The Confabulist

confabulate (kənˈfæbjʊˌleɪt)
— vb
1. to talk together; converse; chat.
2. psychiatry to replace the gaps left by a disorder of the memory with imaginary remembered experiences consistently believed to be true.

As The Confabulist opens, the aging Martin Strauss meets with a doctor who explains that Strauss is in the process of losing his mind: while he will continue to perform all of his normal functions, his memories will disappear and be replaced with imaginary ones. This is a doubly interesting condition to affect him since memories and guilt have plagued Strauss his entire adult life, because as he reveals right away, he's the man who killed Harry Houdini. Twice. As he meets with Houdini's daughter Alice, Strauss is compelled to unburden himself of his past; to apologise for depriving her of a father. 

The book timeshifts between Strauss on the day of the diagnosis, the history of Houdini, Strauss' early days, the fateful meeting where Strauss suckerpunched the great magician, and Strauss' subsequent years. In addition to all of these shifts, each section usually had two time frames: one present action and a related memory that shifted back and forth. This might sound confusing, but it worked since (as the title suggests) the nature of memory is a major theme of The Confabulist:

In a magic trick, the things you don't see or think you see have a culmination, because at the end of the trick there's an effect. Misdirection tampers with reconstruction. But if life works the same way, and I believe it does, then a percentage of our lives is fiction. There's no way to know whether anything we've experienced is real or imagined.

Much of the Houdini information was interesting and the excitement was ratcheted up with spies and death threats, the debunking of powerful spiritualists, and a philosophical feud with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Strauss sections worked less well for me -- this unreliable narrator didn't do too much, and in the end, can never even explain what compelled him to throw that punch (and if Steven Galloway is going to use this real person's infamy in a work of fiction, I think he owes it to the man to at least construct a reasonable motivation). 

Much of the philosophising about memory (and there is a lot of it) was a bit vague to me and I think that this book will be interesting to readers to the extent this they find this bit near the end insightful:

We think that our minds are like a library -- the right book is there somewhere if you can find it. A whole story will then unfold with you as the narrator. But our memory changes, evolves, erases. Moments disappear and are replaced and combined. What's left of a person after they're gone is a spirit of who and what they were.

This is where our pain comes from. Because we know this is going to happen. We feel it and it underwrites our mourning.

For all of us the future is an unmade promise. For the living there is the present and the past. The past is always moving, always changing, as the people we lose are transformed in us. The past is no place to live. But it's the only place the dead lived.

On the other hand, there were many passages that I did find well-written and evocative, and these are just a couple of examples:

Darkness has a way of making everything louder. There's no way to identify the sounds coming at you. You can imagine what they are, but it's always a guess, based on what you remember about the world before the light went out of it.

And:

He'd always thought a theatre felt strange without people in it. With its seats empty, its lights up, and its air still, it reminded him of a dead body.

I remember enjoying The Cellist of Sarajevo, and most especially for the research -- just as I thought Galloway did a masterful job of evoking the terrible siege of that city, I think that he excels here in bringing Harry Houdini to life and making him even larger than the known legend by adding fictional elements to his life's work. Where both books fall short is in inducing empathy for the purely fictional characters, and since I didn't really care about Martin Strauss in The Confabulist (or the sniper in The Cellist for that matter), it became a less than perfect reading experience. *spoilerish* And I can't imagine most people wouldn't see the twist ending coming, but perhaps like an audience member looking for smoke and mirrors, I ruined that for myself by not submitting to the misdirection.

Do we ever really get over the things that our parents do to us? There was no grand cataclysm that marked my childhood, but the sum total of it left an echo that is still here. My mother was everything gentle. She made things better, she fixed what went wrong, and she remains what I conjure when I think of goodness.

My father was not a villain, though he did villainous things. He was cold, distant, and had no time for children. At his best, he was an actor playing a father. At his usual, he was a man who endured his children. At his worst, he resented us. 

Well, even in a book that I don't fully connect with I can find a passage with which I can. This is pretty much my childhood memories -- no cataclysm but an unhealthy echo of neglect and resentment (without the gentle fixer of a mother). And here's an interesting synchronicity: In the book, Strauss recalls that his fondest childhood memory was a picnic he had with his parents; he can still, years later, remember the tang of the mustard on his roast beef sandwich and the aura of goodwill of that afternoon. But when later he reminds his father and then his mother of that day, neither of them remembers having a picnic, and although Strauss goes looking for that perfect spot within walking distance of their home that he remembers, he eventually must concede that that spot, and that perfect day, was a confabulation. As for me, I was once snivelling about how we never did anything interesting as kids -- about how our stay-at-home mom always stayed at home when she made us go out to play -- and Ken said, "No way. Remember all the picnics Mom used to take us on? It was all the time."

Um, no? I remember never doing nothing, nowhere, nohow. So what's up with that? Confabulation for him or repression for me? Or did we only go for picnics when I was so little that I no longer remember, yet Ken was just old enough that he does?

My mother was just here with us last week and she remarked on how Mallory's (bright red) walls are sure covered with a lot of stuff (like, nearly every square centimeter). "And imagine," she said, "you weren't allowed to put up anything."

"Yeah," I chuckled. "That's probably why I'm so permissive about it."

Since my parents were always open to being transferred through my Dad's work, they always felt that their homes needed to be ready to sell at a moment's notice, and even though they only transferred 4 times while we were still living at home, they had a strict nothing on the walls policy to prevent nail holes (and while my bedrooms were eventually painted some non-offensive shades, all the main rooms of our houses remained stark white). Moving around was bad enough without feeling like we were in a long-term hotel stay (and with bad luck in the housing markets, none of their homes sold quickly anyway -- a situation repeatedly solved by the company buying out the houses from them). 

And as a final thought: I brought my girls on many picnics, and honestly, they didn't really like them. When they were little enough to be brought in the bike trailer, they were game, but once it involved walking or riding their own bikes or even driving to a nice park, the whole idea just fizzled out. And as much as I have tried to not repeat the wrongs from my own childhood, the last thing I want is for them to eventually complain to each other about, "Remember how Mom used to make us go on all those picnics?"

"I know, right? How lame was that?" 

Or maybe they won't remember them at all...

*****

2014 Finalists for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (with my personal ranking):

·   Miriam Toews (Toronto) for All My Puny Sorrows 

·   André Alexis (Toronto) for Pastoral 

·   K.D. Miller (Toronto) for All Saints 

·   Steven Galloway (New Westminster, B.C.) for The Confabulist 

·   Carrie Snyder (Waterloo) for Girl Runner 

Dark Places

The Days were a clan that mighta lived long

But Ben Day's head got screwed on wrong

That boy craved dark Satan's power

So he killed his family in one nasty hour

Little Michelle he strangled in the night

Then chopped up Debby: a bloody sight

Mother Patty he saved for last

Blew off her head with a shotgun blast

Baby Libby somehow survived

But to live through that ain't much a life

--SCHOOLYARD RHYME, CIRCA 1985

In Dark Places, Libby Day is the semi-famous lone survivor of the brutal massacre of her family ("lone" if you consider that the 7-year-old Libby's eyewitness testimony pegged her 15-year-old brother, Ben, as the killer). She is "semi-famous" in the sense that her story made international news and for 24 years she was able to live off the donations of well-wishers and the meager revenue from a memoir that was ghostwritten for her. Listless and full of fury still ( Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs), Libby cannot imagine how to support herself until an offer falls into her lap: The Kill Club -- a bunch of murder groupies who hold conventions to compare theories, role play, and buy commemorative merchandise -- offers to pay Libby to meet with people from her past, and hopefully, exonerate and free her brother, Ben, from prison.

The book is skillfully told from shifting points of view, first from Libby today, and then from her mother's and brother's perspectives on the day before the murders, doling out just enough information to advance the plot without giving away too much at once. The tension is taut as the oddball Ben, full of hormones and rage towards his hopeless mother and annoying sisters, desperately tries to fit in with some older kids who dabble in drugs and devil worship. Their mother, Patty, divorced and struggling not to lose the family farm, spends the day chasing down her missing son and being confronted with horrifying accusations about his behaviour. The noose tightens as the hour of the murders approaches, and when the crimes finally occur…well, a person would need to read the book to find out.

This was the first Gillian Flynn book that I read absolutely cold, having had nothing spoiled for me in advance, and it was a rewarding experience -- the story was interesting and the mystery was satisfying. As I was the same age as Diondra in 1985, the timeframe was familiar to me and well captured: I certainly remember Willie Nelson and Farm Aid trying to save family farms; the fear over Satan worship and backward-masking in heavy metal songs; rumours of cattle mutilation; girls with spiral curls and too-dark foundation; and false memories implanted in children by well-meaning social workers. Like in the other Flynn novels, the main character in Dark Places is a flawed and conflicted woman who, while not exactly likeable, was in this case at least sympathetic:

I totally believe our blood is bad. I feel it in me. I've beaten the shit out of people, Ben. Me. I've busted in doors and windows and…I've killed things. Half the time I look down, my hands are in fists.

In addition to the well-crafted structure of this book, there was much interesting writing:

The voice was lovely, all cigarettes and milk.

Coffee goes great with sudden death.

The Day women were the definition of mob mentality. And here they were on a farm with plenty of pitchforks.

If I had to rank my Gillian Flynn reading experience, I'd put this book first, followed by Gone Girl and then Sharp Objects, and am looking forward to whatever slithers out of her brain next.

Boy, Snow, Bird

mirror (ˈmɪrə)
noun
1. A surface capable of reflecting sufficient diffused light to form an image of an object placed in front of it.
2. Such a reflecting surface set in a frame. In a household setting the surface adopts an inscrutable personality (possibly impish and/or immoral), presenting convincing and yet conflicting images of same object, thereby leading onlookers astray.

For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they’re around mirrors.

**Spoilers ahead -- can't write about this book without some**

Like the title, Boy, Snow, Bird is split into three parts (and as an aside, when Dave saw this book in my hand, he declared it the worst title ever). The first part, told from the point of view of Boy Novak -- the pale and beautiful daughter of an abusive rat catcher in mid-20th century NYC -- left me breathless and fascinated: The setup was not quite fairytale but just unreal enough to put me off-balance, and I liked it. This felt like Neil Gaiman for chicks (and I don't say that dismissively -- this beginning resonated with me more than the books I've read by Gaiman; I truly appreciated the feminine touch.) In this first section, Boy runs away from her father, settles into a village of artisans, and marries a widower whose daughter, Snow Whitman, seems too good to be true. Boy notes of Snow, "She was poised and sympathetic, like a girl who'd just come from the future but didn't want to brag about it." When Boy gives birth to a daughter of her own, a family secret is revealed -- her daughter has dark skin and it comes out that her husband's family were only "passing as white", having moved north from a racist community where the lightness of their skin hadn't protected them from prejudice -- and Boy sends Snow away to live with other banished members of the family. 

The second section is from the point of view of Bird, Boy's own daughter, and although there are some interesting parts, it all loses steam once Bird discovers her half sister's address and begins a correspondence with Snow: the epistolary structure stops the forward momentum of the story, and although I am willing to be charmed by a couple of Anansi tales (and especially charmed by the notion of talking with irked house spiders), they felt out of place in the letters in a way that the folktale in the first section (as "remembered" and written by Boy and Mia) did not. 

The third section is from Boy's perspective again, and although Snow is allowed to return for a visit, it's from Boy's own family that a bombshell is dropped -- it turns out her father, the gruff and nasty Rat Catcher, is actually her mother? A lesbian who was raped and, after giving birth, decided to live as a man? This final reveal was so unnecessary and not in keeping with the rest of the story (except as a tacked-on extension of the not judging a book by its cover theme, I suppose?) that it just annoyed me. By the time this book was done I was left wondering what became of half the characters (what was the point of the three black kids in the bookshop if they could be simply chased away? Mia does some investigative work, but what was the point of Vivian?) and I realised that I never really got to know the main characters: Both Boy and Snow are accused of being evil, but neither acts evil. And Arturo (Snow's father) is simply forgettable alongside the interchangeable grandmothers (I seriously couldn't keep them straight throughout the entire book).

But…I didn't hate this book. I was so intrigued by the rat catcher and his cages of starved and blinded rats -- the menace of his character:

One of the first thing you remember is resting your head against the sink -- you were just washing your hair in it, and you had to take a break because when your hair's wet it's so heavy you can't lift your head without your neck wobbling. So you're resting, and that clean hand descends out of nowhere and holds you facedown in the water until you faint. You come around lying on the bathroom floor. There's a burning feeling in your lungs that flares up higher the harder you cough, and the rat catcher's long gone. He's at work.

There was something Rapunzelish about that scene (the weight of the hair, the entrapment), vaguely folkloric, and those were the bits I liked the best: a little girl complaining about an ogre in her room; mirrors that don't show a reflection; an odd doppelganger matching Boy's stride down a steep hill; and in describing first seeing the house Snow lived in:

One of the bigger houses had brambles growing up the front of it in snakelike vines. The smell of baking chocolate-chip cookies aside, it looked like a house you could start fanciful rumors about: "Well, a princess has been asleep there for hundreds of years...”

And the notion of Helen Oyeyemi (a woman who was born in Nigeria and raised in England) taking on the Snow White tale and layering on race identity had so much potential -- when the evil stepmother traditionally asks the mirror "Who is the fairest of them all?", I had never considered the meaning of "fairest" beyond "beautiful": of course a little girl with dark skin like Oyeyemi would have been interpreting it as "lightest". Somehow, it just didn't work for me as a race allegory, though. (A further disappointment after the limp Emancipation Day -- yet it's always so interesting to me when books that I pick up without knowing what they're about seem to come in related themes.)

In the end, I'm not disappointed to have read this book and am left intrigued enough to check out some of Oyeyemi's earlier work. 

Emancipation Day

I remember my mother-in-law once telling me about how the singer/actress Dinah Shore gave birth to a black baby, and although it nearly broke up her marriage, her white husband ended up accepting the boy was his (although they did secretly give the baby up for adoption) after it was discovered that Shore had a black ancestor somewhere along the line. My mother-in-law wasn't telling me this story because she was horrified by the image of a white woman having a black baby -- she was simply sharing a weird-but-true story about miscegenation and the mischief that genes can play in future generations. And, of course, the story isn't even true -- it's just a rumour, but a tantalising enough rumour that it has persisted, an urban legend that chillingly makes young mothers wonder: "What would I do if my husband didn't believe his baby was really his?" Um, go on Maury for a dna test? 

In the 1920's Windsor of Emancipation Day, the modern tools of paternity testing weren't yet available, and so when a black mother gives birth to a very white son, he is rejected by a father who insists he isn't his. As the boy, Jackson, grows up, he learns the advantages of passing for white, and after witnessing (and feeling conflicted by) the 1943 Detroit Race Riot, he joins the Navy, happy to be shipped far away where no one could guess his true identity. After meeting and marrying a rich white girl while stationed in Newfoundland, Jackson is eventually forced to confront and reveal where it is he came from.

Wayne Grady won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award for Emancipation Day, which is an interesting accomplishment for an award-winning author of 14 works of nonfiction and an award-winning translator of a further 15 books. Originally started as another work of nonfiction, but worked over and over again for 18 years in novel form, the writing of Emancipation Day was prompted when Grady discovered that his own great-grandfather was an African American emigrant from the United States. All this talent and all this time spent on its writing should have made for an excellent book, but I suppose that, like Michael Jordan attempting a baseball career, awesome skills of one type don't always translate to related skills; as a novel, this isn't a great book.

I was intrigued to learn that the lily white Wayne Grady had a black ancestor, but I don't know that that completely excuses the persistent racism of this book (in a Only a Ginger Gets to Call Another Ginger, Ginger kind of way). Honestly, there are no likeable black people here: Jackson's father and brother are lazy drunks who would steal shampoo from a house they're renovating; his mother is a flighty ditz who is constantly offering tea but forgetting to make it; the Emancipation Day celebration of the title (a day when black people take over a local Windsor park to celebrate the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Britain and its colonies) is an annual bacchanalia, with black folks getting drunk and having sex in public, with lewd dancing and knife fights and people passed out in the bushes; Alvina and Dee-Dee aren't developed at all, but the evil "bird woman" with her Windsor special "Dark Secrets" gives an unpleasant glimpse into female society. It's no wonder that Jackson doesn't want to be associated with these people.

Jackson himself is a totally unlikeable character, unable to show affection to his new wife, Vivian, or loyalty to his own family. Vivian is a long suffering fool who is willing to accept a loveless marriage and the poverty that results from her husband's big dreams and low ambition -- and willing to be duped by his mother's face powder and father's absences. Could it have really taken years for Vivian to discover that she married into a black family, and especially when spending time in what is portrayed as a racially explosive city like Windsor?

And there are just too many coincidences -- Jackson being treated by Peter's father on a Navy ship; Jackson happening upon his father and brother during the riot (and of course they were looting a liquor store at the time); Jackson finding Della in the first place he looked. And there were strange scenes I just didn't buy into: like Peter somehow getting home to Windsor without a car during the riot (never mind him abandoning the search for his mother); and Della sleeping with Jackson; and Vivian having a vision of them sleeping together; and Della's story about Vassar and Jonsey; and Vivian having the epiphany about Jackson's race moments before she sees his father for the first time.

I did like the descriptions of jazz and bebop, was charmed by the scenes in Newfoundland, and found the suspense thrilling as Jackson and Vivian crossed the country on the train; heading slowly towards Jackson's secret past (and that's probably why it was such a letdown to have her think they were just well-tanned or overly powdered). When the little boy at the end is named Wayne, I have to wonder if that's the way that the author remembers his own childhood: and if he was that conflicted about race his whole life, 18 years and 20 rewrites turns out not to have been enough to successfully translate his inner self into fiction.

There is a persistent racism in this book that I found off-putting and Wayne Grady paints Jackson as a doomed character who will never fit in with his family or his community because of his skin colour. Related to this, I am conflicted about the degree of racism that's involved in my sister-in-law's sister leaving soon to adopt a baby from Africa. 

What a gorgeous baby she is, too, but I wonder how she's going to feel, being raised by a single, white woman so far from her roots. Is she really going to be better off? Should wealthy North Americans adopt African babies or would it be more culturally sensitive to actually get down to improving living conditions in their home countries? In the big picture, this baby won't be at risk of starvation or poor health care or (one hopes) wars, but as everyone knows that adopted babies in general have abandonment issues, how much more pressing will that be to a little girl who doesn't even look like the people around her? Here's hoping that love and stability will conquer all.

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

The believer in a conspiracy theory or theories becomes, in his own mind, the one in proper communion with the underlying universe, the one who understands the true ordering of things…conspiracy theories are actually reassuring. They suggest that there is an explanation, that human agencies are powerful, and that there is order rather than chaos. This makes redemption possible.

It was revealed in the newspaper this week that 14% of Canadians are considered anti-Semitic, agreeing with such statements as "Jews have too much control over global affairs" and "Jews are responsible for most of the world's wars". I have been fascinated with anti-Semitism for the longest time precisely because I don't understand it -- who are the fear-mongers that spread the idea that the Jewish people are a shadowy cabal that pull the strings behind the scenes? And when you compare the anti-Semites with the Jews, which side looks more conspiratorial?

In Voodoo Histories, David Aaronovitch answers these questions and more, starting with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and its role in launching the age of the modern conspiracy theory: That Jews had planned and caused WWI as war profiteers and to disrupt world governance. While there was undeniable proof at the time (1919) that The Protocols was a forgery (it was originally a French satire about Napoleon's lust for power that was later edited to implicate Jews instead), the fact that it seemed to make sense of the devastating war that had left the populace feeling powerless and horrified made it irresistible. This acceptance of shadowy theories despite proof to the contrary is a recurring theme in Voodoo Histories, and here's what I found interesting about that: Although I have heard of these various conspiracy theories, I have never heard that there is definitive proof that the American Armed Forces hadn't cracked the Japanese codes during WWII (and so they couldn't have been aware of or supported the attack on Pearl Harbor); I have never heard that an expert panel (not the Warren Commission) proved that JFK could have been shot by Oswald alone; I have never heard that Princess Diana was definitely neither pregnant or engaged to Dodi Al Fayed (removing any tenuous excuse for her "assassination" by the Royal Family) -- it boggles my mind that the conspiracy side has been louder throughout the years than the plain facts; that even someone like me who doesn't go looking for conspiracies has heard the cranks but never their detractors (and honestly, I was sure that Oswald didn't act alone).

Now, I've never gone looking for conspiracies, but I do have a soft spot for pseudo-history, so was surprised at the inclusion of (and denigration of) authors like Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock, and especially, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln and their book Holy Blood, Holy Grail -- how especially disappointing to learn that the last three knew their theories were based on a hoax even before they went to print. I admit that I have spent many happy hours reading these authors' wacky alternative history theories (the pyramids were built by the Atlanteans! Ezekiel's Wheel was an alien spaceship! Jesus' descendants await a return to the throne of France!) and I would tend to think, "I don't believe it, so what's the harm?", but Aaronovitch explains:

I have now plowed through enough of these books to be able to state that, as a genre, they are badly written and, in their anxiety to establish their dubious neo-scholarly credentials, incredibly tedious. So, if we're not reading them for the prose, why are we? Why do we read bad history books that have the added distinction of not being in any way true or useful, and not buy in anything like the same numbers history books that are often far better written and much more likely to give us an understanding of who we are and where we came from?

Those are good questions: I have never bought a National Enquirer in my life (or even flipped through one in the checkout line to see the real and unretouched photos of the Elvis-Sasquatch baby), so why do I pollute my mind with nonsense because it has the veneer of scholarship? And since most of us agree that the Truthers and the Birthers are all crackpots, what's the harm of letting them have their pastimes? Aaronovitch explains that there is harm: Once upon a time, the crackpots poring over The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were young men named Hitler and Himmel, and based on a forged hoax of a book, these men tried to implement the Final Solution. In our modern times, within 5 years of 9/11, over a third of New Yorkers believed that the US government was either complicit in the attack on the Twin Towers or at least were involved in a coverup. When we look at the big picture of history, past conspiracies do affect modern political agendas -- and I must assume that includes persistent anti-Semitism, and especially as it is expressed in the poll I started with.

Voodoo Histories is an interesting and erudite book -- a relentless debunker of all the modern conspiracy theories -- and if I had one small complaint it would be that, as it was written by a British journalist, it includes a few scandals that I've never heard of and they were a little dull to me: Would you care if I told you your shoelaces are NSA listening devices and then disproved it in the next breath? Remember you heard it here first.

My sister-in-law, Lolo, has a brother who long ago fell down the conspiracy rabbit-hole. For many years now, he has spent all his free time on the internet, looking for the connections that explain what is "really" happening in the world. He has done this to the exclusion of face-to-face relationships, and although he is a good looking guy with a job and a condo, he doesn't date or have friends or even leave home much. He's the kind of guy you don't want to be cornered by at a party because he is sincere in his efforts to educate you. For example, their other sister was a teacher at an international school in Cairo for quite a few years and transferred out just months before the revolution started in Tahrir Square. I said to him, "You must be glad that Ellen got out of Egypt when she did." 

He narrowed his eyes at me and said, "How do you mean?" 

"Well, with all of the violent clashes with the police and innocent bystanders getting caught up in the fights, you must be glad she got out safely."

"Only if you believe what they want you to believe."

Was there ever any question about what was happening in Cairo? How could "they" manipulate foreign journalists and private youtube videos? To what end? So, I do understand that getting caught up in the conspiracies isn't truly harmless.

And yet, some theories make me giggle. As I've said before, my friend Delight has a social justice group on facebook and just last week she posted a link to some anti-nuclear blog and this was my favourite comment below the original post:

So Oppenheimer was a luciferian "jew"... that figures. Khazar Martian/Cydonian luciferian LIZARDS "who call themselves jews" have almost ruined this planet too. 

Stupid pagan lizards and their ma$ons and witches. It's about time for all of the dirty lizards with their queen witch mother lucifer, ALL their beer-baby demons and the pagan apple-eaters they've picked up, to go back home. Dumbass lizards and pagan apple-eaters... go back home to your ruined planet already. I'm sure it's gonna be a real party for ya.

There's that anti-Semitism I'm not really any closer to understanding, too, but "dumbass lizards and pagan apple-lizards" -- what does that guy's rabbit-hole look like?


And this quote is insanely long (and hard to read), but it was shared on Delight's group's page by someone who is always trying to get her into a debate about money (for which Delight thanks her for bringing new perspectives to the group -- *eyeball straining eyeroll*). I need to keep this here to remember where I first encountered the phrase "zombie-rape-baby" to describe Jesus; this is a rabbit-hole from a different planet:

THE TENDER FOR LAW – APPOINTED ARTICLE - INSURANCE FOR THE INEPT - By APPOINTMENT of Gail Blackman (c) 2013 ROGUESUPPORT INC. under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

One of the great things about being in a law forum, run by a prorogued noble, is that you have the unique opportunity of posing the right question and always getting a near-magical answer; which causes something to flip in that little lump of protoplasm you laughingly call a brain.

...and everything becomes clear.

How many of you are kicking yourselves because you didn't know what THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER means?

Well, this one's no different.

Readers of this forum will notice I have a particular distaste for the Abrahamic religions. I have to tell you, it's not going to let up in this article, because this article is about INSURANCE. We all know about INSURANCE. If you're driving, you HAVE to have INSURANCE. Hell if you want safe harbour anywhere, the harbour-master will demand that your boat have INSURANCE.

So let's look at the word. First the prefix "in". What does the prefix "in" mean? Well, look at all the words that I use to describe all of you - Inept, incompetent, incapable, insecure, insincere, indefensible, inexcusable, ineffective...I'm sure you guys are getting the idea. And the rest of the word just refers to surety. In the end it all refers to surety and accounting -- nothing else.

In order to completely remove surety (insure) another PERSON must take responsibility for your actions. This concept is in fact, FRAUD. Here in reality it's not what you know, it's what you can prove. I've leveraged that concept all my life. Let's assume as I type this, I KNOW I am responsible for at least three homicides; but can you prove it? Let's say you could. What if you decided I committed those homicides for the right reasons, and you decided that you were going to "do the time" for me. And while I certainly don't want to discourage people from doing really nice things for me, you serving the sentence for me does not actually absolve me of the responsibility. You're just taking the proverbial "hit" for me. Allowing you to do that time for me would be unethical in ways I won't even cover here, yet that morally repugnant concept is played out daily - with INSURANCE.

Another PERSON assumes SURETY for your actions. This is why INSURANCE companies still refer to natural events/disasters as "Acts of God". A delusional Christian fuck-wit brings this up weekly as though their INSURANCE policy validates the existence of God.

This is one of many uses for the Abrahamic religions. They socially-engineer concepts like INSURANCE so they are elevated from blatant unethical FRAUD to a necessity for daily life, and they will say you are foolish, or a bad person, for not having INSURANCE.

How did they manage to pull that off? In my above homicide scenario, I explained the FRAUD in plain, unambiguous terms. Only the most ethically bankrupt amongst you will miss the point. The reason it has never occurred to you, is because of everybody's favourite zombie-rape-baby, Jesus H. Christ.

As a little side note to Christians, as it may not have occurred to them, it's NOT OK to impregnate women in their sleep! This should seem obvious but you're a Christian -- so you can never be too sure.

Anyway...where was I? ...Jesus the zombie-rape-baby...right.

The whole Christian doctrine revolves around the assertion that Jesus-zombie-rape-baby died for your sins. Only Christians seem to be able to determine what these "sins" are; however, apparently having sex is a sin, and murder is a sin; hell, even thought crimes (impure thoughts) are sins. But don't you worry, you horrible, wretched thing, Jesus the zombie-rape-baby has died for your sins. And if you can believe that, well then, Bob's Universal All-encompassing mega INSURANCE policy (don't forget to read the fine print) is for you (Act now, 'cause you know we can't do this all day)!

One of the things all of you have to realize, especially the Christians, is that the entire history of the world was rewritten in the 1500's. Shakespeare was introduced to inject "legalese" into the vernacular of the Angols. Translate any copy of THE MAGNA CARTA and you will notice no legalese ever appears in it. And my personal favourite is Christians that wave around the KING JAMES BIBLE. I can't make this any simpler. It says right on the fucking cover who is scamming you!

Everything in the nobility is executed by APPOINTMENT, from social engineering projects like the KING JAMES BIBLE, to Dunhill cigarettes, because the Queen likes a certain type of tobacco. These products and "services" are executed with the presumption that they are in compliance with the Sovereign's wishes, and notice is given on the product itself that it was created by APPOINTMENT, by the entity who appointed it.

The KING JAMES BIBLE was APPOINTED by King James. The technology had reached the point were mass production of print medium was possible. This meant that social engineering that normally relied on "word-of-mouth" could now have rigid change-control introduced. This meant the instructions for selling your daughter into slavery was consistent throughout the Commonwealth. This also introduced the concept of an imaginary rape baby taking responsibility for all the bad shit you do. Seriously that's what you "bought". There are people reading this who believe this to be true.

The whole "dying" thing is also a scam. That's the zombie part. Zombie-rape-baby-Jesus supposedly came back to life three day's after he died. Where's the sacrifice? He wasn't even out of commission long enough for his relatives to start fighting over his stuff. The very notion that "Jesus died for your sins" is nullified by the fact that he stopped being dead. He didn't die for your sins, he had a bad weekend for your sins...and he slept through most of it. OK, I'm really Christian-bashing here. Let's split the difference and say, "Jesus was sightly inconvenienced for your sins."

I understand he was inconvenienced on a long weekend, too, which makes it really...bad?

I'm sorry, I'm really trying to ascertain how this equals all the bad shit you do. You Christians will claim this Jesus guy will absolve me of any wrongdoing because of the "sacrifice" he made, but I'm not seeing where this sacrifice is. I'm not mentioning this because I'm looking for convincing. I'm from that same group of guys that made this book, and that's where the argument becomes moot.

I can't stress this enough, but I'm one of the guys that's in on the scam.

You'll constantly hear me say, "Stop studying the clubhouse rules, because you're not in the club." I'm descended from the founders of the club. I would rather live in poverty than to live off your labour; although my position on this has been on a sliding scale of late. Of all the clubhouse rules, the bible in any form, should be avoided at all costs. It should be fought at every possible opportunity, and should be met with all the ridicule and contempt you can throw at it...

...because it deserves no less. It is an ethically bankrupt FRAUD...just like INSURANCE.

If you think I can make Christianity sound retarded, wait until I cover INSURANCE.

So let's zoom back to when you were 16-years-old. You can't vote, you can't drink, there's a question mark as to whether you can legally have sex according to where you reside, but there is one thing you can do -- you can drive.

Hence you engage in the ego-building act of getting "permission to learn" from the government. So, at the whim of a paper-pusher who couldn't get a job in the real world, you will hopefully be given permission to learn; and you will have proof that you have this permission when you produce a LEARNER'S PERMIT. And so every good Christian goes through this RIGHT OF PASSAGE where they are granted permission to learn. Gee willikers, it's awfully swell that the government gave you permission to learn, huh?

But you're just sixteen, remember? You're not old enough to know of the real pitfalls of life...like dames and broads trying to play you for a sap (I'm laughing as I type this, because 1950's movie-speak is almost as retarded as this generations's pop-culture slang).

Now in order to exercise your newly-acquired "permission to learn" you're going to need a vehicle, perhaps a car, which is a contraction of carriage...which is a LEGAL term, so don't use it. But since you're trying to be "LEGAL", having been granted "permission to learn" (seriously am I the only one who finds that the most demeaning thing ever written on paper?), a car will do just nicely. But what if you get into an accident? It won't occur to you that accident is just that - an accident. There is no SURETY, real or implied, for something that's accidental. That's what makes it an accident! There is no intent behind the damage. But if you subjugate yourself to a PERSON, that PERSON will assume full SURETY for any damages, and like zombie-rape-baby-Jesus, this PERSON only exists on paper. All of you consider it so real, that people are jailed regularly for "Driving without INSURANCE". It sort of "drives" the point home, doesn't it?

You have been pre-programmed to accept this subjugation, this ridiculous, FRAUDULENT, morally-bankrupt subjugation is a LEGAL necessity, and all of it deals with MONEY OF ACCOUNT. MONEY OF EXCHANGE never touches the equation. For those of you who are too lazy and/or stupid to learn the difference between MONEY OR ACCOUNT and MONEY OF EXCHANGE, one dollar in MONEY OF ACCOUNT is only capable of buying and/or cancelling another dollar in MONEY OF ACCOUNT. 90% of all money in the world is this type of money. It's pretend. It's not real. It only applies to the clubhouse rules, and it competes directly with the money in your pocket. This is the dynamic that everyone misses.

I hear lots of extremely accurate descriptions of how MONEY OF ACCOUNT is created, and they all come from idiots who know nothing about what money is. They'll go off on some tangent about Lou Manotti and his evil henchmen, the Freemasons. ...and lizards. There's lizards somewhere in all of their crap, too.

Once again I'd like to digress and remind everyone that on every occasion that I required a mason, free did not enter into the equation. Masons are fucking expensive, and there's no such thing as a free one.

...where was i?

Ah yes...MONEY OF ACCOUNT versus MONEY OF EXCHANGE.

THE TENDER FOR LAW is primarily about the money that carries that TENDER. There are lots of learned men who will talk endlessly about law. I have forgotten more about law than all of these men combined have ever learned. I say men because a woman's brain simply would not be able to encompass the blatant lies that the travesty that we call law spews at them. Reading the writings of Mary Elizabeth Croft will provide you with one example of what goes through a thinking-woman's mind when law is actually analyzed. You'll notice the things I teach you here from a law perspective, are really simple. They are all created with the intent of getting you out of accounting and surety. I have declared publicly on the record that the TENDER FOR LAW that money provides is, in fact, a FRAUD. Most of you reading this are probably already painfully aware of this fact.

My entire life plan relied on the RULE OF LAW remaining intact, but when the time came for me to assert my RIGHTS under that rule, the pretence became blatant. Anyone else going through what I have, would have been defeated; but as I constantly point out, I'm descended from an evil, vile, pseudo-culture...and I've forgotten more about law than any of these people will ever know. There are lawyers that will testify to that fact, so it's not like this should come as a surprise, but I have documented EVERYTHING. If it was spoken as regards me, I have a recording of it. If any name over which I have executive authority has been used in a document, I have a copy of it. Laid out on a time-line, the blatant FRAUD becomes irrefutable, conclusive proof of what everybody already knows.

I mention all this because what I'm describing is, INSURANCE. Notice that my INSURANCE is a little different than the good neighbours at, "State Farm". It's designed to put the SURETY where it belongs -- not with me. The difference between the good neighbours at State Farm and me, is that I am not subjugating myself. My INSURANCE is real. It exists in the real world, and the more astute among you will see that I am pushing it all into a universe of virtual worlds.

When you understand what money is, you can construct money through VALUE.

If it exists in the real world, it has VALUE. Any currency used to track that VALUE, when exchanging goods, is MONEY OF EXCHANGE.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, does not exist in the real world. Only its mysterious creators have any COPYHOLD on the VALUE. That's the thing about Bitcoin - in the end the guys that created it, get all the money. They get this because people volunteer to take alpha-test-grade, proof-of-concept code, and open their computers up to the Internet. They then give hardware-level access to their memory, processor, GPU and hard drive, to a rogue, autonomous process that their empty, little heads couldn't even dream of understanding, with no one paying attention to its original intent -- which is to prove that it could be done.

Don't get me wrong, there are people who are doing this on purpose, because the VALUE is returned almost immediately. For Bitcoin has all the properties of gold, without the liabilities. Bitcoin is but one cryptographic currency. AQUILAE has its own cryptographic currency. It cannot be counterfeited, and is a near-perfect accounting mechanism. AQUILAE is not even a PERSON, it's a TRUST. If a TRUST can have a currency, why can't you? What I am building for everyone here, is a method to remove the middle-man. If you have your own currency, you don't need a bank. If cryptographic currencies can't be counterfeited, then it's trade cannot be regulated. It remains within the private realm and the ease at which you can convert your currency to MONEY OF EXCHANGE anywhere in the world, is directly proportional to your VALUE. In the current economic framework, backed by debt-based FIAT currency, the only legitimate path to wealth is to produce, to make something in the real world that didn't exist before.

Like every dollar in existence, all things of VALUE have a creation date and a death date. Whatever you produce must be built with that in mind. For instance, producing a plaque with a cheesy-Jesus slogan on it, actually has VALUE. Perhaps it has VALUE to its creator, but here in reality, that plaque with the cheesy-Jesus slogan, will find its way to a landfill very quickly.

This very article you are reading has a creation date, and a death date, and this is becoming apparent with the four threads that just magically disappeared here. Pierre destroyed the thread where he was bestowed his sacred, native name. The thread itself had VALUE, for it reflected the culture from whence Pierre came. The colloquial term, "fucking the dog" refers to bored, unionized workers taking their one-hour breaks between their fifteen minutes of actual labour. Look at any road crew in Quebec and you will see a working example of "fucking the dog." And so, Fucks the Puppy was bestowed upon Pierre as an homage, and in an irrational fit of nameless rage Pierre destroyed the thread, which by the way, is the most labour I've ever seen out of labourer in Quebec. Ok, I don't really feel that way about people from Quebec. Don't quote me on it, but I'm pretty sure there's an act or statute somewhere in Ontario that says I must make fun of people from Quebec. I'm also pretty sure there's an equivalent act or statute for people in Quebec to refer to people in Ontario. Truth be told, one of the most inspirational people in my lifetime was Rene Levesque, and I strongly suggest that every single reader look at the history of this awesome shit-disturber.

Quebec politicians do some awesome things. For example, if you want to see awesome, political suicide, no one will ever beat Jacques Parizeau...but I digress again...

We were talking about INSURANCE.

My INSURANCE is my life plan. It's way off track, and I need to get it back on track. But my life plan relied on the Rule of Law remaining intact. And while we weren't looking, our RIGHTS got sold, and nobody bothered consulting us. My INSURANCE company went bust. The Rule of Law is not intact, and in my eyes they have forfeitted the right to exist; because I've made it very clear, that limited liability is a fallacious concept, and if I stand by and watch the GOVERNMENT OF ONTARIO operating as "JUSTICE", victimize the PUBLIC whose TRUST it holds, I become no better than you. I have a life plan that I must return to. I have a defective government process posing as "JUSTICE" and victimizing the citizens it has sworn to serve.

To return to my life plan under these circumstances is to make myself an enabler; and so I have a problem. For whether I like it or not, I'm one of the good guys, and it's not a role I'm comfortable with. There are many reasons for this, one of them being that to be the good guy, I have to do both. I have to get "a" Rule of Law in place, one that serves the interests of the people it governs. Since I love spewing out spoilers I'm going to give the end of the story away RIGHT NOW! Why am I destroying your journey of discovery by giving away the ending? Because, FUCK YOU, that's why! I may be the good guy, but I don't have to be nice about it.

The only way to LEGALLY and LAWFULLY do what I propose is to restore EXECUTIVE POWER to the Monarchy for a period not exceeding five years. From this moment forward a primary focus of those who follow what I am teaching should be an investigation into why this is true. It is the only possible answer that has any chance of success. Over the next few weeks we will explore why giving executive power to a little old lady of Germanic descent, and nine Corgees, is a good idea. AND, because I'm right, everybody is going to find out the hard way, that it is impossible to prove that I'm wrong. That's what makes it right!

As I explain, step-by-step, how I intend to accomplish this lofty goal, it will become readily apparent that I already have everything in place. I've planned for what's to come. AND, before shit gets real, I'm going to train you all up to a level where you can think in a useful manner. By useful, I mean to YOU, because you currently think wrong, and VALUE the wrong things. It may be difficult to hear, but you're programmed to be a useless, sack-of-shit. If you should produce any VALUE, the government is there to lie to you about that VALUE, and to trick you into thinking you owE THEM for being VALUEable. If I'm successful, all that stolen VALUE will be returned to the people it was stolen from. But what happens at the end of that five years? You see Elizabeth Windsor is the KEEPER OF THE TRUST. You see a little, old lady. I see an echo of a little girl that the world knew as Princess Elizabeth -- and her plea to the Commonweath to come to her aid. This is the SOVEREIGN OF THE COMMONWEALTH, and she didn't choose it. My grandfather taught me all I needed to know to TRUST Elizabeth Windsor. When the power is handed to her, she'll know what to do with it, because she knows that even if she fails at what is surely a lifetime of planning, she has you and I, as INSURANCE.