13 March 2000.
Index of earlier issues - click here.
(Those who like digging about will find that there are hundreds of articles on many subjects to be found on this site.)
I am working again on old issues of Other News (1993) and hope soon to put a few more of them on the site.
The Bonnington Cafe Struggle.
No up-to-date news. Will eventually re-open, I hope.
Bonnington Cafe, Vauxhall Grove, London SW8 UK. Near Vauxhall underground and mainline station, and many buses. Booking is difficult.
Frito-lay
Many people recently received an email telling them that frito-lay do not use GM ingredients in their products. With a name like that, I felt there was something not quite right about their claim. I had never heard of them before, but a name like that in some way suggested to me an attempt at reaching a huge market (I still do not know what they sell). I decided I would email them thus:
Date: 02/19/2000 01:16:04 AM Subject: Non-gm ingredients
Email Body:
As long as you stick to the decision not to include genetically modified products in your foods (of which I had not heard before a recent commercially extremely useful to you email circular), I will be looking out for them in the English shops as well as elsewhere.
However, the net is a powerful place, and once people start misusing it they very quickly get detected and it could do them more harm than good. Gae ye cannily.
The Other News From England is at http://www.othernews.co.uk
On the 10th I received this reply:
Return-Path:
Thank you for contacting Frito-Lay. We are always pleased when our
consumers
take the time to share their thoughts with us.
Now that there is a renewed interest in biotechnology by regulatory agencies
and some consumer concern exists, we did not feel it appropriate to ask our
growers to include bt crops in what they sell us.
Just like other food companies, Frito-Lay relies on and supports the
regulatory
agencies charged with safeguarding our food supply when sourcing ingredients
for our products. These agencies continue to report that genetically
modified
ingredients are perfectly safe.
Since we are also a large buyer of agricultural commodities, and more than a
quarter of the North American crop is derived from biotechnology, just like
other food companies, we could have biotechnology ingredients in our
products.
Thank you for taking the time to contact Frito-Lay. We hope this
information
is helpful.
Frito-Lay Consumer Affairs
Reference #: AAAA-4GMTM6
To which I replied:
I received today (10 Mar 2000) an email from you that is both ambiguous and evasive, and seems to contradict a message I received earlier stating that you do not include GM ingredients in your products. You have used the words biotechnology and BT, which to one like me implies Genetically Modified, and your statements regarding these have been very ambiguous. In addition to that, one sentence seeks to give you the escape clause that you might (after all) use GM ingredients in your products, even though in the very recent past you have been telling people you do not.
Could you perhaps clarify what you are actually saying, as opposed to that which you appear to be hoping I will believe you are trying to say?
Yours
In recent years a whole collection of cases have been going through the courts in which the litigants (who are usually litigants in person because they cannot get legal aid, they are broke, and possibly because no lawyer will take them on, challenging the establishment in this way) claim certain irregularities. The self-representation leads to much amateurishness, which does seem to irritate your average judge (who speaks his own language with his own little clique of lawyers), but it also reveals a few common themes, which because of the great number of cases begin to have some credibility. The one which is interesting to me at this moment is the bank forging documents to support their already strong case for what in all other circles would be malpractice, but in banking is legal and fairly commonly practiced. Barclay's seem to be the most commonly complained of bank in these matters.
If the bank's case has been made on the back of forged documents, then of course you would expect it to collapse. But often it doesn't, and it would be very easy to say that as banks are entrusted by the nation to process financial matters they are incapable of dishonesty, and incapable of iniltration by thieves and crooks, and that therefore whatever the evidence suggesting this to be otherwise, the document is not forged. From the point of view of a judge, there appear to be such concepts as 'a proper authority' which is treated as not having the ability to do anything illegal, and so it is much easier to say that the litigant must in some way have contrived this evidence falsely. The fact that accountants uncover millions of pounds in false bank charges every month may not be known to them, or is perhaps ignored. It is possible that the judge may also be a jobsworth.
But a great many of these litigants feel they have fallen victim to freemasonry.
Before I give you a fairly typical outline of a hypothetical case (there are enough real cases along the same lines), I should tell you one or two things about freemasons. Freemasons are a 'society with secrets', a brotherhood who agree to help each other ('masonic preference'), and who use a selection of secret signs to recognise each other. If you are a freemason you are committed to helping your 'brother'. They are an attractive area in which to operate if you are interested in crime, but they are also probably attractive to some perfectly honorable ordinary men who like the camaraderie and complicated and dated rituals associated with freemasons. They are said to date back a thousand or more years, and to descend from knights templars and other self-interest groups. There are said to be a great many lawyers, bankers, politicians and business-people who are freemasons, and they would not normally tell you anything about their organisation. Some persons believe freemasons have their own laws and legal system, perform the odd execution, and work together to cover up any evidence which may come in front of the public that is against the interests of freemasons.
I was once told by a freemason that freemasons 'study politics'. A lot of people believe that most of the world's key political figures past and present are freemasons, including Blair, Clinton, Prescott, Thatcher (there are female masonic groups), Bush, Nixon, etc., and that a change of government just means a change from one set of freemasons to another, with no real change of government at all - particularly in recent years. If that is so, then the easy way forward for an ambitious criminal group is to join the freemasons.
A man once told me "my dad asked me if I wanted to join the freemasons when I was young. He told me if I did I would never want of anything". On the other hand, I know a man who's father was a freemason and resigned from the order - but I don't know why.
Now we should have another look at these legal cases.
When our current slightly left-wing but largely right-wing government was elected, one of the people in the new regime started a campaign to try to force masonic judges to reveal their connections with masons as part of their contract of work. The Lord Chief Justice (or was it the Lord Chancellor?) told the public that it wasn't worth it as there were only 94 masonic judges, thus revealing that he was one himself (or he would not have been so sure of the number), and told us that as judges took their work so seriously masonic preference would not make any difference to their decisions, and that therefore he would not require them to reveal their connection. The fact that a great many people would be quite sceptical about the sanity of a judge who could join such an organision did not seem to occur to him, and the fact that large numbers of people do not trust freemasons was apparently not considered at all. Some of those people who have been dragging their cases through the courts could tell you better than I could why they don't trust freemasons.
Now, I will try to give you a better idea of the general nature of these cases.
Banks lend money to business people (they don't lend money they have, they just write a credit from thin air) on terms that may be varied from time to time as the bank thinks fit, and with the money repayable on demand - not in so many days, months or years, but on demand. The nature of most business is such that one cannot have the luxury of being able to stipulate a period of notice, and so business people by and large have to just hope the bank is interested in their welfare, and hope they would not pull the rug from under them. They do not realise that the money they have borrowed did not exist at all until the bank 'created' it, and that therefore it is of relatively little significance to the bank at the same time as being highly significant to the business.
If a person working in a bank with a fair amount of influence or a person who is able to manipulate by other means knows that (a) a business has borrowed £500,000 which at cannot currently pay back, (b) is borrowing against the security of certain very desireable property that a friend would like to purchase cheaply, and (c) the business has no other source of capital, then it is very easy for the bank to call in the overdraft, and if it is not paid within 24 hours appoint a receiver to wind up the business and sell it's assets. There not being an immediately identifiable market for the property (which might be valued at, say, £1.5m) it can be sold to a friend cheap - the friend being the only readily available purchaser, and the only person making an offer. The friend can then sell the property for £1.5m at his leisure and makes a gross profit of £1m. Nothing so crude as commission changing hands needs to take place if it is freemasons who do this, as freemasons do each other favours. This is not, as far as I know, illegal in this country, and there are not a few insolvency practitioners who would say that our businessperson was a fool for borrowing from a bank in this way. I think I agree, but it is very easy to be fooled into believing a bank is an honest and honorable institution.
The local freemasons' lodge is the perfect place to find out which properties are so dangerously mortgaged, and to find out who might be interested in them, to try to influence the bank to call in the loan, and to try to influence who to appoint as receiver. And if the victim challenges the matter, the perfect place to work out who will help you through the courts, which judge you want to hear the matter, how to influence the selection of judges, which documents need to be forged (if they do at all), and freemasons, being a society with secrets, may well be able to arrange everything in your favour. This is why so many people do not trust freemasons - and it is unlikely they ever will for as long as they remain an international 'society with secrets'.
So far, I have only lost a few thousand shares by this process (when banking with Barclays), but as I find shareholding unsavoury that's probably OK.
Well, of course it's not just banks and lawyers people are discontented about. The nation has elected a governemt which it expected to represent all, and yet they behave as though they are only interested in a tiny group of very prosperous individuals.
I recently heard somebody suggest that the reason the government are not willing to have dodgy banks challenged successfully in the courts is that they are afraid the banks will take their business elsewhere - in other words, they don't mind what the banks do or who they fiddle as long as they keep their business here in the City of London. I rather think the average British person would choose to be a bit poorer rather than have a collection of crooks running the economy.
Wanted: Established musical act performing to reasonably sophisticated adult audiences needs an agent. This act is already on the road but needs help with increasing it's profile, and getting in front of a wider variety of audiences. Please email pcj@gn.apc.org or editor@othernews.co.uk if that doesn't work.
This website is about the destruction of countryside and agriculture. Worth a visit if you want to find out about how it is thought the British countryside will fair under the ongoing creep of the multinationals.
This website is one to do with monetary reform. If you are interested in economics it is worth a look. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~bamr1
This is a website about alternative currencies.Might be worth a look to those who have realised that you don't necessarily have to have money as such to be prosperous.
This is a website for something called The Green Guide. I know nothing about it, but am hoping it is something worthy. Please let me know if it is questionable.
This is a site concerned with one of the most unpopular planning decisions ever made in Greater London, the Crystal Palace Complex. It is so stunningly awful that only a handful of people who do not live near it appear to approve, whilst the rest are not entirely uninclined to mention such things as payola, freemasons....you name it! The site belongs to the London Borough of Bromley, but the aggro generated by it and the destruction of amenity caused by it will be almost entirely suffered by residents of adjoining boroughs and not the people of Bromley themselves.
This is a recycling site based in London, and offering materials to anybody. The organisation is a charity seeking to link suppliers of surplus materials with users. Especially good for the more ingenious designers amongst us.
The email of the people who run the above site is cs@london-recycling.demon.co.uk. They are called Creative Supplies. Look them up for more info.
Here's an interesting education site - particularly for those who have young children and are not quite sure what to do to avoid the worst of what`s on offer in the mainstream of education.They are called www.edrev.org.
early Othernews - 1992, 93, 94.
There were a few essays that went out with the early Other News as a freestanding item. You can read these by clicking below.
London Journey - a trip from Docklands through Beckenham and back to Docklands.
(Friday Woodworkers are suffering a temporary break due to some of the episodes not having been fully edited at the time of writing. It may take some timne to fix this problem.
Episode 17.
(These articles were written in 1988, and were my first attempt at writing. Some people when shown these fell about laughing, some smiled faintly - and some yawned. I thought I was going to write a technical book, but it soon became apparent that I was much more interested in the people than the technology - and that is the main reason there are no drawings - although it might be rather good to do a couple of caricatures sometime.)
Index of Friday Woodorker articles (and a means of access).
A READER COMPLAINED that it was not possible to go back more than 6 articles in Gabriele`s area. Regrettably this is because there is no index, and I have not the time to organise one yet. However, for those determined enough to find the early ones, they should be accessible by going to an early Other News and clicking through from it. This will not be fast, but I think will do the job. They started about November 1997 I think.
In an earlier issue I told you about my feelings regarding Tempo retailers and the Lexmark 3200 printer I bought from them.
The Lexmark 3200 printer I got from Tempo must surely be the most uneconomical printer I could possibly have bought. The black cartridge only does about 250 pages of ordinary type - for £28! That makes each sheet cost 11.2 pence plus the cost of the paper and probably another 11.2 pence more if any colour is used! - ABOUT 22.4 PENCE A SHEET! Nearly a pound for every four sheets!
I wouldn`t recommend you to buy it - but also look at my earlier article for an idea of Tempo`s service.
A person to help make up a subject index for the growing numbers of articles on The Other News From England. Email editor@othernews.co.uk
8- or more-track tape recorder. email pcj@gn.apc.org
All material on this site is copyright. Contact me if you want to use it. I am quite flexible. Educational non-profit use is free - but ask for permission and print an acknowledgement. If you can`t think what to print, put:
From The Other News From England. http://www.othernews.co.uk
editor@othernews.co.uk
Banks, lawyers, freemasons.
Politics.
The stuff that doesn`t often get changed now follows:
Early Other News essays.
The Soup Designer`s Handbook.
Friday Woodworkers.
Gabriele Gad on alternative therapy.
editor@othernews.co.uk
Cartoons and graphics.
drawings click here.
sheet music click here.
Consumers.
LEXMARK 3200 PRINTER.
Wanted
That`s all this week folks