C.J. Stone's Blog, page 27

Who do we trust?

Russian jets in Syrian skies

A friend of mine asked me a question a while back, which has been niggling me ever since.

I put up a post on Facebook, which I got from fair.org, “F.A.I.R.” stands for Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting.

It was about the reporting of Russian airstrikes in Syria by the mainstream media. What it showed was that there was a certain amount of false reporting going on. The news appeared to be different before and after the Russian intervention.

On the 30th September the New York Times had reported airstrikes in Homs, but then added that it was a region of Syria not under the control of the Islamic State (IS).

There was also a report from the BBC, which quoted a Syrian activist network called the Local Co-ordination Committees, saying that the Russian airstrikes had hit five towns in the region, resulting in the deaths of 36 people, including five children, which also stated that IS were not in control of the area.

The implication is clear. The Russians were lying about the purpose of their engagement in Syria, and innocent people were being killed as a consequence.

However, an earlier report, on the 21st of September, from AFP, an international news agency, had carried a report about IS executing people for being gay in the same area. This was only ten days before, prior to the Russians entering the war.

So either IS were in the area, in which case Russia were bombing IS targets, or they weren’t, in which case IS weren’t executing gays in Homs.

One of the reports was a lie, and it wasn’t clear which one.

As an introduction to the article I had added a comment.

“Never trust the mainstream media” I said, to which my friend had replied in the comments section: “Who do we trust? Facebook posters? Left wing bloggers? Analysts? Commentators? Non mainstream media? Academics? Do we need to trust anyone? You all peddle fear and distrust in some form do you not?”

It’s an interesting question. Who do we trust?

Personally I’ve always distrusted the media, in whatever form. I can clearly remember a news report back in the 80s about an escape from East Berlin involving a Lada station wagon painted like a Soviet patrol car and a bunch of shop floor mannequins dressed up as Soviet troopers.

The story appeared on the BBC, as well as in other news outlets, and I can remember seeing images on the news and hearing the news reader telling the story and thinking at the same time that it was obviously fake.

About a week later it did turn out to be just that. It was a practical joke designed to mock the East German rulers and to highlight the tragedy of the wall. It had not, however, been an actual escape.

The fact that the BBC had dutifully carried the report, despite its absurdity, showed that even this venerable institution could be gullible about certain kinds of information. The BBC was wedded to a particular Cold War narrative that has since been thoroughly discredited.

I guess the reason for my scepticism came from the fact that I had been schooled by an old-school Communist into questioning the main thrust of Cold War propaganda. It allowed me, even in the pre-internet age, to retain a certain wariness about what the news industry routinely fed us, although in those days you couldn’t go on the internet to check.

 

Chomsky and Herman, in their seminal analysis of the media, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), referred to anti-Communism as one of the five filters through which Western Propaganda was historically funnelled. Since then the Cold War has ended, of course, the Americans have won, and there is very little call for anti-Communist rhetoric any more. But that has been replaced by another arch-villain in the public mind: Islamic terrorism.

It’s actually amazing, thinking back on it, the way the narrative shifted seamlessly from the one to the other in so short a space of time. Even before the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the Western powers were already embroiled in a new Hot War, the first Gulf War, which was to serve as the catalyst for everything that has happened since.

Saddam Hussein, a former ally of the USA in its continuing disputes with Iran, quickly became the new bogey-man on the World Stage.

I’m looking at the Wikipedia page “Timeline of the Gulf War” and searching in vain for something I know was significant at the time. It isn’t there.

In October 1990, after Saddam had invaded Kuwait, and declared it Iraq’s 19th province, a young Kuwaiti woman known only as Nayira in order to protect her identity (so it was claimed) gave a moving testimonial before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus describing what she had seen as a volunteer at the al-Addan hospital in Kuwait City. “While I was there,” she said, sobbing with emotion, “I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where… babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”

That speech had a huge impact on public opinion before the invasion. The story of the babies left to die on the cold hard hospital floor became the hook for the campaign to remove the vile dictator from the equally innocent and abused state of Kuwait. It was repeated again and again, in the news, in talk shows, on the radio and on TV. George Bush (the elder) told the story and it was referred to at the UN Security Council. The only trouble was: it wasn’t true.

The PR company that had been hired by the Kuwaiti government to present its case had failed to inform the Human Rights Caucus that Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family, daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US. There were no other witnesses to the events she described and later Kuwaiti investigators confirmed that the story was untrue. On January 12th 1991, however, the US Senate agreed by only five votes to support the Bush administration in its declaration of war.

Of course this isn’t the only time that Western nations, lead by the US, have invaded Iraq on the basis of false evidence. But the fact that this highly significant event is missing from the Wikipedia Timeline shows that the internet is also not a reliable source and can easily be manipulated to present a certain narrative.

 

Robert Fisk, he knows what he’s talking about.

So who do we trust?

I’m going to answer that question by telling you who I trust.

I trust Robert Fisk of the Independent, but not necessarily the Independent. Fisk lives in Beirut, is sympathetic to the people of the Middle East, and was the last Western reporter to interview Osama bin Laden. He knows what he’s talking about.

I trust Noam Chomsky, of course. Chomsky has been a consistent and thorough critic of US Imperialism since he first came out against the Vietnam War in the early ’60s. Chomsky is the first go-to if you need a dose of sanity amidst all the lies and disinformation that whirls around the mainstream press. He’s not always necessarily 100% right – and he himself would say that you should trust no one, not even Chomsky – but his insights are often profound and his world-view a useful counter-balance to the skewed reporting of the liberal press. He talks of Intellectual Self-Defence, as a means by which we can arm ourselves in our forays into the structural bias of News Industry. It is a useful quality to cultivate.

I trust Jonathan Cook, a Nazareth based reporter who used to write for the Guardian. It is Cooks experience working for the left-leaning paper that offers us insight into how the news is constructed by the liberal press.

I trust Chris Floyd and his Empire Burlesque blog.

I trust Chris Hedges, John Hilley and John Pilger; although a journalist friend of mine says he dislikes Pilger for his self-regarding style of journalism, where every story has to include some reference to himself. Me, I’ll forgive him that. He is still a protective barrier against the drumbeats of war that echo through the pages of most papers.

The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald‘s on-line platform is always worth paying attention to.

In terms of TV news, Channel 4 is the best, although you still need to be wary while watching it.

I like Democracy Now! (“Democracy Now, the war and peace report: I’m Amy Goodman!”)

The Real News Network is also very good.

I’m a subscriber to the Information Clearing House by Tom Feeley. What this does is to collect news from around the globe. Some of it is contradictory, but this is not a bad thing. It shows the varieties of information which is available out there. Watch out for the comments though. Its full of conspiracy theories and weird rants by people with possible mental health issues.

I like the Morning Star, which is lovely in that it wears its heart (and its bias) on its sleeve. It is profoundly non-cynical. It doesn’t pretend to objective reporting, which means you know precisely where it is coming from and can judge its contents accordingly. Tony Benn used to write for the Morning Star. Jeremy Corbyn still does.

I like the New Internationalist and Red Pepper.

I’m also partial to Fidel Castro‘s occasional rants. It’s good to know he’s still alive out there in the world, and still kicking arse.

So ends my potted guide to the alternative news industry. I’m sure there are plenty of other reporters and news outlets out there worth clicking on to. Many of them you will find referenced in the pages of Information Clearing House, which remains my go-to outlet for most of the World News.

Airstrikes for Dummies

Airstrikes in Syria

Last week David Cameron presented the case for airstrikes in Syria.

He said: “Throughout Britain’s history we have been called on time and again to make the hardest of decisions in defence of our citizens and our country. Today one of the greatest threats we face to our security is the threat from Isil [Isis].”

I took the report from the Guardian website. You will notice that they felt the need to explain who Isil are by adding an alternative name in brackets. This is just in case there might be some confusion.

The group are also known as Daesh by Middle Eastern commentators, and as Islamic State by themselves.

The United States is already bombing them, as is France, Russia, and the Syrian government. Also fighting them on the ground are Hezbollah, the Syrian Arab Army, the Iranians and various Kurdish factions.

The Kurds are considered to be terrorists by Turkey, who are bombing the Kurds even as the Kurds are fighting Isil. Hezbollah are also called terrorists by the United States and Israel.

The reason that Cameron wants to bomb Syria is that Isil claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris on November 13th.

However, the people who committed the atrocity were from Belgium and from France, not from Syria.

Also involved in the war are the al Nusra Front, an al Qaeda affiliate, and the Free Syrian Army, along with a rag-bag collection of mercenaries, crazies and veterans from earlier wars in Libya and Iraq, which we helped to start.

There may be as many as 120 different groups operating in Syria, all of whom would be called terrorists if they were doing what they are doing on the streets of Western cities; as it is we call them allies and number them amongst the 70,000 troops on the ground Cameron has stated will be mobilised to defeat Isil.

Many of them are jihadist groups hardly distinguishable from Isil.

Meanwhile Turkey downed a Russian fighter jet after it crossed briefly into Turkish airspece. Turkey is a member of NATO and a key American ally.

Russia has accused Turkey of aiding Isil.

Yesterday (December 2nd 2015) Britain carried out the first airstrikes in Syria after MPs voted in favour of military action.

So, to clarify:

We are bombing the people of one country, because people from a second country attacked people in a third.

Fortunately we are able to differentiate the good terrorists from the bad terrorists.

Half of the world is also bombing, but no one can agree who the enemy is, let alone what to call them.

Does anyone expect a good result from this?

Down From London by Alison Dilnutt

I have a confession to make. I took part in a literary fraud a while back.

The fraud involved me pretending to have a conversation with a person who didn’t actually exist.

The person is CK Blaine and is the creation of local writer Alison Dilnutt.

Alison is one of the people I deliver to on my postal round.

She used to run a blog called Living the Dream, supposedly written by this character, Conrad Blaine.

Conrad is a DFL, and an annoying one at that. He is somewhat delusional, thinking he’s fitting in with the locals when he’s not, and he has some patronising views on women.

Alison has been using this character satirically, as a way of observing our town.

In the blog post I took part in Conrad has been going through a mid-life crisis, having found grey hairs in his beard, which has prompted him to dye it.

Unfortunately the dye came out wrong, and he decides he needs a role model: someone who is not afraid to let his hair go grey. He picks on me.

So this is the conceit: Conrad Blaine accosts me on the street while I’m going about my postal round and tries to ask me questions about my beard.

In fact the questions came in the form of an email, which I answered by email, and which were then incorporated into the blog. The result is enjoyably absurd.

The blog has been going for over a year now, and has picked up quite a following.

Lots of people found CK Blaine suitably annoying, which was the point.

What many people didn’t realise is that Mr Blaine is in fact a character from a book.

The book is called Down From London: Chasing the dream, Stalked by a nightmare, and it is set in Whitstable.

Twenty copies will be available in Harbour Books over the weekend.

A number of my friends have read it, and say it is unputdownable. The reviews on Amazon are universally positive.

Alison published the book herself through print on demand.

It will be interesting to see how it sells.

It is wrong to stream kids from the age of 11

The daughter of a friend of mine recently failed her Kent Test. So I finally have proof of something I’ve been thinking for a while. It’s not Kent youngsters who are stupid: it’s the Kent Test.

This is a girl who has a reading age of 14; who has been reading by herself since the age of seven; who is imaginative and creative, funny and intelligent, kind and considerate and who has all the qualities to make her an accomplished and well-rounded human being. And yet she failed her test.

I won’t go into details here. There were mitigating circumstances. But she can’t be the only youngster in the county to suffer real anguish and humiliation in failing a test that, on another occasion, she would have passed with ease.

Shall I tell you what the Kent Test is really all about?

It’s about class.

Well-off people hire tutors to ensure that their children pass. Less well off people don’t.

So the county’s grammar schools are packed with the children of the privileged.

They aren’t more intelligent than the other kids: merely more tutored in the art of passing tests.

People of Kent, why are you so deferential? There’s a good reason why the 11-plus was abolished in nearly every other county in the UK.

It is simply wrong to start streaming children at this tender age.

There are different kinds of intelligence, and children develop at different speeds.

My son had a highly developed spacial and visual awareness. He loved taking things apart and putting them back together again.

He had a logical mind and was deeply fascinated about the way the world worked. He was scientifically curious and yet artistic too, with a real flair for colour and design.

He too failed the test.

Why put people into boxes?

There is so much more to being human than the ability to get good grades in exams.

My friend’s daughter used to love school, but this obsession with testing has knocked all joy of learning out of her.

Is this the kind of education we want to inflict on our children?

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
fax  01227 762415
email kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

Stop trying to score cheap political points

I went to the Remembrance service at the war memorial on Sunday. I was there to accompany my father, who was on active duty in the Korean War.

My problem with the service was how relentlessly Christian it was. How many of us are Christian these days? I suspect not many, though all of us are touched by the effects of war.

I must add that the Rev Rachel Webbley did a good job in broadening her sermon out, referring to “our friends the Muslims” at one point. I think that was a bold statement, possibly inserted to ensure that the meaning of remembrance couldn’t be hijacked by the far right.

There have been attempts. Britain First, a far right hate group with a large presence on Facebook, posted a photograph of two of their members standing either side of a couple of young sea cadets, saying they were “standing watch over poppy sellers to ensure they don’t get any hassle from left wing anarchists and Islamists.”

It was a fabrication. In fact the Britain First members had merely asked to have their photograph taken with the children, who, not knowing who they were, were happy to oblige.

This wasn’t the only made-up thing on Remembrance Day. Another involved Jeremy Corbyn and his supposed lack of respect in not bowing deeply enough in front of the Cenotaph.

I don’t know about you, but I am getting heartily sick of this relentless campaign of vilification against the Labour leader by certain sections of the media.

Unlike some of the figures who flanked him, Mr Corbyn has never put British troops in harms way by fabricating evidence in order to profit from a war that nobody wanted.

It later transpired that, while the other party leaders and ex prime ministers had gone off for a slap-up lunch, Mr Corbyn had stayed behind to watch the veterans march and to speak to some of the participants afterwards.

So much for a lack of respect.

What I think shows a lack of respect is newspapers and other pundits using this solemn occasion to score cheap political points.

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
fax  01227 762415
email kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

Caught by sneaky wardens

So that’s twice now I’ve been landed with a parking ticket in Whitstable.

The first time was outside Samphire restaurant on the High Street. It was about seven o’clock in the evening. I was dropping off my aged and partially-sighted father at the Shobab, where we were meeting the rest of my family for dinner, and parked in what, to my untrained eye, looked like a parking bay.

You know the place I mean. It’s off the road, causing no traffic hazard and the double yellow lines go outside the bay rather than inside it. There are no signs to show that it is anything other than a parking bay, and lots of cars park there on a regular basis.

But it is not a parking bay. It is place where, despite the obvious invitation to park, no parking is allowed.

The second time was in the car park off Victoria Street. This time I was out with my dad and my brother eating fish and chips at VC Jones’ and – stupid me – I thought that that there would be no parking fees after seven in the evening.

In fact I parked there at around 7.20, and had a ticket by 7.21, which leads me to suspect that the traffic warden was lurking about in the bushes, waiting for just such an opportunity.

But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What’s the point of parking restrictions? I always thought they had something to do with safety, with stopping traffic hazards and congestion on our through roads at peak times of the day. That’s why most parking restrictions are dropped after six in the evening.

Not so in Whitstable, it seems. In our little town the council has extended parking restrictions till late in the evening, and employed an enforcement officer to sneak about after hours while other people are eating their dinner in order to catch them out.

In Whitstable the parking restrictions have nothing to do with safety. Rather they are a way for Canterbury City Council to earn itself some extra income at the public’s expense.

We’re being asked to make impossible choices

I’m just looking at Kent County Council’s budget consultation document for 2016-2017. It makes for abysmal reading.

After asking us how much Council Tax we would be willing to pay, it goes on to offer a series of increasingly impossible choices.

We are asked to identify the most and the least important services from a set of lists of what £1,000 of council spending buys. There are 14 lists altogether.

Here are some examples:

Twenty two faulty street lights to be repaired; sixty two attendances by a young person at their local youth centre; five hundred journeys on subsidised bus routes; nine weeks of taxi transport to and from school for one child with special educational needs; four days of supported living for an adult with learning difficulties.

That’s just the first screen.

I couldn’t go any further because to do so would be to agree that any one of these services was more important than the others: that street lights are more important than youth clubs, or that subsidised bus routes are more important than children with special needs.

It’s not really a fair choice is it?

In case you haven’t figured it out, it’s a con. These impossible choices are being foisted on us because the government has already made a number of other choices, none of which were open to consultation.

The choice of whether to replace the Trident nuclear submarine programme, for example, at the cost of £130 billion.

The choice of whether to continue subsidising corporations to the tune of £93 billion a year.

The choice of whether to go on giving tax breaks to the super-rich or to allow corporations to register their businesses in offshore accounts or to pay the Chinese to build a new nuclear reactor.

There are thousands of choices that the government has already made before forcing these choices on to the tax payer by cutting funding to local councils.

And central to all of this, of course, is the chancellor’s choice to go on imposing austerity when nearly every economist in the world is telling him that it will only make things worse.

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Message from Canterbury and Whitstable Stop the Cuts Group:
The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader for Labour has shown massive support for an anti -austerity programme giving hope and confidence to thousands of people. Meetings are taking place locally to discuss how groups from across the political spectrum can work to fight cuts.
For more information:
Canterbury and Whitstable Stop The Cuts Group
Tel: 07970074230
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhitsAnticuts
email: cwstopcuts@gmail.com

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
fax  01227 762415
email kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

Is Blair beginning to feel the heat over Iraq?

The news this week is that Tony Blair has finally apologised for the Iraq War.

Well not quite. This is what he said, in an interview with Fareed Zakaria for CNN: “I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong.”

This is the mendacious wriggling of a lawyer trying to get himself off the hook.

I can clearly remember a counter-dossier, by Alan Simpson MP and the academic and campaigner Dr Glen Rangwala, which reviewed the same intelligence available to the government at the time but concluded that there were no WMDs.

Blair would certainly have seen this.

I also remember Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector in Iraq, pleading to be given more time to pursue the evidence on the ground, before being forced out by the impending attack. Later Mr Blix declared that in his view the war was illegal.

And, of course, how can any of us forget the revelation by Dr David Kelly, as told to Andrew Gilligan and revealed on the BBC, that the Prime Minister’s office had “sexed-up” the evidence?

Gilligan lost his job because of that, and we all remember what happened to Dr Kelly.

Blair is being “economical with the truth” as usual.

Given that newly released emails show that he had signed up to the war in 2002, a year before the invasion, this disingenuous apology has the air of someone already rehearsing his defence before the inevitable summons arrives.

Current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has made it clear that, if it can be shown that Blair has committed war crimes, then he should be made to stand trial. It’s no wonder the Blairites are spooked.

Waging a war that is not in self-defence is a war crime.

“Not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole,” according to the Nuremberg Tribunals.

Fortunately for George W. Bush – or deliberately perhaps—the United States is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court.

The United Kingdom, however, is, which means that Blair would be liable to prosecution.

Personally I can’t wait.

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
fax  01227 762415
email kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

Honesty is the best policy

Tony Blair famously employed spin as a way of persuading the electorate to support his agenda.

So in the run-up to the Iraq War, Blair successfully spun the intelligence to make it appear that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed within 45 minutes.

It was not an actual lie, but it was nothing like the truth either.

David Cameron is nowhere near as sophisticated. He simply tells you what he thinks you want to hear.

Before the last election, for example, when asked by David Dimbleby on Question Time if he had plans to cut tax-credits, he said, quite clearly and distinctly, that tax credits would not fall. We now know that this wasn’t true.

More recently, in his conference speech, he said that Jeremy Corbyn “thinks the death of Osama bin Laden was a tragedy.”

In fact the “tragedy” that Corbyn was describing was the lack of a trial, not his death.

“This was an assassination attempt, and is yet another tragedy, upon a tragedy, upon a tragedy,” he said, adding that “the World Trade Centre was a tragedy, the attack on Afghanistan was a tragedy, the war in Iraq was a tragedy.”

Those were his exact words. How many of you would disagree?

This is the difference between the two men. One of them reflexively evades the truth, the other, just as reflexively, speaks his mind.

Sometimes, indeed, Corbyn is honest in a way that is not necessarily to his benefit.

When asked if he would “push the button” and use Britain’s nuclear deterrent, he said no; a fact that was spun by his enemies into making it appear that he was soft on defence.

But this is insane. No one but a mad person would unleash nuclear weapons in advance of an attack, but using them after, aside from being too late, would also show that they were never a deterrent in the first place.

Maybe the question should be, who would you rather lead our country: a person who stands on his principles and always tells the truth, sometimes even to his own detriment, or someone who will say anything to get himself elected?

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
fax  01227 762415
email kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

Let’s not lose precious high street trader

I’ve just been talking to Belinda Murray, of Herbaceous on Oxford Street.

She tells me she is thinking of closing down, the reason being that she is finding it hard to make a living any more.

She’s a qualified herbalist. Trying to run the shop has distracted her from her main vocation.

During the Oyster Festival she had one of her windows broken, while, in another incident, somebody stole a handful of jewellery.

The Oyster Festival wasn’t the boost it usually is. Instead, it cost her this year, and not just in earnings: in peace of mind and a sense of security too.

To the vandals who broke her window and the thieves who stole her rings: you are a bunch of blazing idiots. I would use stronger language, but this is a family paper. How brave of you to target an independent trader. Belinda is a credit to our town.

I suspect that Herbaceous isn’t the only shop which is experiencing difficulties at the moment. The supermarkets are beginning to crowd in on our High Street while rents are going through the roof.

Belinda tells me that she feels sure that spies from the supermarkets visit her every so often to check on her stock and to lower their prices accordingly.

This is trouble with the multinationals. Maybe they appear cheaper in the short term, but they use their financial muscle to stifle the competition, and, once they have a monopoly, they are able to raise their prices again.

Herbaceous sells health and organic food, herbs and spices, jewellery and various crafted goods.

Belinda is generally very competitive but says that a lot of people pass by her shop because they don’t know what to expect.

Once they step over the threshold, however, and discover what she has on offer, they usually come again. She calls this her “herbaceous border”.

So if anyone can give her advice, or ideas to help her find her “unique selling point”, then pop in the shop and talk to her. You might even find you want to buy something.

It would be a pity if Herbaceous were to close. The town is losing its personality as a centre for independent retail.

It’s up to all of us to help keep the diversity of Whitstable’s High Street alive against the fierce competition of the supermarkets.

For more information go to the Herbaceous website at: http://www.herbsandremedies.com/