simple fucking minds

One of the most apt pieces of naming in music history - more than calling a load of souless saps Wet Wet Wet, more than having Freddie Mercury front a band called Queen, almost as appropriate as Michael Jackson calling his 1986 album BAD - is the moniker attached to those purveyors of unthinking vacuous bombast Simple Minds.

The huge hollow contrived stadium-rock twaddle, the obviousness and superficiality were offensive to anyone who wants to hear music with any soul or meaning.

I remember in the late 80s some LibDem spokesperson- who clearly had only heard the band's names rather than the music - thinking they were clever saying 'the Conservatives are the music of Simple Minds, Labour are the music of Dire Straits, but we are the New Kids On The Block'.

I remember thinking how unintentionally accurate this was. The Tories and their selfish egotism and overblown arrogance. The New Kids and their squeaky clean cuddly image belying their strategy of corporate greed; pointless, irrelevant, and impossible to take seriously. Then Dire Straits, an unimaginative stale soporific dinosaur, nothing there that you'd ever actively choose, nothing to enrich or inspire you but, well, if you were on a long car journey and only had those three tapes, it'd be Dire Straits that got played.

For those who are too young or don't have an obsessive retentive memory of pop music, New Kids On The Block were the prototype of those 90s hairgel bands, those bland saps with their over-rehearsed sincerity, their Donny Osmond straight-to-camera puppydog eyes.

As Bill Hicks said at the time

'Oh come on, Bill, they're the New Kids, don't pick on them, they're so good and they're so clean cut and they're such a good image for the children.' Fuck that! When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children? I want my children to listen to people who fucking rocked. I don't care if they died in puddles of their own vomit, I want someone who plays from their fucking heart.

On the cover of their single This One's For The Children (chorus: 'This one's for the children / The Children of the world / This one's for the children / May God keep them in His throne'), New Kids On The Block wore T-shits with the words 'DRUGS SUCK' in foot-high letters.



Bill Hicks again:

See, I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do. And if you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor, go home tonight and take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CD's and burn them. Because, you know what, the musicians who made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years? Rrrrrrrrreal fucking high on drugs. Man, the Beatles were so high, they let Ringo sing a couple of tunes. Tell me they weren't partying!

Okay, I'll tell you what else. I'm gonna extend the theory to our generation, now, so it's more applicable. The musicians today, who don't do drugs, and in fact speak out against it - 'We're rock against drugs' - boy, they suck! Ball-less, soul-less, spirit-less, corporate little bitches, suckers of Satan's cock, each and every one of them.

There is more than one way to be a ball-less soulless spiritless corporate little bitch. All those stadium-rock raised fist gestures devoid of meaning and intent rank just as low as New Kids, and kings of it were Simple Fucking Minds.

It's not enough to just like good music and art any more than it's OK just to do positive political action; we must berate, ridicule and actively assault the bad as well. As Bruce said in Easy Wheels, 'evil doesn't just go away, it hangs around like a stupid salesman until you kick it the hell out'.

For some inexplicable reason, Simple Fucking Minds got to play the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury 1995. This was such a full frontal assault on those of us who treasure the spirit of Glastonbury that we decided Something had to be done.

Not wanting to - or even being confident if we could bear to - endure their full set, it had to be a good swift surgical strike.

We turned up a while into their performance. It was, I'm pleased to report, by far the poorest attended evening perfomance on the Pyramid Stage I've ever seen. With this working in our favour, we easily got to about 15 people from the front.

And we waited, choosing our moment.

Should we do it during Waterfront? Nah.

How about during Don't You Forget About Me? No, too bouncy.

And then it happened. No need to confer, we knew this was the time. The intro to Belfast Child. As arrogant and pompous a song as has ever been written.

As the pipes wailed, Jim 'Wan' Kerr crossed his arms and tried to look wise, aloof and wistful as he stared into the distance.

And then we raised our banner, in clear two foot capitals, easily legible from the stage:

WHY DON'T YOU JUST FUCK OFF?

The phrasing is all the more insulting for its tone; not angry, more like dismissive.

It got a few chortles from the people around us, so it seems that a good portion of the paltry crowd didn't really like the band.

After a couple of minutes one arsey bugger told us to take it down cos she did like the band. We respectfully pointed out that if that were the case perhaps she should be facing forwards rather than turning round looking at us. She snapped one of the poles, so we retreated, job done.

If feel sure there are Simple Minds roadies still telling the story to this day.

And here we are, me and my companero Adam at the edge of the crowd moments later.

giant goat survives war zone

Now and again I hear of some bizarre animal that sounds made up, and I think surely if they were real I'd somehow know about them already.

For instance, the capybara, a giant amphibious guinea pig the size of a labrador.



Early Spanish invaders of South America had trouble finding enough plant food to let them observe the Catholic tradition of meat abstinence during Lent.

They got round the problem by getting the Vatican to decree that because the capybara is amphibious it therefore counts as fish.

Next mad animal? Thanks to a piece in The Independent, I learn of the markhor. It's a goat that stands 6 foot tall, with spectacular twirly corkscrew horns adding another couple of feet.

[piece reproduced in full cos The Independent have a habit of doing pay-archiving]

Giant goat survives war zone

The ceasefire between India and Pakistan in Kashmir has produced an unexpected beneficiary - the world's largest goat.

The markhor, a mountain goat that stands almost 6ft tall at the shoulder and can weigh 17 stone, was thought to be extinct in Indian-held Kashmir. But a recent joint survey by Indian wildlife organisations and the Indian army found 35 small herds - 155 goats - thriving near the Line of Control.

As recently as 1970 there were 25,000 on the Indian side, but by 1997 they had been driven to near extinction. The main cause was the conflict. But markhor are also hunted for their spiral horns - a mounted pair can sell for £850. The horns are also used for Chinese medicine; a kilogram fetches £600 in China.

Markhor are considered critically endangered, but other populations have survived in the mountains of Pakistan away from the Line of Control, and in Afghanistan and Turkmenistan.

In the same mad way that South Americans can't do the decent thing and leave the 'fish' capybara alone, Pakistan still legally permits markhor hunting despite their status as a critically endangered species. Fuckers. If I were in charge of goats that good I'd just fuss them all day long.

Personally I think the problems of Kashmir could be resolved by telling both India and Pakistan to fuck off out of it and declaring the territory an independent goat republic. With six foot goats armed with big horns, you'd not mess with the border patrols.

amusing ourselves to death

A message board I frequent had a posting from someone really distressed after a 'friend' showed them a video of a beheading, wondering how anyone could regard watching such things as fun.

Seeing execution as entertainment is certainly not new, in fact it's a long-standing tradition we've only recently abandoned.

But that doesn't mean watching videos like that is done for the same reasons. A couple of hundred years ago death was way more in your face, people would've seen relatives die already, whereas now a serious proportion of people, myself included, have never seen a real dead body.

How removed we have become from that essential and inevitable part of life. At the same time, we've shed our religions that make us believe in afterlife, we've shed strong sense of community, and we've developed a strong sense of individuality.

Individuality is made worthless by death, so we are, by and large, shit scared of it. Hence the development of the idea of medically prolonging life as much as we can irrespective of its quality, and hence our having death as entertainment.

We've all seen tens of thousands of pretend deaths in movies and on TV, lots of it billed as 'family entertainment'. We think little of kids playing with toy guns, whereas if there were a toy rapist kit on the market we'd be up in arms about it. We have to trivialise death to try to tell ourselves it's no biggy.

Also, as the mass media gives us information about so many other people and places we get overwhelmed. There isn't space in our heads to accord so many people full human status. The concept of that many other people belittles us, and the flipside is that those other people are also something insignificant, something that slips past on your screen like an advert.

If we really felt that, say, starving people in Niger were as fully human as the people in our street or workplace, we would be out there doing something rather than sat here now in front of computers.

'Sure, your robot self can get you through the day, but be careful - or the person in you who does the dishes or drives on automatic pilot may easily become the same one who brings up the children. And then where would we be? Touched by absolutely nothing at all. So when you watch the News at 10 and the dead bodies are just a drag... be afraid, be very afraid.'
- Julian Cope

But we can't help it, it's too many people for us to consider and be concerned about. From there, it's a small jump to seeing the suffering as not just insignificant but as entertainment.

I don't think it's right, I don't think it's justified, and anyone who showed me a beheading video would not be counted as a friend afterwards. But I do think there's reasons for it.

However, those who engage in it should really be pulled up short on it. Taking pleasure from the suffering of others is a good working definition of the word 'cruelty'. It's not where we want to be going, personally or culturally.

We have to try to maintain as high a level of humanisation of others as we can, and seeing suffering as entertainment is clearly going in the direction of dehumanisation.

hey joe

Harry Hutton's posted pictures of the International Festival of Youth and Students, a young communist/socialist shindig in Caracas.

There are some interesting choices of T-shirt adorning those attending. One saying Kein Sex mit Nazis - 'no sex with Nazis' - certainly seems to have found a motto to live by.

Others, however, are more questionable.

Bearing in mind that a T-shirt is a mass-produced item there must be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who walk around wearing one of these.

iraq: action in my name

Do you know what this is?



A clue for you; here's a close-up



And it's all in such quantity that it can shock the buyer's mum when she finds it piled up in her living room



This is part of a consignment of medical supplies bought by Raed Jarrar. Raed is one of a family of Iraqi bloggers, and at the end of last year they set up an appeal for money to buy medical supplies for civilian victims of the occupation of Iraq. (I gave it a plug at the time)

Soon after, here in Leeds we did an Aspire, an occasional squatted social centre hosting cafe, film showings and corking gigs and parties. Although we put Aspires on for free, there are donations made and there's always some money left over, which we give away to worthy causes that can't get more conventional funding. I'm proud that we're one of the biggest donors to the Jarrars' appeal.

Raed's based in Jordan, where they've bought medical gear and driven it into Iraq. As Iraqis, they can safely go where western NGOs fear to tread. The supplies our party bought saved lives in a hospital in Fallujah.

If all that destruction is being visited upon Iraq in our name and paid for with our money, I feel obliged to actively withdraw my consent, and pay for something that mitigates some of the damage.

Raed's appeal is still open. Go to his blog and click on the Make a Donation button. Don't think what you can spare is too small to be worth it. Many donations have been under five pounds. It's enough to save a life in Fallujah.

new books & panties

New Books

As Carol Vorderman's How to Do Sudoku continues to sell by the shitload, one has to marvel at her Cartlandesque ability to be such a prolific author. The same pen brought us Carol Vorderman's Detox Recipes and several other detox books.

Before that, when the craze for home improvement TV shows kicked in, we got Carol Vorderman's Better Homes, and before that there was - surprisingly missing from the Waterstones Top 100 books of the 20th Century list - Carol Vorderman's Guide to the Internet.

As with detox, the sudoku fad is going on long enough for her to squeeze out several books, so next month sees the publication of Carol Vorderman's Massive Book of Sudoku, followed two weeks later by another one. Soon after that there'll be Carol Vorderman's Guide To Having A Manager Who Gets You Fifty Grand For Having Your Name And Face Put On The Front Of A Book Somebody Else Wrote.

And after the success of The Little Book of Calm, The Little Book of Confidence, the Little Book of Feng Shui and - fad on fad - The Little Book of Sudoku, this autumn sees the publication of The Little Book Of Publishing Books So Physically Small That They Don't Go On Normal Shelves And So End Up By The Till Like The Chocolate In A Supermarket Checkout Where Believe Me Any Old Bollocks Will Shift A Fuckload Of Copies.

Credited author; Carol Vorderman. Probably.

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Panties

Another new blog added to the sidebar: Shot By Both Sides. I was nudged towards this by Jim Bliss, and its inclusion was clinched by two sections in particular;

Firstly,

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have criticised the UK for 'not doing enough to stop Islamist terrorism'. In other news, Jim Davidson has criticised Bill Hicks for 'not being funny'.

and;

The death of people's right to say bloody stupid and offensive things in Britain without being arrested for them seems to be increasingly imminent. For fuck's sake, people: people like Omar Bakri had absolutely nothing to do with the terror attacks on London - if they had had anything to do with the terror attacks on London, we could charge them with that.

If you seriously think people should be locked up for treason for not liking our country and its values, then you should probably be locked up for treason for the threat that you represent to our country and its values.

(Oh, there's no panties in this post, I just wanted to do the Ian Dury pun in the title and couldn't think of something to do with a new link that is phonetically similar to 'panties')

re-claire the streets

Just back from several days with my family and their swarm of small children.

For a whole host of reasons I have chosen to never have children of my own. But just as I recognise cattle farming as an environmental catastrophe yet still adore the cows themselves, so it is that I can have a great time with kids. Anyone who can have a laugh simply by being dangled by the ankles or twatted with an oven glove is cool with me.

But I pity the parents. Their attention spans have been so heavily assaulted that even when the kids are all asleep their focus and priorities stay shifted. What sane individual could want to talk loudly about nappies when vintage Patti Smith footage is on TV? Who told them it was OK to be graphically describing the texture of baby shit while I'm eating?

Worse is when you're eating with Parent A and Parent B comes back. It's not just those descriptions from Parent A but the searching questions from Parent B about moistness and succulence. Really, try pushing a chip into curry sauce and raising it to your mouth while that's going on.

I attempted to. I failed.

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The more alert Badgerers may notice a newcomer to the other people's blogs section in the sidebar links. It's Re-Claire The Streets, the poetry blog of radical supergirly Claire Fauset.

Frankly the P-word scares me. Having been involved in small-press and zine publishing for years and years, I've had a lot of self-published poetry cross my path. Only the tiniest sliver of it has been something other than appalling drivel. No area of human creativity has produced such a high proportion of totally worthless crap, with the possible exception of 1980s poodle-rock metal.

Most of those poetry zines were the same uninspired, unimaginative, up its own arse whinging from people who should just get out more.

I'm not being cruel or callous here. You'd be the same if you'd had to read it in such volume. Most zine distributors I know have a no-poetry rule, otherwise a third to a half of what gets submitted is exactly that stuff I mentioned.

I'm really proud that some distros made one-off exceptions for the poetry Godhaven Ink has published. Mahalia's work is in that smallest fraction of self-published poetry that really means something, and Love is one of the best books I've ever read.

But away from the printed page, performance poetry certainly does ring my bell and tickle my fancy. Sure, it too has some codswallop, but a lot less. Performance poetry has a far higher strike rate perhaps because it is, by definition, done by people who do in fact get out more.

I first saw Claire Fauset as a performer at the open mic night of last year's Earth First! Summer Gathering. She did Between The Lines, a truly shocking piece about her lover who self-harms. Shocking not for any gory descriptions, but for its sensuality, the way it has all the enchantment and effervescence of being in love applied to a subject you only ever hear discussed in grave and/or judgemental terms. I sat there stunned, eyes welled up, as were the people I was with that night.

This June she turned up in the Speakers Forum at Glastonbury, as momentum built for the G8 protests, doing Make Poetry History, giving each verse an escalating gusto like the way key changes shift a song up a gear, powering out the poem so that the passion of the delivery matched the scale of the subjects covered and the whole thing engulfed the audience.

At Hammer & Tongue's poetry slam at the Big Green Gathering she did Art Not Oil, sharp commentary on the oil industry and sponsorship, cleverly unpicking the nuance of the evils of advertising, and which really needs to be heard (so read it to yourself thus) in that smiley-malevolent American PR voiceover tone.

The way she can tackle the personal subjects with the same captivating verbal dexterity as the political marks her out as a real talent.

On the blog, you have the words but not the delivery. It's the same difference as you get between reading a screenplay and seeing the movie. She herself acknowledges,

Without the tone, dynamics, pauses and gestures that give them life they're empty shells so you have to all imagine me jumping up and down in a big red frock and you might get some of the intended sprit.

She promises more to be posted soonly.

punish the sick

Patients with inflammatory bowel disease may benefit from cannabis-based drugs, UK scientists believe.

One of the team of researchers, Dr Karen Wright, 'said that the psychoactive effects and the legal implications associated with herbal cannabis use made it unsuitable as a treatment.'

If the law is preventing people from getting effective medicines, then surely the law should be changed rather than the medicine denied. As Jimmy Carter said, the punishment for using a drug should not be worse than the effects of using it.

And what of these psychoactive effects? The 'legal implications' are due to it being banned because it is used recreationally. It is used recreationally precisely because the psychoactive effects are really nice.

A friend of mine has self-medicated with cannabis for inflammatory bowel disease. He finds the mood elevation and relaxation to be perfectly acceptable side-effects. Indeed, as the condition is exacerbated by stress, it is probably dealing with it preventatively as well as reactively.

If caught, he faces up to two years in jail. If he's used an economy of scale and just bought a big stash he could get up to 14 years for intent to supply.

The only problems he's had are erratic supply (due to illegality), and bad reaction to impurities in cannabis resin which he used when he couldn't get herbal cannabis (again, due to illegality).

'it might be possible to make a synthetic cannabis-like drug' says the report. There already is one, dronabinol (marketed as Marinol), which has been prescribed since 1986 in various countries. Whilst first labelled as an anti-nauseant and appetite stimulant, it has been prescribed for a lot of different conditions, mostly the ones associated with cannabis treatments such as multiple sclerosis and depression.

The problem is that it is given as an oral capsule. It has to to be swallowed and digested before it works. This takes over an hour, often considerably longer. If a patient is suffering from a vomiting condition like bulimia, or chemotherapy side effects, they simply puke the pill up before it's kicked in. Conversely, cannabis smoked delivers effects in seconds.

Additionally, the long kick-in of the pill means it's hard to judge an effective dose. Patients often find, too late to do anything about it, that they have taken too little or too much. As smoked cannabis hits instantly, it's easy to see if it's enough and top it up if not.

Furthermore, the effects of swallowed cannabinoids are different to when they're inhaled. They last a lot longer, and the chemistry itself is different. As the liver processes cannabis it transforms some into a substance called 11-hydroxy-tetrahydracannabinol. This stuff is incredibly psychoactive, much more than smoked cannabis, as anyone who's eaten a hash cake can attest. So in many ways, inhalation is a far safer method of consumption.

There's a further problem in isolating the active elements as a pill. Scientists working on the glacially-paced UK government medical cannabis tests have found that cannabis contains elements that counteract the rushing nausea people commonly suffer when taking refined cannabinoid medicines. Essentially, we need the whole plant.

Obviously smoking brings other risks, but this could be countered by giving a vaporiser. Even if a patient does smoke, if they do so without tobacco it's unlikely to be a serious threat to their health.

And more to the point, shouldn't that be for the patient to decide?

Why should a patient have to suffer for years whilst a possible cannabis-like drug is developed and tested? We already have a cannabis-like drug now; it's called cannabis.

Cocaine, heroin, solvents; all are used in medicine in the UK despite having psychoactive effects and being highly toxic. Cannabis, despite being non-toxic, is not allowed to be used medicinally even though there is a range of conditions with proven benefits, and far more with strong anecdotal evidence.

Most prescribed medicines have side effects, some of them horrific. Another friend of mine is on citalopram, antidepressants whose listed proven side effects include depression(!), lactation and hallucinations. Jeez, imagine if it gave you all three at once.

But any drug has different effects on different users. Some patients don't get the side effects, others do but think it's better than not having the primary effects.

Patients should be told of the side effects then given the option to choose whether to use a medicine.

To say to people whose lives are ruined by serious painful conditions 'we have a medicine but you can't have any even if the only effects are positive' is as cruel an act as I can imagine.

robin cook the warmonger

He has been called 'one of the most principled... politicians of our time'.

Give this a few seconds thought and you realise the benchmark's not that high, rather like being the tallest dwarf. Still, there's been a deluge of this stuff saying how noble he was, resigning because of the Iraq war because he was such a man of integrity who could never sanction war without good reason.

In their 1997 election manifesto, Labour promised 'an ethical dimension' to their foreign policy.

After Labour won power and Cook became Foreign Secretary, he made a statement saying that there would be a ban on the sale of arms or other equipment 'which has obvious application for internal repression, in cases where the recipient country has a significant continuing record of such repression'.

Indonesia's occupation of East Timor involved, proportionally speaking, the largest act of genoocide in history. Over 200,000 people, a third of the population, were killed.

A British Aerospace factory in Lancashire had been making Hawk jets for Indonesia, sold as 'training' aircraft readily converted to frontline attack planes. Cook knew the ruse, and indeed in 1994 told the House of Commons 'Hawk aircraft have been observed on bombing runs in East Timor in most years since 1984'.

In January 1996 peace activists broke into the British Aerospace factory and smashed up a Hawk destined for Indonesia. They then called security and were arrested.

Their defence in court was that they were preventing a greater crime; the crimes against international law being perpetrated by the Indonesian military in East Timor with those Hawk jets. They were acquitted; the court accepted that Hawks were indeed being used as frontline weapons in the mass killing of an illegal occupation, in breach of UN, EU and British laws and regulations.

One of the first deeds of Cook's tenure in the Foreign Office was to allow 16 Hawk jets to Indonesia.

Whilst the export licenses were granted by the Major government, and Cook said through his junior minister Derek Fatchett there was no power to revoke the licenses, the government's own annual report on arms sales clearly acknowledged that they did indeed have the power. They just chose not to use it.

In the first two years of the Blair government, over 50 export licenses were granted to sell arms to Indonesia, many of which will have been for use in the genocide in East Timor. In the same period over a million pounds of British taxpayers' money was spent training dozens of Indonesian military officers at a base near Hull. This compares with just one being trained under the previous Major administration.

This was assitance to a brutal war that Cook knew all about, was in a position to stop assisting, had promised to do so, and yet chose instead to continue and escalate.

Even after he lost such power when Blair demoted him in 2001, he didn't feel any stirrings of conscience.

He resigned after disagreeing with the second vote to go to war with Iraq; but in the first one a month earlier he voted against a resolution saying 'the case for military action against Iraq as yet unproven'.

To see which of the votes was the incongruous one for Robin, consider that he was the man who'd presided over four years of the enforcement of sanctions against Iraq. Those sanctions denied essential medicines and were directly responsible for killing far more people - and predominantly the sick, the very young and very old - than the war.

The resignation vote came from a man whose career was on the slide, who'd just seen his last attempt at a grand project (reform of the House of Lords) get binned and so had little to lose. It was anomalous in the career of a man who, like any other major politician, talked peace and justice in opposition but was bent over for the Big Business warmongers once in power.

Once again, I warn you to beware of this sort of revisionist sycophantic shite when Thatcher goes. And once again, thank fuck for Harry Hutton.

kill the poor

Bobby had an eagle and a flag tattooed on his arm
Red white and blue to the bone when he landed in Kandahar
Left behind a pretty young wife and a baby girl
A stack of overdue bills and went off to save the world
Been a year now and he’s still there
Chasin’ ghosts in the thin dry air
Meanwhile back at home the finance company took his car
Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war

- Steve Earle, Rich Man's War.

Those who've seen Fahrenheit 9/11 will remember the chilling cynicism with which recruiters for the US military target poor areas. Needing cannon fodder for the wars that maintain and increase their wealth, the super-rich never send their own kids to fight.

In the Second World War - despite now proclaiming it as a war against racist ideology - the Americans sent troops in racially segregated divisions. The South Park thing of 'Operation Hide Behind Darkie' was horribly true. In Vietnam, the proportion of black troops was four times the proportion of blacks in the population at large.

These days it's not even poor non-white Americans being targeted. There's a scene in Gangs of New York where Irish immigrants arrive and queue up for processing at two tables. The first welcomes them to America and gives them citizenship. The second tells them that as a citizen they are liable for conscription, gives them their papers and sends them off to fight.

So it continues today, but without even making them citizens first. More than a quarter of American troops in Iraq are not even Americans. They are foreigners offered fast-track citizenship if they join up.

Despite the waffle from politicians about 'fighting for your country', wars are usually about fighting to get someone else's country. Our soldiers know it and say it.

Despite the LibDems' anti-war mask, Charles Kennedy has said the UK soldiers in Iraq are doing it 'for their country'. The only people doing that in Iraq, Charles, are the ones killing our soldiers.

As in the USA, in the UK recruiters like to come through our poor areas seeing who they can trawl.

As someone who both remembers the 1980s and has lived for a long time in inner cities, I can barely begin to imagine how grim these urban areas would've become after Thatcher's onslaught if they hadn't had the immigrant influx to keep energy and spark in them.

The celebration and spectacle of a caribbean carnival or an Asian mela are among the best things about a British urban summer.

This year, the Leeds Mela has several sponsors.

The main one? Royal Air Force.

iceland: dam nation

I've got a new article published.

Called Iceland: Dam Nation, it's about colossal plans to introduce heavy industry to Icleand, powered by a series of dams flooding vast areas of ecologically unique pristine wilderness.

Greenpeace are betraying their core principles and their members by keeping schtum on the issue. They have a deal whereby if Iceland stops whaling then Greenpeace promotes Iceland as a nice ecologically minded tourist destination, even though that is blatantly untrue.

The article's online here.