada is not in the King James Bible he didn't have to pay taxes. For a while Belanger was in hog heaven, he came down to Vancouver Island and took up residence in Peterson's waterfront property. He made videos in front of a crackling fire and walking along the waterfront. As Mowe wrote;

This is lovely. Without question, Peterson is advancing a pure-stream CERI strategy based attempt to avoid state authority. He even seems to be using video notices as was proposed by "minister" Belanger / "Cudgel" awhile ago. In this video notice he complains that he thinks the Youtube video counter is broken (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xfPnXlecrE).

I am looking forward to watching this matter progress. If Peterson really does owe the CRA over $1 million then this is not going away. Belanger's crew usually appear to be all but penniless, so I think they have avoided a lot of state and judicial scrutiny by simply being too trivial to follow up.

Belanger actually felt threatened enough by Quatloos to respond to us in his videos and postings on Quatloos;

I feel that after reading your self centered wordsmithing hatchett job on men and women wishing to follow Christ you may wish to hear what another good minister says in response to your fetid wind of damage control... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNMoUnUi ... e=youtu.be

But when it was obvious Belanger's scam was worthless Peterson moved on. He's still at it. He recently lost a case in the Supreme Court of British Columbia on some sovereign issue or another, I haven't looked into it yet.

So your question;

How do they reconcile wanting the law to stay out of their lives as much as possible with wanting to implement God’s Law - which in many respects is more restrictive than current secular law?

Is totally meaningless in the context of CERI. They see nothing to reconcile because their religious beliefs are no more than words provided by Belanger that they parrot in order to try and realize a non-religious goal.

[AndyK]

Many fmotl types or self-designated sovereigns rely on / fall back on religion as an unassailable foundation of their beliefs.

To support / justify this, they refuse to admit that anything other than their particular version of a god is valid. To carry that further, they insist that only a specific version of a specific 'holy book' is acceptable.

This leads to (among other events) interesting conflicts in the courts. In the course of a single week, a court could be faced with someone solidly thumping a King James version of the Christian Bible, someone else ranting in pseudo-Hebrew about his adherence to the Five Books of the Old Testament, and so on across all legitimate and imaginary religions.

The one thing the fmotl / sovereigns unconditionally refuse to accept is that there could be any possibility of their viewpoint / actions / paperwork being less than valid. After all, they found it on the infallable Internet.

It is vital to realize that we are talking about people who believe, without question, that whatever problems they face ARE NOT THEIR FAULT! Someone, be it the Jews, Illuminati, Masons, or just TPTB, is (1) specifically out to get them and (2) blocking their every effort at success. But, God (whichever particular flavor) is on their side.

Thus, they fall back on God's law as the only thing valid.

When that fails, they invoke the UCC.

[sue858]

So the Freemen who blather on about 'God's Law' and use cherry-picked verses from their chosen holy book to support their positions are really just hiding behind religion? That makes sense. I never thought Ash was 'putting on' his religiosity just to get out of paying his taxes/debts. But, at least at the beginning, he didn't seem to follow his religion's tenets much unless he felt like it. I suppose Ash probably told himself that he'd like to live in a theocracy as a way of dealing with his cognitive dissonance. "If only I lived in a theocracy," he'd muse, "I'd instantly transform into an upstanding tax-paying citizen." Because realistically the UK is never going to become an Islamic Caliphate, Ash could make such promises knowing deep-down he'd never have to keep them.

Ash Fiddles his Meter

Ash's gas was pre-payment but his electric was standard billing. I don't know why this was; maybe Ash tried his Freeman shenanigans with his gas first. I don't think that was the reason though; as far as I remember, his gas and his electric came from the same supplier, though I couldn't say for sure that this was the case. If Ash's credit rating and standing with his supplier was good enough to get a standard electric meter, why did his supplier insist on pre-payment for gas? Maybe Ash had inherited this arrangement from the house's previous occupier, though that begs the same question as to how/why the previous occupier ended up with this system. Anyway, since the gas was pre-payment, there wasn't much scope for Ash to try out his Freeman nonsense with that, so we concentrated on the electric.

As far as I remember, Ash had already implemented his meter-fiddling system when I moved in. He didn't show me straight away; he waited till he trusted me enough that he didn't think I would snitch on him. It was a fairly simple system. I don't want to go into too much detail in case providing such instructions would break the law and/or this forum's house rules, so I'll just say that Ash's system involved a straightened-out paperclip, a small strategically-drilled hole and an out-of-date meter.

When I first moved in, Ash gave me strict instructions to never answer the door. As an experience Freeman who had done his research, Ash knew the magic words to send bailiffs, debt collectors, police officers etc running off with their tails between their legs. As a novice to Freemanry, I lacked such skills. If I were to open the door and discover that it was a policeman/bailiff/MI5 Agent knocking, I might inadvertently invite him in by unconsciously scratching my nose, and then there'd be trouble. After a month or two spent watching Ash-approved YouTube videos, Ash decided that I'd learned enough to answer the door to certain people. First, he installed a CCTV system which would allow me to see who was at the door without having to potentially reveal my presence by looking though the peephole. Then Ash taught me how to spot the difference between 'dangerous' callers (bailiffs, debt collectors, council workers and the like) and 'benign' (provided you had sufficient Freeman training) callers (meter readers, salesmen, JWs etc).

I was still under strict instructions to pretend I wasn't there should a bailiff or copper come knocking while Ash was out. I was, however, allowed to open the door to meter readers. But first I'd have to remove Ash's meter-fiddling device. It was quite easy to remove; just pull the paperclip out and pocket it. It took like 2 seconds. Should I suffer from a brain fart and let the meter reader in before doing this, it could still be done discreetly provided I got to the meter first - this could be achieved by some "Here, I'll show you where it is, follow me ..." acting. Once the meter reader was gone, I could put the paperclip back in or, if I felt unable to, I could just leave it for Ash when he got back; the main thing was hiding Ash's meter-fiddling from the meter-reader - it wasn't the end of the world if Ash had to actually pay for a few units of the leccy we used.

Ash made the decision to allow me to answer the door to meter-readers because he thought it best to try to avoid playing the "I'm not here!" 'Bailiff Game' with them since then they'd just get suspicious and be more likely to check his meter properly when they were eventually let in. On the topic of "Not making the leccy company suspicious," Ash also taught me that one could basically give the LC whatever reading they liked. Providing you didn’t do something stupid like give a lower reading than before, the LC would take you at your word. Since they’d only send someone to read the meter a few times a year at most, the chances of your meter being read soon after you gave your own reading were pretty slim. However, even in the event that should happen, so long as the difference between your reading and the meter reader’s was reasonable, you’d be OK. Ash sometimes fudged his readings to keep his usage reasonably constant and smooth out the discrepancies caused by leaving the paperclip in for too long or not long enough.

I’m aware the meter-fiddling falls outside general Freemanry and into outright fraud. I tell this story because a) It ties in with my upcoming ‘Ash takes up gardening’ post and b) It shows that, deep down, Ash didn’t think A4V would work. I never thought to ask at the time, but why would Ash feel the need to fiddle his meter when he would just be A4Ving his leccy bills anyway? Though I did get some answers to other questions I asked Ash which, with a little modification, would serve as Ash’s likely explanation. I’ll get to those answers in future posts.

[Tevildo]

This leads to (among other events) interesting conflicts in the courts. In the course of a single week, a court could be faced with someone solidly thumping a King James version of the Christian Bible, someone else ranting in pseudo-Hebrew about his adherence to the Five Books of the Old Testament, and so on across all legitimate and imaginary religions.

There's quite a well-known video of an American SovCit (Tertelgte?), doubtless also inspired by their interpretation of "understand", addressing a courtroom while physically standing on a Bible. Such an action might be considered a little disrespectful to a holy text...

[ArthurWankspittle]

This leads to (among other events) interesting conflicts in the courts. In the course of a single week, a court could be faced with someone solidly thumping a King James version of the Christian Bible, someone else ranting in pseudo-Hebrew about his adherence to the Five Books of the Old Testament, and so on across all legitimate and imaginary religions.

There's quite a well-known video of an American SovCit (Tertelgte?), doubtless also inspired by their interpretation of "understand", addressing a courtroom while physically standing on a Bible. Such an action might be considered a little disrespectful to a holy text...

I think Ernie Totaltwat stood on law books not the bible.

[grixit]

The "outdated meter" is the key to that trick. Those were mechanical, they put a small motor in the circuit that would spin at a rate proportional to the amount of current being drawn. The motor turned the dials that showed how much power was consumed. Sticking the end of a paper clip in the right place would drag on the system, slowing the count.

[AnOwlCalledSage]

The "outdated meter" is the key to that trick. Those were mechanical, they put a small motor in the circuit that would spin at a rate proportional to the amount of current being drawn. The motor turned the dials that showed how much power was consumed. Sticking the end of a paper clip in the right place would drag on the system, slowing the count.

There was another trick doing the rounds. Solder wire to two needles and stick one through the live cable going into the meter and the other into the one going out. This would shunt a certain amount of current around the meter.

[grixit]

I wonder how often

1) people would forget to wear gloves and electrocute themselves

2) people would hit the wrong wire and short out their wiring

3) people would set the place on fire

[notorial dissent]

All three of those definitely come to mind every time I hear about something like this, particularly when we are talking about people who seem to think electricity is magic.

[sue858]

Why Ash Insured his Car

It was mentioned earlier that Ash deviated from typical Freemanism by getting a driving licence and insuring, taxing and MOTing his car. Ash (along with most Freemen, I believe) subscribed to the “Driving vs Travelling” theory. ‘Driving’ meant “Using the roads for business purposes”. So if, for example, you worked as a taxi driver or pizza deliverer, you would need to follow all the usual rules of the road. If, on the other hand, all you ever used your vehicle for was popping over to visit your mates and doing a bit of grocery shopping, then the ‘business rules’ did not apply to you because you were merely ‘travelling’.

There seemed to be some debate amongst Freemen when it came to commuting. Did that count as ‘business’ use (since you were, after all, travelling to a place of business for the specific purpose of conducting business of one form or another) or merely ‘travelling’? Ash used his car for commuting. He didn’t know whether commuting counted as business or personal use of the roads, and he didn’t fancy volunteering to be the ‘guinea pig’ to test the ‘commuting = travelling’ theory; to be on the safe side, Ash obeyed all the rules of the road whenever he was travelling for business purposes. Since there’s no such thing as ‘Except for social, domestic and pleasure’ insurance, this meant that Ash ended up being taxed, insured etc all the time. When he was giving me a lift back home, well, that was a trip undertaken solely for pleasure, so Ash was within his rights to disobey the rules of the road by speeding.

Ash worked as a freelance IT consultant. I can’t remember whether he did general tech support or whether he specialised in website design or code or whatever; the main thing is that he was self-employed and could theoretically become an employer. This will become important later on when I get to the ‘Ash forges payslips’ part of my story. He wasn’t the stereotypical unemployed layabout on benefits Freeman; he worked for his money, but didn’t want to pay taxes on his earnings. Despite this, he actively encouraged me to claim all the benefits I was entitled to plus a few that I wasn’t. Again, I’ll get to that in ‘Ash forges payslips’.

Once, I asked Ash, “Would you want to drive/travel/whatever you want to call it on roads where anybody could just jump in a car and start driving here there and everywhere?” Ash conceded that yes, letting any idiot drive was probably a bad idea and that having a licencing system in place probably did make the roads much safer for everyone. But he still objected to the current system, because of some Freemanish aversion to anything the government does that seems like a restriction of some sort. He never came up with a better system. I think the closest I got out of him was “Basically the same system as we currently have, only administered by a private company instead of the government. Plus somehow participation in this system will simultaneously be both voluntary and compulsory.” Ash also hated having to ‘submit’ anything. Whenever one ‘submits’ an application, registration, whatever, they are ‘submitting’ to the government “In the way a slave would.”

“Look at the V5!” Ash would say. “You’re not the ‘owner’, you’re the ‘registered keeper’. That’s because when you ‘submit’ your ‘registration form’, you ‘submit’ to the government and thus make them the owner. That’s why They can give you tickets, tow your car, crush it, do whatever they like to it. Because you’re not really the owner, you’re just looking after your car for the government. Like if you agreed to pop round to feed and walk your neighbour’s dog while she was on holiday, you wouldn’t be that dog’s owner, just its ‘registered keeper’.” There was also some Admiralty Law stuff fit in there too. Something about how back in ye olden dayes, when a ship docked that ship and her contents would be ‘registered’ to the dock-keeper for safekeeping while the captain went off to do whatever he needed to do on land. So by registering your car, you were also somehow agreeing to be subject to Admiralty Law, at least whenever you were using your car. Add on to that the fact that many registration/application forms as for the ‘person’s’ details, and you can see why the prospect of filling in any such forms made Ash apoplectic.

Next time, I'll do either '(Ash forges) Payslips' or '(Ash takes up) Gardening'.

[sue858]

Payslips

I felt guilty about not contributing towards the household bills, but the money I made from working at the Chicken & Chips shop was really only enough to cover my ‘pocket money’. Even if I handed over literally every penny I earnt to Ash, it would’ve just been a drop in the ocean. So, when my college course came to an end a few months after I moved in, Ash and I talked about the possibility of me claiming benefits.If I were to declare myself to be Ash’s partner I would qualify for nothing because Ash’s income from running his IT consultancy was well above the benefits threshold. So Ash suggested that we said he was a ‘Live-in Landlord’ and I was his lodger. After all, there must be lots of landlords who sometimes ‘mix business with pleasure’; doesn’t mean that they suddenly cease to be landlords.

Initially, Ash suggested that I claim Jobseeker’s Allowance and then claim Housing Benefit once the JSA had been sorted. I was under the impression that to qualify for Housing Benefit one must already be on JSA or Income Support or ESA or some similar out-of-work/barely-in-work benefits. Ash did nothing to correct this misapprehension of mine - I guess he was operating under the same error - and we thought therefore that Housing Benefit would be much easier to get after I was already on JSA rather than if I applied for both at once.

But I said to Ash that I didn’t want to go on JSA if it could be avoided. I don’t want to get too political here, but I can’t understand why people with certain political leanings think that everyone on Jobseeker’s is a lazy layabout who is quite happy to sit around watching daytime telly all day at the taxpayers’ expense. Even if that stereotype were true, the lazy still wouldn’t want to be on Jobseeker’s. You get £70 a week, but you’re expected to attend various appointments with your ‘advisor’ - at least 2 a week at the Jobcentre, plus various ‘CV Workshops’, ‘Work Clubs’, ‘Practice Interviews’, ‘Recruitment Drives’ and so on. So by the time you’ve paid for travel expenses to these compulsory appointments, you’re down to £50 a week. Even if you skip the actual job searching you’re supposed to do and just fill out your sheet with unfalsifiable made-up stuff like “I called Some Big Company and asked Bob if there were any jobs going; he said no.” You still have to attend those various appointments which take up several hours a week; by this time, if you had a minimum wage job with the same ‘hours’, you’d be better off. So even if you were a lazy layabout who wanted to get away with doing as little work as possible, going on JSA still wouldn’t make sense, because you’d make more money for less work with an actual job, even if you were only making minimum wage.

Back to me and Ash. I didn’t want to go on JSA if it could be avoided. I would rather claim that I was working just enough hours that I didn’t qualify for JSA, but still earning little enough that I would get housing benefit plus maybe income support or tax credits or something. In the absence of a JSA claim, I would need payslips to apply for Housing Benefit. There was no way in heck my Chicken & Chip shop boss would give me payslips; making such a request would most likely see me instantly fired. Ash had a brainwave: he would claim that I worked for his IT company. He could put me down as anything I liked: ‘assistant’, ‘secretary’, ‘cleaner’, whatever. Then he’d print out payslips which ‘proved’ I was working however many hours suited our purposes at minimum wage. How would the government be able to prove that I hadn’t actually done the work I was claiming I had? It shocked me how easy it was for Ash to print out the payslips. I could even print some out myself; all you need is some half-decent word editing software and a colour printer.

In the end, I moved out a couple of months after my college course finished; since I didn’t qualify for any benefits for 3 months after the course finished, it never got to the point where I starting fraudulently getting benefits. Some time later, I applied for JSA due to a genuine need. At one point, I asked my advisor what I should do if I was offered a job but my potential employer insisted on the job being cash in hand and paying below minimum wage. I was told that such an offer was illegal and should be reported (as if I’d have any proof it was made - these offers were always verbal, and this was back in the days before everyone walked around everywhere with a recording device in their pockets). But one advisor (you didn’t get the same advisor every time) told me that I could get around this by putting myself down as a self-employed freelancer. Eventually I got a semi-legitimate job delivering pizzas; half my hours would be on the books, fully paid, taxed etc. The other half would be cash-in-hand, £2 or £3 an hour. Such arrangements are commonplace among people working in unskilled or semi-skilled occupations. These days there’s talk of the ‘Gig Economy’ as if it’s a new thing, but circumventing employment law by erroneously categorising employees as self-employed or fudging their hours down has been going on for at least a decade. The construction industry in particular is notorious for calling everyone a ‘self-employed sub-contractor’.

I also had to pay for the insurance, fuel, maintenance etc of my car (of course, to get the job I had to provide my own delivery vehicle) out of my own pocket. Moral of the story: tip your takeaway delivery driver, because s/he is almost certainly earning significantly less than minimum wage and relying on tips to cover vehicle-related costs.

I promised to provide some insight into what factors might drive someone to Freemanism, so here’s one. From my point of view at the time, it seemed like the government was trying to depict all Jobseekers as lazy layabouts, while also putting unnecessary obstacles in the way of me getting a job. I couldn’t just say to the government, “I’ve got a job, I’m making £4 an hour.” Because that would be illegal and I’d be in trouble. But then there were all sorts of loopholes with calling yourself self-employed or conspiring with your employer to fudge your payslips which would allow you to effectively circumvent these laws. I was told by my JSA advisor to do that at one point. So when it suited the government because it meant you’d stop claiming benefits, they were quite happy to relax the rules they’d previously imposed on you. And if employment law is that flexible, what about the rest of the law?

Next time: either 'Gardening' or 'Ash's Filing System'.

[ArthurWankspittle]

I could even print some out myself; all you need is some half-decent word editing software and a colour printer.

You were doing it wrong, everyone else bought the pre-printed stationery. Also used for inflated income mortgage applications.

[sue858]

Maybe that's how Ash did it. He's the one who made all the payslips; I just looked at them and thought, "I could've made that in MS Word," but maybe Ash used pre-printed stationery.

Gardening

Ash and I decided that one of the ways I could contribute towards the household bills would be by doing odd jobs around the house. One of those jobs turned out to be looking after Ash’s not-so-little gardening project. But it wasn’t as simple as ‘put some plants under some lights, give them a bit of water and wait.’ A lot of other things had to be taken into consideration. Again, I don’t want to go into too much detail lest I break laws/house rules; in any case, there are plenty of other sites out there with instructions on how to set up such a project. But basically, one had to minimise the heat and smell which escaped the grow room. I don’t know if this actually happens or if Ash was just being paranoid, but he said that police helicopters sometimes flew around with an infrared camera looking for unexplained heat sources. An unusually hot shed would’ve been a dead giveaway.

Then there was the extraction fan. Ash went for some top-of-the-line thing with some carbon filters or something which got rid of almost all the smell before it left the shed. But he was still careful to position the fan so it blew air out into Ash’s back garden - nowhere near any passing pedestrians. Some growers Ash knew (in a ‘friend of a friend’ way) had apparently been caught because their fan blew straight out onto the pavement and stank up the whole street.

As the resident electrician, I was tasked with wiring up the extraction fan and special grow lamps. There was also some kind of water pump system which automatically watered the plants, but still needed refilling every day with water and a special concoction of chemicals (mostly fertilisers, but I can’t remember the exact details). All the fittings were already in place and Ash (or rather whoever he or the previous occupier had hired) had already done the hard bit of bringing power to the garage (taking power outside involves mucking about with SWA cable, which is a right pain in the arse). So all I had to do was bring a bit of wire through from the main garage to the grow room and make the final connections to the growing equipment. Looking back, I probably did a bit of a bodge job because really the garage connection was only set up to supply lighting and a couple of sockets, not a massive extraction fan and a load of power-draining heat lamps. But I just thought, “If I’ve overloaded it, the MCB should trip long before things start catching fire.” Luckily, nothing bad ever happened as a result.

The grow room was quite well-concealed. It was in his garage, but behind a false wall with a concealed entrance at the back. Nobody except Ash ever had any reason to go into his garage, but even if they had, they would never have realised that the wall at the back was false if Ash hadn’t told them. Ash often lectured me on the dangers of boasting about our gardening project. “It’s on a need-to-know basis,” he’d say, “And right now, we’re the only ones who need to know.” Other growers, Ash warned, would feel the urge to tell everyone they met who seemed vaguely 420-friendly about their ventures; such blabbing would only lead to trouble. ‘Loose lips sink ships’ and all that.

This ongoing gardening project became Ash’s go-to excuse for why he didn’t fight the power. He didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to himself while he had a grow on - that’s why he generally obeyed traffic rules, paid most of his taxes, didn’t A4V every little bill he received, and so on. “But if growing weed is only against statute law, and you’re only bound by common law, why do you care if the cops come a-knocking?” I asked. His answer:

He wasn’t just worried about the police. Mainly, Ash was worried that, should a rival growing gang catch word of his project, he'd be burgled. He wouldn't be able to appeal to the police to apprehend and prosecute these common-law burglars because the police force were no longer operating under common law. These days, the police are effectively private security guards hired by Elizabeth: Windsor operating as the Corporate Company Her Majesty the Queen (or some variation of this but with Parliament, the MoJ, whoever that day’s boogeyman was). Asking the police to catch your burglars would be like asking Tesco’s Security Guard to catch the scrote who nicked your bike from outside the train station.
Ash also feared that a police officer would confiscate his plants and sell them on to a rival gang. Or that the officer would tip off that rival gang in exchange for a bribe. Again, since the police officer would just be acting as a private security guard, albeit a corrupt one, Ash would have little recourse. Yes, Ash could theoretically sue the police for violating his common law right to blah blah blah in the event that his precious plants were stolen or confiscated. But such a case would take years to work its way through the courts, and Ash needed money now, not in 5 years’ time.

Basically, Ash seemed to realise that all his “But growing weed only contravenes statute law, which I am not bound by!” whining would get him nowhere, so best to lay low for now. There’d be plenty of time to play the martyr when he’d sold all of his produce and was ‘making his stand’ in some way which wouldn’t result in him getting in any real trouble (i.e. motoring offences). Is that a common theme with Freemen? Are they mostly internet hard-men, who brag online about how they blow doobie smoke right into officers' faces but in reality confine their law-breaking to minor stuff like speeding?

PS: Ash believed that the police used to stand for decency and upholding the real Common Law. Ash made a big thing about how, back in the good ol’ days, it used to be called the Police Service, not the Police Force. And it used to be comprised of Police Men and Police Women, not Police Officers.

The grow room project was also why Ash felt the need to fiddle his meter and research SSFEMs. He was worried that if he didn't, the leccy company would detect his unusually high usage and tip off those nefarious power-abusing cops.

[Burnaby49]

The grow room project was also why Ash felt the need to fiddle his meter and research SSFEMs. He was worried that if he didn't, the leccy company would detect his unusually high usage and tip off those nefarious power-abusing cops.

Vancouver has an extremely high number of home grow-ops, apart from vandalism and non-payment they are the biggest problem landlords have. Electricity is the most vulnerable area for detection. The authorities and the B.C. Hydro have (or had, I haven't kept up) an agreement where very high electrical volume residential units (homes, condos, rental apartments) are reported to the police. Once a guy with an extensive acreage outside city limits was raided because of this. Turned out that he ran a big hot-tub 24/7.

[sue858]

So Ash wasn't being paranoid, his concern was well-founded. I always thought the Leccy Company, when presented with a customer with unusually high usage, so long as LC was getting paid on time they'd just think "Thank you very much for all that lovely profit!" I suggested installing solar panels to offset the extra usage, but that would a) Cost a lot more in effort/money and b) Be more likely to attract attention than just fiddling the meter. The grow op wasn't huge. It wasn't a tiny single-plant personal-use setup, but it wasn't a massive industrial grow either. It was maybe a dozen or so plants. As an educated guess, I'd say altogether it was pulling around 5kW. That's equivalent to a couple of fan heaters, so not huge amounts of power. Though doing the maths, that adds up to around 44K units a year, which is about 10 times the typical usage of a domestic customer, so yeah, that probably would be noticed. Plus it would cost a bomb - at say 15p a unit, that's £6 or £7 grand a year!

A couple of solar panels ought to have made up the difference. I wonder whether BC Hydro would report "This guy got planning permission to install solar panels, but his usage hasn't dropped" in the same way they'd report "This other guy had suddenly starting using 10 times the usual amount of electricity." I guess what a grower really needs to do if they can't/won't fiddle their meter and don't want their leccy usage tipping anyone off is to set up their grow in commercial or industrial premises where the building's ostensible use would provide a good cover story for their high usage - some business which already uses so much energy that an extra few dozen units wouldn't even register as a rounding error.