Clinging To A Rock

The Die-in-Hell option

2012-01-28T17:16:00.004Z

According to a story planted by godbotherers in the Manx Indifferent, the Bishop is welcoming yet another professional pro-life misdirection artist to the island.
Baroness Ilora Finlay will give a lunchtime lecture in February at St. Georges, a bat sanctuary near Athol Street in Douglas which the Manx Diocese has spent an unsuccessful decade trying to ‘reinvent’ as the Manx equivalent to St Pauls in a desperate attempt to drag in some finance sector punters. Unfortunately, they did this just as the real finance sector was moving to purpose built out of town premises, leaving a few aging winos from the unregulated 1980’s to stare at their Athol Street office walls until the bailiffs turn up.
Finlay passes herself off as a ‘palliative care’ expert. Indeed when not collecting expenses at the House of Lords she is Professor of Palliative Medicine at Cardiff University School of Medicine, which is not as impressive as it sounds.
Because 21st century ‘professorships’ are often little more than an honorary title given to a tame academic, in return for services rendered to whichever industry paid the university to create the post. This scam works both ways. The university gains a ‘department’ and maybe some paying students: the sponsor gets academic endorsement of their 'product'.
In this case, the palliative care industry is an ugly combination of private health care contractors and profit-orientated faith groups running facilities for society’s most vulnerable and desperate, using semi-qualified and voluntary labour to offer bogus ‘feelgood’ therapies rather than state of the art equipment and medical ‘best practice’.
She also chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Dying Well, which again is not as big a deal as it sounds. In fact, just a ragbag of pro-life charities and right wing faith groups lunching with the Conservative Christian Fellowship and claiming expenses.
The Die In Hell attitude to any genuine attempt at a cross-party discussion of end of life care, which would have to consider options like assisted suicide, is to try and prevent such discussion by refusing to join in unless they get to run the committee, and when it does happen to complain loudly to the Daily Mail about the findings because they ‘were not consulted’.
Pretty much what you would expect, in fact, from a nasty little industry with a fortune to lose if people could make choices about the end of their lives, instead of having to die in desperately sad dives where no decent person would allow a dog to conk out, never mind their nearest and dearest.
But Finlay is an unashamed career prodnose, to be honest. Her other ‘achievements’ include proposing a bill to outlaw smoking in public buildings in Wales, pushing the Sunbeds (Regulation) Bill through the Lords (because it was in danger of being laughed out of the Commons) and attempting a private bill (whose main beneficiary would be cheapskate private health parasites) to change opting in to organ donations to having to opt out.
From all this, she gives the impression of being little more than an opinionated elitist who thinks ordinary people have no right to take decisions about the way they spend (or end) their lives, and whose very bodies should be the property of the state and her Magic Invisible Friend, but who is happy enough to draw a salary from either the state or the private sector to spout such twaddle.
A bit like a bishop, in fact. Which is why nobody except the kind of chump who likes superstitious claptrap will be turning out to listen.

Of Cultures and Vultures

2012-01-28T13:32:00.006Z

The announcement (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/mnh/guardiansofislan.xml) that: “Applications are currently being invited from members of the public who are interested in becoming Trustees of Manx National Heritage (Manx Museum and National Trust)” made me laugh out loud.
Why? Well, partly because a former Trustee used to tell me that MNH board meetings are like a wet Friday in a small town morgue. He seriously wondered if some of the superannuated fossils in the room were still alive, and used to joke that one executive deliberately dulled proceedings and used their failure to respond as a sign of assent when trying to push through dodgy business.
But mostly because any serious analysis of ‘Manx Heritage’ (there hasn’t been much) would worry about the McDonaldisation of ‘heritage’ to suit the tourist trade, and in particular the whimsies of potential upper middle class visitors with a drippy hippy past and more money and spare time than sense.
Related to that is the more serious problem that the public cash and effort thrown at ‘culture’ is based on a (frankly) racist definition of ‘culture’ that even some Nazis would have problems with. It is propagated by folk who simply don’t understand the basics of sociology, anthropology and cultural (and more particularly subcultural) theory – or anything else which actually studies how societies tick and individuals interact within those societies. They completely fail to recognise the contributions and lives of the vast majority of Manx residents, past or present.
The few serious studies which do are all by off-island academics who consider the matter in contrast to developments in heritage, tourism and cultural policy elsewhere and end up falling about laughing. I know about them because some 20 years ago I was headhunted to do a Ph.D. as part of a massive project by professors at two once great universities who were being funded to make the only significant analysis, then or since, of regional development and the late 20th century ‘heritage industry’.
The disinterest of the Manx government in either current affairs or serious cultural analysis meant I never got a grant, so the project went on without me. But I stayed in touch with the professors and we still swap jokes (disguised as examples of political and bureaucratic cretinism), or commiserate with each other about declining standards in academia and the state of the world. Ironically, the completed project featured prominently in the readings for my Cultural Studies M.A. through the Open University, which I also funded myself due to continued Manx government disinterest in such topics a decade later.
One of the few interesting, though not encouraging, snippets of information to come from the latest futile exercise is the information pack (see http://www.gov.im/lib/docs/cso/mnhtrusteesinformationpack.pdf) which chunters on ad nauseum to excuse the project, but also mentions that any loser considered brainless enough to join the Trustees will get £78 a time (plus around 50p a mile ‘travelling expenses’) to snooze or pick their noses while 3rd division marketing morons lay out the strategies by which the great Manx public will subsidise our regression back to the Bronze Age.
I keep hearing about retired executive types who are trying to flog the poor judgement that ended their careers to Manx government ‘advisory bodies’. Jobs like this should keep them in claret for another day without a free business lunch - and never were two dimwitted interests better matched.

Oh ye of little faith!

2012-01-20T20:50:00.005Z

As I hope every sensible person will have realised by now, Age Concern is a notorious bogus charity that preys on the elderly while posing as a pressure group. In reality most of their real lobbying is on behalf of the pensions and insurance industry with which it is so closely linked, having (with the help of such powerful interest groups and the blindness or sheer lack of social concern of politicians and civil servants) simply put every small, local and genuine charity worried about older people out of business. This also explains why the policies it wants most involve the private health industry taking on 'vital services' which the government can 'no longer afford'.
Considering these links to private (i.e second rate and cost-cutting) health I have often wondered why it needs to beg so much money from the public .Or perhaps that is just a charade too, like other local bogus charities most of whose income, policies and even 'voluntary help' is actually provided by government.
Still according to this week's Courier, this 'charity' is looking for a member of the clergy to lead a sponsored abseil laughingly entitled 'A Leap Of Faith'.
So here is my question to the religulous.
If any of the clergy really had so much faith, why would they need a rope?
Mind you, I still would not pay to watch them jump without one. On principle, I never support bogus charities, or any other drain on the weak and vulnerable.

Beyond the lunatic fringe - and beyond a joke

2012-01-20T20:36:00.005Z

According to http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=42869 and Manx Radio:
“A former Lord Mayor of Belfast is speaking in Port Erin this weekend about how he turned his life around from an unpromising start. With dyslexia and little education, Reverend Eric Smyth was told at a young age he wouldn't amount to anything. However, after finding religion he went on to become Lord Mayor of the city and, in that role, met former president of the United States Bill Clinton, and was awarded an OBE for his charity work.”
Well, that’s one interpretation of it. Possibly provided by someone with little or no link to the real world, or just a compulsive liar.
It might be nearer the truth to consider Smyth as a professional bigot who became a DUP councillor in 1981, only keeping his seat for most of those years because he moved house after the wards were redefined in 1985, which meant the only constituents he had to please were the Shankill hardliners. He also tried regularly to run for the Northern Ireland Assembly in its various forms but failed – dismally - eventually even quitting the DUP in 2000 because they would not back his mayoral campaign.
He only met Clinton because he was contractually obliged to welcome him to Belfast in his role as mayor between 1995 and 1996. After Clinton had gone he told the press that "the President stands for republicanism and is a supporter of it". There was an election looming, but being such a fair minded Christian this cannot have been connected.
And as such a firm Christian man, what about his involvement in any ecumenical efforts which might have brought an end to Northern Ireland’s ‘troubles’? You can get a sample of his stance on those things by his call for a boycott of Catholic shops towards the end of his mayoral year in 1996.
The ‘charity work’? Well, both his sons were jailed for drug dealing, so rather than just apologise for being a poor parent he spent time conning free trips abroad under the banner of a bogus social campaign called European Cities Against Drugs then coming home and preaching about it. Not too seriously though, as upsetting the drug rackets which funded rival Shankill paramilitaries at the time would have lost him votes. Actually, considering Smyth went on record in 2004 supporting a Shankill hardline view that Loyalist paramilitaries should not give up their weapons, we can be fairly sure he is no pacifist or critic of violence either – at least not violence inflicted (with state help) by one Christian faction on another one without such friends in political high places.
As Northern Ireland left the dark ages and Smyth’s political career nosedived he spent more and more time as Reverend of the Jesus Saves Mission Church, a sorry bunch of chancers he founded which is closely aligned with the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, which is in turn a breakaway of Paisley’s similarly monikered freakfest. He disagreed with the DUP's implementation of the St Andrews Agreement, and following Paisley's agreement to stand down as Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church, he stated that Paisley "has gone back on everything he ever preached and there was no way he could continue as leader although I do think he should have stood down years ago."
So, a freeloading halfwit who not only broke away from Ulster’s most right wing political party because they got softer on Catholics, but also broke away from a church run by Paisley (which was in turn little more than the DUP at prayer) because it didn’t hate women, gays and most other people enough, then tried to form a hardline splinter group to the right of the hardline splinter group….
Hmm. Just the kind of wholesome character you need to spend a weekend taking moral advice from, isn’t he?

Sod Manx marital apartheid. Get hitched in a civilised country instead

2012-01-13T21:12:00.004Z

What passes for a Manx media is all of a twitter over the idea that two hotels have been licenced as wedding venues(see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/two_hotels_get_licences_to_host_marriage_ceremonies_1_4129915 ).
….and this is progress because…….?
Bottom line is that we still suffer from a system of marital apartheid on the Isle of Man.
Absolute bottom line - if you believe in magic a bloke in a dress can legally marry you in a ceremony where all sorts of flowery language and music can be (and often is) incorporated, asking his Imaginary Magic Friend to bear witness. If you’re slightly more rational you can only be legally married by a civil servant, and if you depart from the dull as ditchwater script by so much as a word it is null and void.
Why, exactly, is it an improvement that you can go through this grey charade in a hotel rather than some small town government office?
The funniest thing is that, thanks to the continued bigotry of some church leaders, the only people who now have total equality in marriage are gays and lesbians. Because they, and only they, can only be legally hitched in a civil ceremony. Following that they are free to either find a liberal priest who will bless them or to make up their own imaginative ceremony according to what they hold most dear. Religious or secular, that ceremony makes no difference, because only the civil ceremony which proceeds it is legally binding.
This is exactly the same circumstances as I experienced, years ago, for my wedding in Hungary where, like many European countries, it is a normal, common sense notion that the state presides over some token rubberstamping of your relationship to make it all legal, then you go off and do it as quietly or spectacularly as you like in a ceremony which means something special to you and those who matter most to you, even if it’s pure nonsense to everyone else.
So if you’re not gay and you’re getting married, take my advice. Sod waiting around for this third world ruritanian backwater to join the 21st century. Set a date with these guys (see http://www.humanism-scotland.org.uk/ceremonies/index.php ), then take a break in Scotland and get legally married in style – and most importantly in a ceremony that means something to YOU – in a country which doesn’t treat the huge rational majority like kids with special needs.
Just do it.
You KNOW it makes sense. You KNOW you deserve it.

Bogus charity bingo night goes ballistic

2012-01-12T20:38:00.003Z

Last November ( see http://clingingtoarock.blogspot.com/2011/11/another-day-another-parasitic-quango.html ) I prophesied that a Manx bogus charity was running out of government funds and would launch a new moral panic to stay in business. To recap, I said that Isle of Man Alcohol Advisory Service had “struggled for a year or two now to justify further direct government funding, or to use their relationship with government to demand ‘charitable donations’ from local retailers in return for not further infantalising the whole process of buying alcohol.” I then outlined how they would join forces with a similar British government puppet charity to talk up the ‘dangers’ of gambling until someone threw enough money at them.
Not only have I been proved right, but a report today (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/study_to_provide_insight_into_gambling_1_4133011 )suggests that (1) they’ll split the loot with their Brit ally and (2) in the process open up a process of back door taxation of Manx businesses to subsidise a Brit government ‘third sector’ initiative.
Funnily enough, this means the Brits get to tackle an entirely imaginary ‘social problem’ without having to spend a penny or employ a single public sector ‘professional’ or ‘expert’. Sadly, that doesn’t mean the problem of the imaginary social problem will go away too.
This all began when in 2007 GamCare received 80% of a £3.5 million budget set aside on government mandate by the UK gambling industry to ‘promote responsible gambling’. They were hoping to bump that up to £5.34 million in 2010 and 2011, but the latest accounts they’ve submitted to the Charity Commission suggest that the gambling industry told them where to get off, also that the ‘charity’ still gets no other income apart from their gambling industry hush money.
And on today's 'news', I should also say that the pseudo-survey is a classic marketing scam, and now a bog standard tool for the moral panic industry.
As I’ve explained elsewhere, the trick is to decide what answers you need, then set the questions and participant parameters so that you can get no others. It is ridiculously easy, as the full results and methodology will not be in the public domain, old fashioned rigorously neutral academics able or willing to find the time to take such nonsense apart are thin on the ground, and even cynical lay people tend to take such surveys at face value if they’re for a ‘good cause’ or concern a matter which decades of biased reporting lead us to falsely believe is a ’social problem’.
A classic example is the infamous regular ESPAD 'surveys' of ‘’under-age drinking’ which, here and elsewhere, have kept an entire bogus therapy industry in funds for over a decade now. But even right wing amateurs like the Mothers Union are getting in on the scam (I mentioned their scare tactics over ‘parenting’ some while back, and now it seems they have David Cameron’s ear, so keeping tweedy geriatrics with one foot in ga-ga-land off the backs of decent parents is going to be an increasing problem in the coming year).
If only such imaginary problems and the proponents of their equally imaginary solutions could go away or be forgotten as quickly as bad dreams.
Sadly, I would not bet on that any time soon. Not considering the amount of public money wasted dreaming them up, along with ever more pointless employment opportunities for the bogus therapists involved.

Marriage advice from Hell

2012-01-10T21:44:00.004Z

It seems I’m not the only one raising an ironic eyebrow at the news that a notorious ‘family values’ group is being allowed to run a marriage workshop at Ramsey Town Hall.
It’s tempting to get serious, and write a letter to the Commissioners checking if they have a policy on preventing the promotion of hatred, because strip away the veneer and Care for the Family seem to dislike a lot. The track record of their parent, CARE, suggests either discomfort or flat out disgruntlement around gays, and pretty much anyone and anything else that stands for decency, compassion and, in general, a happy, self-disciplined existence that doesn’t subsidise religious parasitism.
Probably not worth the bother, because this sad bunch have done a pretty good job of putting themselves out of business anyway, which is the only thing to thank them for. Take away any losers they’ve picked up from Living Hell’s Grammar School ‘outreach’ and the organisers will be talking to themselves. Mind you, evangelical headbangers spend so much time talking to invisible friends they might not notice the difference.
What might be funny is if some gay couples turned up and joined in – not that any well balanced couple planning to marry for love rather than outright desperation would hang around for more than five minutes.
Actually, what would be much better would be if people who could not be less qualified to 'advise' on personal relationships took advice from other people instead of being not only arrogant enough to offer it, but dishonest enough to charge for knowledge they simply do not have. Particularly, they should learn from those who have struggled for years against bigotry to maintain such relationships.
Who knows, if they actually listened they might even learn something. And considering the sorry mess that most evangelicals pass off as 'family life', many of them need to learn a lot - and fast.

...and who guards the moral vanguard? (Pot, kettle, black)

2012-01-07T18:10:00.004Z

There’s an interesting example on Taking Liberties (see http://taking-liberties.squarespace.com/blog/2012/1/6/the-hypocrisy-of-ash-stephen-williams-and-peter-hain.html ) of what happens when an English MP asks for details of how a dubious ‘health charity’ is funded and what influence it might have on the Department of Health and other relevant government bodies.
To be specific, Tory MP Karl McCartney wrote to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health asking for details of how ‘public health charity’ Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) is funded. McCartney also wanted details about the number of people associated with ASH who have placements with the Department of Health and other areas of government.
Whatever your views on smoking, this sounds like a reasonable question from an MP wanting to check just how ‘independent’ is the advice used by government to make policies (which could well include the decision to further openly or discreetly underwrite ‘public health charities’). So it seems odd that the Chairman of the APPG’s response was to demand, via a rather one-sided press report of the affair, that government “tighten up the regulation of lobbying" because McCartney once “accepted hospitality totalling more than £1,300 from Japan Tobacco International (JTI), which produces Benson and Hedges and Silk Cut".
All McCartney actually did was to accept some tickets from JTI to the Chelsea Flower Show - and incidentally to scrupulously declare he had in the Register of Members Interests, from which source he appears to have been grassed up to tame hacks by someone we can assume was not quite ‘neutral’ in such matters.
Manx politicians really aren’t bright enough to operate at such a level of duplicity, but this nonsense, when mixed with the prominent reporting of the latest ‘drink driving campaign’ (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=42507 for example) did remind me of similar silliness in the Isle of Man.
The obvious question to me is: ‘If a month of dedicated police work, stopping over 800 vehicles, produces just nine prosecutions, while on average at least one motorist a month is found guilty of drink driving anyway without dedicating specific resources, then isn’t this an annual PR stunt, and a waste of time and public money?’
If you ask any police source not threatened by budget cuts that question, or check any regional or national police annual statistics, the answer is ‘Yes’, because the only evidence of more drink driving over Christmas is arrests made only as a result of dedicating all police resources and much police overtime to seeking those arrests.
There is, on the other hand, no evidence that people drink and drive more over the holiday period. It is a folk myth, fed by press too lazy to look for real news, which in turn causes the police to mount campaigns (which they know are pointless) simply to avoid criticism from, say, the kind of tabloid reading politico who is too disconnected from reality to kick off about real world issues rather than fairy stories.
But also touching on that local story – the funniest thing is that the biggest alcohol-related waste of Manx police time and resources that I know of was actually CAUSED by characters who, elsewhere, dominate local (urban myth and junk science led) government consultations over alcohol.
To be specific, a charity and an enterprising retail manager put on a fair trade wine-tasting evening for local bigwigs. No problem with that – it was intended to introduce senior government figures to the idea that ‘fair trade’ was not only a decent (and achievable) moral goal for the island, but that the produce is pretty good too.
Unfortunately, those senior government figures sampled rather too much of the ‘product’, and this was also an era when ministers (of either government or the cloth) were too posh to take a bus home and carry a paper bag in case they got queasy. The upshot was that the entire police night shift for that end of the island had to be deployed ferrying our ‘tired and emotional’ moral leaders and decision makers home.
These folk - let us remember - are the ones who think doctors, teachers and the police should spend their time nagging the public into total abstinence to 'save money', rather than actually ensure such public employees do what we pay them to do.
And even worse - they also subsidise (from our taxes) an entire subculture of lemon-sucking, morally degenerate, flat out bare-faced lying career prohibitionists who could be more usefully employed (if any supermarket would ever take them) stacking shelves and contributing to public funds rather than being a total drain on them.

Who guards the guards, or judges the judges?

2012-01-06T20:53:00.006Z

This story (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/union_backs_prison_work_parties_1_4113520 ) nicely illustrates why I have given up on the pathetic right wing farce that passes these days as trade unionism.
If the paid full time ‘area manager’ of a large trade union doesn’t know that the sole punishment of a convict is to be imprisoned, and that prisoners should not be subject to a 'punishment' (even passed off as 'therapy' or 'rehabilitation') that has not been specifically laid down by the judge, then he is unfit for the job. And any trade unionist who supports a practice which abuses the basic rights of another human being deserves to be treated by other working class people with every bit as much contempt as those who run immigrant labour scams in the UK or child labour factories in poorer countries.
Because prison work parties are a modern form of slavery, often directly for large corporations with a poor record of human rights or indirectly with the ‘supervision’ costs passing to such pond life. And whatever public statement is made by the DHA the truth is that prisoners who refuse to be slaves will be marked down as ‘difficult’, find themselves unable to be considered for parole, or even to get proper access to their legal counsel or families as the law is supposed to ensure because the screws keep ‘losing the paperwork’.
But of course, Salter doesn’t give a monkeys about that. His sole interest is in ensuring that any of his members who might be called upon to assist in such disregard for the law and human rights get a handsome kickback for…well, basically for sitting about watching someone else do the actual work.
I suppose the minister in charge of the DHA who thought up this scheme (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/on_the_chain_gang_1_3976309 ) is only the latest in a line of inadequates with a government portfolio. For as long as I can remember we have only had one Education Minister who could spell his own name without assistance, and we currently have a Health Minister who prefers prayer and other voodoo to science, so a Minister for Home Afairs who does not know how courts operate, or that judges determine the punishment of offenders (and not friends of politicians wanting cheap labour for government underwritten sweatshops and scams) is just par for the course in Manx politics.
But we cannot depend on the Manx courts for justice either, or for the judiciary to stay independent when government is riddled with such idiocy.
For example, when that minister, just a few hours after warning the public not to get drunk at Christmas, got so rat-arsed at public expense at his own department’s Christmas party that he puked up on the bus home (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/no_police_action_over_juan_s_drunken_shame_1_4093699 for more) he paid just £60 to clean up the bus – and even that was only because the press, for once, ran a story on it instead of looking the other way.
By comparison, a mere member of the Manx public this week got a £150 fine for being so drunk he threw up in a police cell. As the prosecution only asked for a £50 fine plus £50 costs the new deemster yet again demonstrated why Manx justice is such an oxymoron.
But is the Manx justice system as hypocritical and moronic as those who run the DHA itself? Better judge for yourselves, because the judiciary seem either unwilling to judge or incapable of judging anything.

New year, same old idiocies in print

2012-01-01T13:55:00.005Z

A Happy New Year to both my readers, and one I shall start on a comedic note.
I nearly wet myself laughing at this (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/letters/do_not_spend_on_flood_victims_1_4100110) in Thursday’s Manx Indifferent.
For one thing, because you have to wonder how badly off Johnston Press are if they’re reduced to printing this twaddle to stir up a row. Certainly, last year JP published several anonymous letters easily traceable to two known Manx BNP supporters who were listed in the infamous wikileak as ‘activists’, so they have been scraping the barrel for a while now.
For another, because in the press version of the letter the author let slip he lives on Bucks Road, which reminded me of a funny but true story and made me wonder if he had featured in it. He certainly fits the bill – apparently socially disconnected, cranky and so poorly informed about the world he seems to get his main information from tabloids and other alehouse lepers who are glad of an audience, etc., etc.
A few years ago a very nice Polish deli briefly opened on Bucks Road. It didn’t last long, because Tesco quickly picked up that there was an untapped market in East European foods and undercut their prices, but while it was there it acted as something of a community resource and information exchange for young East European workers. This is probably not surprising, as they wouldn’t have been seen dead with the ageing religious bigots in the Columba Club next to the Catholic Church, which claimed in vain to be the true community resource for guest workers on the dubious evidence that Poland is such a religious country.
Actually, as anyone who talked to young Poles working here would know, Poland was a screwed up, quasi-fascist theocratic mess with no job opportunities for graduates, so anyone with half a brain left to work abroad for a while. Having then gained enough cash and work experience to buy a house back home and put down roots (without having to worry about the spook-chasing reactionaries who had run things under both the old party and the even older church), most return. So, the last thing they wanted while out of Poland was to get into the clutches of the Manx versions of such village idiocy.
But to return to the funny story….
One unwelcome guest at the Polish deli was an often sozzled neighbour who, having read one too many tabloids, put two and two together when he noticed young foreign women going in and out, concluded it was a knocking shop and kept trying to ‘buy’ the female customers. Having been told (politely at first and then with increasing exasperation) that he was mistaken, eventually things degenerated until he was forcibly removed once or twice by male customers. This led him to repeat his fantasies to the police, adding the twisted logical argument that as the lads who gave him the bum’s rush were also foreign they must have been pimps.
Could be a total coincidence, but too funny not to mention. More serious point - don't bother perpetuating the Indie's circulation by answering that letter unless you're as under-employed and tired of life as its author shows ample evidence of being. You cannot argue with a maladjusted loner in print without also appearing to be one, and will give him the opportunity to raid his junk fiction collection for 'evidence' in the process.
P.S. I read the 'Happy New Year' joke in an old Jeffrey Bernard 'Low Life' column months ago, and have been patiently waiting to use it ever since.

Woody Allen Jesus

2011-12-29T12:48:00.002Z

And talking about censorship and handing over Xmas to the fairy-fanciers -Dick Puddlecote drew my attention to another little gem.
It appears that ‘Jon o’ fun Woss’ had the excellent Tim Minchin on his Christmas shindig. All very nice, but there was a bit missing, thanks to management worries about offending the immoral minority. Probably didn’t want Christian Concern and other cross-wielding throwbacks clogging up the switchboard with crank calls, or the Daily Mail calling for Wossie to be disembowelled….summat like that.
The story is that Tim was asked to produce something funny and festive. His offering was a witty little ditty called Woody Allen Jesus, which the studio guests enjoyed, but the studio management had kittens over. So it wasn’t broadcast.
Luckily, you can still see it over t’internet. At http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtPYcDgUHkM&feature=player_embedded! , for example.

Silent Write, who'lly shite

2011-12-29T12:25:00.006Z

The local sock puppet media (though all Manx media has had either a government or corporate hand in the glove for over a decade now) brought us a sermon from Sentamu’s Apprentice at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/god_is_good_at_nothing_1_4093685 .
Oh dear, it didn’t get a good reception, did it?
When even the under-employed dimwits who haunt Johnston Press online forums have gone off a major source of urban myth and general misinformation it may be time to call it a day. Because, as Gary Otton of Scottish Media Monitor (a contrarian colleague of mine who knows that company’s publications better than most) says, only those who stay wilfully under-informed in order to confirm their knee-jerk prejudices haunt such dives in the first place.
Garry, by the way, has the dubious honour of having been banned, even under many pseudonyms, from pretty much every Johnston Press website there is. He has this annoying habit of pointing out the myths and factual inaccuracies in PR pieces from faith-based Scottish hate groups which lazy hacks run, uncut, as their own work. That never goes down well, and as for writing both Sexual Fascism and Badge of Shame (the two best, most damning books ever on the collaboration of the Scottish media in religious hate campaigns against gays, which led to both abominations like Section 28 and a massive increase in homophobic violence) – well, that was right out!
Incidentally, follow the link on the right to Scottish Media Monitor and you will really have your eyes opened about ‘responsible’ local media, church organisations and their friends in government. After a little of that you might just see similarities to the kind of things that vex me, and the reasons I bang on about them. Same media group, linked church groups, similar political scenario.
The odd thing is, I counted four recent stories which gave an excuse for Paterson to offer his dubious thoughts. It might just be because the Manx media is cutting and pasting more twaddle provided by the usual pressure group numpties than usual. Manx hacks so hate to leave the office and actually attend events or go and speak to the public at the best of times: having to leave home and actually go to the office over the Xmas break would probably be a grind too.
But even that is not the oddest thing to me. The oddest thing is that not only have we seen nothing in the Manx media about El Bish chairing the committee charged with producing the Anglican Church ‘pastoral statement’ on civil partnerships (see Big Story, curious silence for more on that), but that the local faithful do not know about it either, and not even the few full time professional clergy have been informed.
The possible exception to this would be the tiny clique of right wingers whose job it is to hand down to Manx Anglican plebs policy and wisdom which, in turn, has been relayed to Paterson from Sentamu’s private crew– a crew which, of course, ‘our’ Bish used to lead.
Their notorious lack of other contact with ordinary churchgoers - and the even bigger gap between them and anything which might be termed the real world - explains a lot. No wonder so many of them are retired civil servants.

Evangelicals steal Christmas from the poor - again

2011-12-21T20:23:00.006Z

According to a story at http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_184186.html
“Over 4000 shoe boxes filled with gifts are on their way to disadvantaged children from the Isle of Man.”
If you believe that, I have some shares in a tapioca mine you might like to buy.
On the basis that Samaritan’s Purse demand £1 from anyone daft enough to give them a box, what we do know is that the con-artist behind this scam - Franklin Graham, the repugnant offspring of televangelist Billy Graham – is at least another £4,000 richer because of Manx people with more money than sense. I also wonder if it will get to him the same way funds from other offshore havens used to.
SP, having failed to find anyone dim enough to register and front a bogus Manx or Channel Isles ‘sister charity’, used to have a strange aversion to receiving the donations in a cheque. On at least one occasion, under the guise of a visit to a regional headquarters, a volunteer was instructed to get on a plane with the hard cash in a briefcase, so that it could be added to the donations from that area rather than being traceable to an offshore source.
This, by odd coincidence, would mean the parent charity in the US had no audit trail to a place the IRS takes a particular interest in. In the drug trade (so a helpful Agent Scully lookalike from the FBI once explained to me and others on an FSC money-laundering course) this is known as ‘smurfing’. Funnily enough, in times further back, it was also the favoured method by which rogue Irish politicians delivered their skim-offs and pay-offs to Manx and Jersey banks to hide it from the Irish tax authorities.
What we also know is that those trying to prevent religious conflict in some poorer countries have just got 4,000 new problems, courtesy of the same idiots. Because we also shouldn’t believe the statement that “Children in countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Liberia and Romania will benefit from the gifts.”
SP have a habit of switching the destination after the boxes leave the donors, but never telling them. For example, a few years back, having led everyone to believe they were going to Russian ‘orphanages’ which had been handily photographed during a flying visit in a previous year, the boxes were reloaded onto an SP owned plane flying to Pakistan with one of their US media crews. Once dropped in a Pakistani disaster zone, they were filmed by SP’s PR unit and paraded in front of the world’s press. The PR unit got back on the plane and flew back to their luxury Carolina media headquarters, where the film and photos were glossily repackaged for next year’s campaign literature.
The boxes? Who knows – but by that time they were unfit for use anyway, so probably dumped on the nearest rubbish tip.
As if Franklin Graham and his despicable cohorts would care about starving Muslims anyway. This is, after all, the guy who even Southern Baptists shunned after he suggested the US Army fly Bibles into Iraq along with the initial invasion force.
This is the outfit who would only allow victims of a Southern American disaster to use tents provided to SP by a US government agency if they formally renounced Catholicism first, and whose tame US Army chaplains told astonished refugees from bombing in Iraq that they could only use the refugee centre showers after attending prayer meetings and bible classes.
Every year I’m pleasantly surprised by the continued willingness of Manx people to help the less fortunate.
But I’m disgusted by the evangelical pondlife who take advantage, and line their pockets by stealing from the world’s poorest people.

Drink up, light up, keep calm and carry on

2011-12-19T22:23:00.004Z

Well, another day, another bit of pointless legislation from the Manx government.
Last week, (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/legal_high_is_banned_after_death_of_teen_1_4059791) we became the laughing stock of Britain by outlawing a substance that wasn’t even found here until some numpty of a drug advisor, desperate for another year of public subsidy, downloaded a stock advice sheet from a similarly clueless or dishonest UK pseudo-charity.
The slim justification for this was selective misreading of a medical report on the death of a girl who may have (but more probably did not) acquire some from a much older man in between necking a lot of alcohol and we know not what else. As nobody involved in the inquest bothered to read the full medical report - so even the coroner does not know what other factors there were to the death (pre-existing medical conditions, social or psychological issues) - and the doctor who made it was not asked to look for any other evidence, the simple truth is we do not know why she died, and will never know, because it might be inconvenient.
Away from the pseudo-war on drugs, evidence this week of the real war by the Manx government on civil liberties at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/should_smoking_ban_be_extended_1_4073426.
As ever, it is dressed up with a lot of false concern for poor ikkle kiddie-widdies.
Oh, grow up!
Does anybody on this island know one car-driving family so impoverished the car doesn’t have windows that wind down? Or one parent so indolent or evil they don’t open them?
If such a creature existed, and was ever the pig-ignorant stereotype these twonks take as a bog-standard parent, isn’t it far more likely that they would damage their kids in a far nastier way, and already have lost them to social services?
Similarly, how many folk do you know so selfish they light up in a company vehicle which may be driven or used by others, rather than being provided for their sole use?
I know none…. Zilch…. nada. And over the years I have worked for plenty of companies which owned vehicles, and with some pretty unsavoury workmates.
And once those red herrings are smoked, we are left with the real question.
Why is the state butting in on one more of the few private spaces left to individuals to chill out?
Some do it by listening to the radio, some by chucking their car a bit too fast round the Mountain Road. Whatever!
The point is, the state has no business telling its employers and sole income source if we can light up in a private vehicle. No more than it had stopping people who, by common consent, wanted to smoke in a closed area of a pub or other public building. No more than it has rationing alcohol to over-25s in weekly allowances any grown adult would consider nearer to a quick lunchtime snifter.
Wake up and smell the coffee - before they ban that too!
A government, guided only by tabloid hysteria, junk science, bogus charities (which it alone underwrites and in many cases picks staff and committees for) and other know-nowt freeloaders and prodnoses, is whittling away at any small pleasure enjoyed by consenting adults.
Time to do something about it, even if that ‘doing’ is, like Spanish bar-owners and customers, to simply, daily and en masse ignore a fatuous law until it is taken back off the books because it is impossible and impractical to police.
In other words, carry on as normal with your lives. Do that long enough, ignore the noise pollution of (self-appointed) experts and bansturbators long enough, and, who knows, we might just get enough peace to enjoy a quiet fag and a pint.

Empty political question, textbook non-answer

2011-12-19T22:16:00.003Z

According to this prize piece of astroturf (seehttp://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=42064) “Social Care Minister Chris Robertshaw has given an insight into levels of child poverty in the Isle of Man.”
He has done no such thing, because like homelessness the government has no means of determining it. A swift glance at the irrelevant collection of statistics this chump produced as an ‘answer’ to a planted question by ‘Doors To Manual’ Hall shows that.
As with homelessness, if ever pressed or offered a suitable framework the government would simply set up a bogus ‘consultation process’ and civil servants would say it was ‘impractical’.
Or in plain English, any genuine consultation or framework would reveal how callous and incompetent politicians and government departments are, and that much of the worst effects of such poverty can be directly attributed to government functions which simply don’t work or aren’t available when they are most needed.
Anyway, ‘child poverty’ is a red herring: a misleading and emotive term which belongs in the dustbin of ideas.
It is not children who live in poverty. They are not wage-earners, not even benefit claimants, and they don’t pay bills or rent houses. It is their parents, families and guardians live in poverty, and neither the government nor the useless offspring of our most venal employers who run the Manx ‘third sector’ want to change that.
Apart from anything else, what would they do if a significant percentage of Manx society wasn’t too scared of losing any job to demand decent pay or conditions?
Children ARE powerless, but that is a different problem, and one which is true for most Manx people in a pseudo-democracy. We are more likely to see a squadron of pigs fly over Tynwald than a conference of the great and the good addressing that issue. Why would they, when they are the main cause and the main beneficiaries of our two tier society?

I'm planning fun, not a funeral, for a friend

2011-12-16T18:13:00.004Z

I was sorry to hear of the death of one of my friends yesterday, though glad that at least in death he got some of the local recognition he richly deserved in life (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=56742 ).
At 93, Denys really was my oldest friend, and since I moved back here one of the dearest. I first met him at a party to launch Fermi’s Paradox, an extraordinary CD by the quite unique Sulby Phantom Band. Denys, even then over 80, was the narrator of an extended poem by his son(and essentially the Sulby Phantom Band), Roly, around which the CD was based. While most of the island’s self-described cutting edge thinkers were there to look cool and hang out with Roly, I was there at Roly’s suggestion specifically to meet Denys and chat about another matter.
Denys wanted to form a Manx group to mercilessly mock local religious hardliners until the Manx public stopped letting them get away with murder (or at least rape, fraud and propagation of general ignorance). Roly, knowing I had similar ambitions, thought his dad and I should talk and see what might be done.
We had a lively chat; I recognised a similar spirit and that night found a role model for my autumn years. Though nothing happened immediately, and neither of us can take credit for calling the meeting which lit the fire, a few months later Denys, Roly and I were amongst a small group of folk who became the Isle of Man Freethinkers. And the rest, as they say, is history.
What I shared with Denys was a belief that satire is the best – sometimes the only –weapon which can neutralise blind belief. If, like us, you chose to balance the joys of Manx life (the scenery, the laid back pace at which anything -or usually nothing- happens) with the mindbogglingly stupid antics of Manx politicians, civil servants and their religulous mates, you also need to be able to laugh.You will never stop the hardcore few who choose such belief, but in poking fun you might limit the damage done by the hypocrites whose wages they pay, and those who we all pay to produce the obscenities which become Manx government policy.
Denys (so I recently found out) had a longer record for top-flight relentless satire than most. He had served as a Royal Artillery officer in World War Two, so saw the savage stuff which fuelled the English post-war satire boom, from Pinter and Theatre of the Absurd at the high culture end to That Was The Week That Was and Monty Python at the lower end.
But arguably this boom was launched well before that by another ex-RA wit, Spike Milligan, with the Goon Show. And in researching some stuff about the Goons and the English Theatre of the Absurd a few weeks back I discovered something amazing. I’d always known Denys was once a plummy-voiced BBC announcer in the days when they wore evening dress to read the shipping forecast, but he was also the narrator of at least one series of the Goon Show.
I can’t claim to have done anything so grand with Denys, but we did launch the League Against Cruel Schmaltz ( a spoof campaign to get Manx radio to play less MOR muzak and find at least one point in the day when Denys’s frail wife, along with many similar housebound oldies, could enjoy some tunes they knew too).
We also harangued the military misfits who turn ‘national remembrance’ days into Bridge Over The River Kwai torture-fests. Pointless two hour prayer dirges, with six hymns, bible readings by dignitaries and a sermon from the Anglican Area Manager, rather than the beer, sandwiches, Vera Lynn and Glen Miller anybody, like Denys, who actually saw off Rommel really wanted.
Sadly, chinless ex-officers who, in their own careers, were too young to have seen a gun fired in anger at anyone but Belfast 10 year olds never listened, and now it’s too late. But we tried, and we definitely had fun, as we also did in the most unlikely campaigns on the most serious issues, such as the assisted dying campaign run by another founder Freethinker, the late Patrick Kneen.
At one point Denys and I had a bit of a private competition going as to who could get the most outrageous letter in the Manx press. When he moved away that stopped, but I would hate to finally win by default, so maybe I’ll take up that baton again just as a tribute to Denys.

Pass the bucket

2011-12-14T21:33:00.004Z

I’ve now read two reports of the recent overblown and underpowered ‘conference’ which was supposed to find out if we have poverty and neglect here on Moaner’s Isle.
Facts and truth are as remarkable for their absence as they would be anywhere else except a collection of government-run puppet charities and their klingons. As I said last month when it was first publicised (see Poverty of Theory, Neglect by Government ) : “If these overpaid parasites have to ask they are more useless than we already knew, and we really need to ask in return why they have claimed so much public money for decades.”
Because, make no mistake, all that is going on – as ever – is the usual suspects whipping up more moral panic over inequality THEY perpetuate, in order to beg more public funds, in order to carry on whipping up moral panics, in order to beg more public funds, in order to perpetuate their useless existence. Maybe they have to, because nobody with an ounce of common sense would employ them for a real job.
The first version of several impartial reports (handily written by a Children’s Centre PR dogsbody then copied slavishly by ‘proper’ hacks) appeared at http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=41577 , where it was noted that: “It was organised by The Children's Centre whose chief executive John Knight hopes it will now lead to united efforts to tackle the issue."
It won’t.
For some clues as to why not, you could pick up the story as it eventually appeared in a newspaper now not only owned and controlled off-island but soon to be printed elsewhere too. See http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/health/poverty_in_the_isle_of_man_1_4041528 for a few clues as to who got paid just to turn up, who got paid to not only turn up but pose as ‘experts’, and who got paid to do both and then had the cheek to beg for more cash.
The non-academic with no peer-reviewed research on the topic to his name (from the Sunday kick-around league non-university with no track record in social sciences) must have felt right at home.
I also noted a social services bigwig who once spent an hour arguing that collecting accurate information on the precise numbers of and circumstances for women needing places of local refuge from violence was counter-productive, because she already ‘knew’ instinctively and didn’t think either the government or the public needed hard facts. Their role was just to hand her a blank cheque every time she demanded one.
She got her way because, as a highly overpaid and under-qualified Home Affairs executive pointed out at the same inter-departmental pow-wow, it was so much easier to blame all Manx social problems on people with dark skin, and also costs nothing in time, resources or research.
Then there’s the public sector key worker who, a decade ago, spent two hours listening to clueless Ulster godbotherers give a lecture on ‘drug education’ in which they couldn’t list (never mind actually give the correct chemical name of) several widely available illegal substances of the era, or the signs of their abuse, or cite one academic source which had identified either a medical danger or a social cause for concern for the drugs (no longer in circulation) of two decades before which their talk actually centred on. After this highly professional presentation both they and the faith barn they proposed to work from were also offered public money.
Or the authority on youth work whose bogus ‘youth club’ closed after no more public money was wasted on it: because as passing police officers kept reporting, the kids outside were just standing there, not members. Because they would rather stand in the winter street than enter a premises where staff, after nicking the sound equipment, had tried to frame innocent kids for it, not to mention assaults on girls under the age of consent who were ‘advised’ by police that allegations against ‘decent’ church leaders by anyone with a petty crime record would not reach court. Which they did not.
So, nothing to see, nothing to report. Just more begging bowl business from the usual recidivists.
Ho hum.

Big story, curious silence

2011-12-09T21:33:00.003Z

Now here’s an odd thing.
Since December 1st I’ve been fielding queries from two ‘specialist’ areas of the press who know me of old. Both, from differing perspectives, are researching stories on an important development in their ‘specialisms’ in which a leading Manx resident will play a major part. Mainly, it must be said, because they’ve never heard of him. Yet the island media appear to know nothing about it.
Many current Manx journalists wouldn’t know a story if it crept up and hit them with a baseball bat, so nothing new or odd there.
What is odder is that powerful friends of the leading Manx resident haven’t spoonfed the story to a grateful hack either. Usually every vapid word he utters while going about his pointless and privileged job is not only relayed to the media, but followed by angry phonecalls and threats about the withdrawal of advertising if not immediately, and prominently, used.
So why not now?
Perhaps you can judge for yourselves.
The queries began when, on 1st December, the Church of England Media Centre issued a press release (see http://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2011/11/group-to-advise-house-of-bishops-on-2005-pastoral-statement-announced.aspx) in which it was announced that:
“The House of Bishops has announced the membership of a Group established to advise it on reviewing its Pastoral Statement issued prior to the introduction of civil partnerships in December 2005. The Group will be chaired by the Bishop of Sodor and Man, the Rt Rev Robert Paterson. The other two members of the Group are the Bishop of Portsmouth, the Rt Rev Christopher Foster, and the Bishop of Dorchester, the Rt Rev Colin Fletcher. The Group will start work in December and report to the House in time for the House to reach conclusions during 2012.”
The statement goes on to explain that:
“The preparation of the pastoral statement was the last occasion when the House of Bishops devoted substantial time to the issue of same sex relationships. The House undertook to keep that Pastoral Statement under review and announced in July, this year, http://www.churchofengland.org/media/1289380/gsmisc997.pdf , that the time had come for a review to take place.
The House of Bishops also announced in July further work on the Church of England's approach to human sexuality more generally. The expectation is that the membership of that Group, whose work will be considered by the House during 2013, will be announced in the next few weeks.”
Wow!
The C of E is looking to make their most important policy statement since Civil Partnerships became a reality, and Sentamu’s Apprentice is in charge of the process?
How big a Manx story is that?
What’s fast emerging is that even their fellow Anglicans hardly know these guys either, never mind the world at large. Which may be deliberate, or just because there are too many church factions with an interest (and form for sulking and taking their ball home) for any of the ‘regulars’ to get picked.
It’s known that Colin Fletcher is a former tutor at Wycliffe Hall and former chaplain to Archbishop George Carey. So he would have been picked by Anglican Mainstream. Don’t let the name fool you. They’re the ultra-orthodox freaks who keep threatening to break away and take some of the oldest, most valuable, church property with them. In reality, a tiny but powerful bunch of cranks, the C of E’s equivalent to a mad relative in the attic.
Less is known about Foster, other than that he studied economics at Durham, then lectured in it before being ordained, since when he’s worked his way up through the ranks in various roles, apparently with a particular interest in church mission, which I thought was just every vicar’s basic job.
But if Sentamu’s Apprentice was chosen because he was a dark horse and therefore gay and liberal Anglicans couldn’t object, it isn’t going to work.
True, the AM nutters don’t know or claim him, but they’ve approved him anyway because they see him as a fellow evangelical; if a bit of a wimp because any apparent antipathy for humanity doesn’t extend to lady vicars or women and everyone else in general except sad old white blokes in frocks.
But on websites such as the influential liberal Thinking Anglican (see http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/ ) comments like this are starting to appear:
“Robert Patterson (sic) was vicar of a parish adjoining mine and is wholly unsympathetic. He sacked a celibate gay curate, and most recently [...] he was one of only two C of E bishops in General Synod to vote AGAINST extending the pension rights of civilly partnered clerics.
I contacted some gay couples I know who live in Robert's former parishes - Robert would not be their choice for this post! I wonder if there is a single civilly partnered person in the whole of England who would support his appointment.”
Well, we’ve seen his grumpy, charmless comments after the Civil Partnership Bill passed, toeing an old Christian Institute line which portrays gays trying to put their relationships on an official basis and ensure pension and other basic rights as little more than economic opportunism, rather than ‘proper’ marriages like Christians pretend to have.
And I’ve noted here his successful attempt to make sure criminal civil servants won’t do time for leaking highly personal and confidential information about transgendered people to vicars, who also won’t do time for receiving it, or have to explain how they got it or why they won’t conduct a marriage ceremony.
So, we already know he has a bit of a problem with gays. In fact, his reported comments are alarmingly close to those swivel-eyed Manx political lunatics whose rabid views on the (then only proposed) partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1991 caused all decent people in Britain to write us off as a third world backwater. A view of us which meant most trade union and business groups took their conference business elsewhere for the next 20 years for fear of being branded homophobic knuckledraggers.
When Patterson and his chums eventually reveal their ‘new, improved’ Anglican policy towards gays we can have little doubt that, however sincerely meant, many will laugh and some will even feel sick. No point putting lipstick on a pitbull.
The problem is, if that view seems influenced by someone who is also an unelected politician in the Manx upper house, and could be portrayed as some sort of moral leader on the island, then we are right back to 1991 in the eyes of the rest of the world. And with a world recession on those are basics none of us want to go back to.

That sinking feeling

2011-12-03T18:25:00.005Z

Part way through a Saturday shopping expedition that, for other reasons, had all of us falling about laughing we tried to park in Ramsey market place. This was only possible after some complicated manoeuvres around a bunch of crinklies and dignitaries who were, as one, staring glumly into the harbour.
The reason, as we suspected, was not a community suicide pact but this (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=41561 ), yet another grief-fest on the rates. No surprise that Ramsey’s best known political carbuncle was in on it either. This collective celebration of the sinking of a ferry over a century ago just set us off in more gales of laughter.
Sorry if that offends the patriots and heritage buffs. Not!
But then, we’re offended that you’ll be gathering for yet another jamboree on the rates tonight , and that half-baked culture dullsters can just take over a building which was a genuine community resource until it was handed over to the heritage racket. The difference is we just laugh at you, don’t waste our time by attending such farces and prefer to contribute to real community initiatives instead of ersatz ones trying to perpetuate historical myths.
But the bigger reason we were laughing, even before encountering the municipal sad-acts in the market place, was to do with this (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/sunday_s_sailings_switched_to_heysham_1_4030703 ).
For off-island readers, the joke is that for the last week the island has been cut off from the real world because the clapped out former US military craft which passes for a national ferry service (a national ferry service not owned by the nation in decades and now, in theory, owned by the banks of another clapped out country) cannot run in bad weather. Yes, a boat considered fit for 21st century military activity in this age of postmodern warfare is slightly less capable of setting out on the Irish Sea than, say, a 40 year old cabin cruiser with an outboard motor.
This has led to empty supermarket shelves, which in turn illustrate effectively just how little the over-subsidised Manx agricultural sector actually produces. It also illustrated, as some have long suspected, that even some fruit and veg labelled as local is actually shipped in from Ireland and repackaged.
Nothing new there. It used to happen years ago with ‘Manx’ meat, and even ‘Manx’ kippers.
And the other reason we were laughing as we surveyed the empty shelves is that it revives memories of when friends and relatives from Central Europe come to visit, and go away startled at our low standard of living, even as they roar with laughter at local newspaper stories which print, unchecked, stories about the fictitious exploits of evangelical Manx ‘charities’ in places like Romania or the Ukraine. One relative was so worried at the apparent inability of the Manx to feed themselves that she took to sending ‘Red Cross parcels’ of proper food for us to pass around the neighbours, or even feed ourselves if it came to the crunch.
When normal service is resumed, my guess is there will be queues of sobbing cultural elitists in Tesco. They will probably be heavily wrapped in balaclavas, scarves and hoods. Not because of the weather, but in case anyone normal notices them and laughs.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but many of us here have been doing that for years anyway. Maybe if you didn't have your heads rammed so far up your backsides you would have noticed.

Freaks and zombie-lovers go back to school

2011-12-03T15:45:00.004Z

Way back in March (see Foul-mouthed pervs strike in Manx schools) I mentioned that the Department for Miseducation and Child Abuse was allowing Christian fundies more opportunities to tell silly stories to small children. This on the dubious premise that so few tinies reach adolescence having read a Bible or even knowing the major stories.
Why this is a problem, I don’t know. Why there isn’t similar concern that not enough small kids are familiar with, say, Aesop’s Fables or the Brothers Grimm I also don’t know.
Actually, the first thing I did on hearing this nonsense was to seek out The Penguin Book of Classical Myths and give it to my daughter. It’s a university classics course textbook, she was then nine, and she loved it. Beat that, zombie carpenter acolytes!
The whole pointless exercise was masterminded by the Scripture Union Ministries Trust, having been sanctioned by the Education Department’s Religious Education Advisory Committee, which is, by law, chaired by the Bishop of Sodor and Man, and whose membership is entirely selected from and by the major Christian sects. No other faith or belief group is represented, or is ever likely to be. In fact, at the time of the last reform of this committee likely to happen in our lifetimes, just under a decade ago, a senior Anglican informed the government that no other faith or interest needed to be represented, as they did not exist.
This barefaced lie this was told because Churches Together in Mann, the government’s only official point of reference on religious matters, was approached in 1999 by people of other faiths about setting up some sort of Manx Interfaith Council. They then wet themselves at the thought of having to share their publically funded toy box with other childlike simpletons.
I also mentioned in March that: “So far only two teams of SUMT yawn-troopers are being let loose in three schools. But apparently, later this year, our clueless government will allow four gangs to practice their potty-mouthed antics in between four and eight more primary schools.”
I heard evidence this week that not only is this now happening, but that it is being used as a Trojan Horse for the distribution of creationist literature through Manx infant schools. The creationist tracts in question were produced by a Northern Irish evangelical organisation. Incidentally, the Education Department, only a few months, ago assured parents Creationism is not and will not be taught in Manx schools
In addition, I hear credible reports that the parents of small children in at least one school say their kids are having nightmares from some of the lurid Old Testament codswallop being read to them.
Aren’t you glad your children are in such safe, professional and attentive hands?

Another day, another parasitic QUANGO

2011-11-12T17:03:00.003Z

And as if to reinforce the message from the item below on the drug & alcohol dependency racket, a new scam to ‘protect’ gamblers was announced yesterday at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/socialcare/thelaunchofgamca.xml.
No surprise to see the Isle of Man Alcohol Advisory Service is behind it. They have struggled for a year or two now to justify further direct government funding, or to use their relationship with government to demand ‘charitable donations’ from local retailers in return for not further infantalising the whole process of buying alcohol. Those who have had compulsory interaction with such ‘advisers’ tell me the service quality, by any professional standard, is so laughable that anyone who thought they had a problem and could afford treatment would be better off throwing money at a passing drunk than employing these bozos. They live off government money because nobody else is dumb enough to give it to them.
Even before checking further into this racket, I could predict that the set-up would be similar to that which has given several prodnoses a steady income from other ‘vices’. The trick is, start a moral panic, lobby for a government advisory body, get invited to be on it and then use it to get (1) a regular payoff from the industry in return for your silence and (2) the perpetuation of the advisory body by offering the odd feelgood, but practically pointless, ‘policy’.
Take, for example, the ridiculous one whereby the employees of supermarkets (many teenage or if older desperate for regular employment) dare not sell alcohol to anyone under 25 (even though they are merely required to challenge anyone who looks under 25 and legally are actually obliged to sell to any sober person of 18 or more who requests alcohol rather than demanding it with menaces). I know of cases where management has sacked employees who sold to 18-25 year-olds in order to scare the rest and impress government watchdogs. Those former employees (even though they have done nothing illegal or immoral) then cannot get other work for months.
Sure enough, when I check out Gamcare (or to give their full and misleading name, the National Association for Gambling Care, Educational Resources and Training) on the England and Wales Charity Register and elsewhere, the scam follows that practiced by various UK alcohol and substance ‘advisory’ charitable bodies.
For example, in 2007 GamCare received 80% of a £3.5 million budget set aside on government mandate by the UK gambling industry to promote responsible gambling. Neither the UK government nor the gambling industry are open about what happened after that, but back in 2008 it was expected £4.76 million in funding would be demanded for 2009, with that number jumping to £5.34 million in 2010 and 2011.
Sure enough, the last accounts submitted by Gamcare reveal that £2.7 million was coughed up, that the ‘charity’ got no other income apart from their gambling industry hush money and that it did not expect to tap anyone else for the cash for the foreseeable future.
In return for what?
Well, companies who carry the GamCare logo at their establishments or on their websites ‘voluntarily comply with a set of guidelines towards the promotion of responsible gaming’, according to the official line. And that’s about it really.
Yes, there’s a website, a gambling helpline, a chance for one–to-one advice (though not necessarily from anyone required to be trained to any obvious standard that I can spot)..blah, blah, blah…bit like the new IOM set-up for this racket, and the established ones for others, in fact.
And like the IOM racket(s), only one trustee for Gamcare has any obvious professional and relevant background. The other names look like the kind of privileged layabouts you see in any average New Years Honours list for…..well, probably for being privileged and getting out of bed long enough to wander into a few government advisory bodies and pick up an OBE in return, to be honest.
Actually, that would be better than the Manx industry standard, which is for an increasingly smaller and smaller, more self-selecting gang of unskilled busybodies to elect themselves onto ever more ‘advisory bodies’ and so avoid having to actually seek employment or pay their own way for yet another year or two.
It strikes me that, compared to that, the average smack dealer is a responsible member of the community. Probably pays more taxes and provides a more useful public service too.

Poor judgement should not excuse poorer new law

2011-11-12T12:37:00.005Z

You can always tell when the local professional prodnose industry thinks next year’s government subsidy might be trimmed because fact-lite scare stories like this (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=40829 and http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=40838) appear.
Two immediate and awkward questions arise: just who are these government ‘drug advisers’ who apparently believe “stricter laws, more research and greater awareness are all needed to curb the spread of such drugs”, and do any of them have any professional expertise?
Knowing that the Chief Minister’s task force on drugs and alcohol was set up by individuals and organisations whose main reference point is the Bible, and who do not have so much as one basic qualification in medicine, psychology (or indeed the ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ sciences in general) between them, I do hope it is not them. Actually, what I really hope is that this idiotic ‘Advisory Council’ is disbanded pretty sharpish, because, on this evidence alone, none of them are capable of interpreting something as basic as a medical report to a coronary hearing.
No, I have not read the medical report either, but I do know that it does not say this teenager was killed by a legal high, and I do know, just from reading local newspaper reports, that that teenager had also consumed quite a lot of alcohol, and I do know, from reading many more reports over the years of inquests into ’drug deaths’, that with the possible exception of purer than usual heroin it is never a single chemical substance (legal or illegal) that kills the victim, but a particular chemical reaction caused by the combination of various substances, plus the victim’s particular medical history and the particular social circumstances of the death event.
I would also have thought that in this particular case other questions which might need answering include why a 17 year old had such easy access to alcohol (which unlike the MDAI really IS illegal -and supposedly the subject of very high profile tough legislation and social control which this case alone proves simply does not work either) and why she was apparently openly having a close relationship with a man twice her age yet nobody personally or professionally related to her thought that was odd.
Again, one of the conditions demanded by and granted to Manx evangelical homophobes for the lowering of homosexual consent to 16 was a clause preventing the ‘grooming’ of anyone under the age of 18 by an older adult. In practice, as UK gay organisations have pointed out, this type of legislation is only ever used to block same sex relationships, and never against the organisations whose employees are most likely to groom teenagers for sex, i.e. religious ones.
You can also tell how close the links are between the court services and the evangelicals who live off such moral panics because, coincidentally, there will always be a high profile case for a helpful coroner or judge to use to call for tougher legislation.
Just think about it. Why would a legal professional call for weaker or better legislation, or for people to take personal responsibility for their lives, or neighbours to look out for each other …..or indeed anything which people in the real world would recognise as common sense? That would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.
Of course, the other thing we can rely on is that either the Manx press were not at the coroner’s hearing, or did not find time to read such evidence as was on public record or the judgement in full, or just chose to concentrate on juicy morsels which ‘prove’ what their bigoted readers always want to think rather than doing their duty as journalists to report the fullest facts and best informed (though probably conflicting) opinion to us so that we can make informed judgements.
Considering the seriousness of some of the issues here, this ragbag conspiracy of self-serving idiots really does need to be treated with utter contempt. And we really should, as their employers, dispatch most of them to the Job Centre as soon as possible.

Care in the Community

2011-11-04T21:34:00.006Z

I’m pretty sure the Isle of Man Government – and especially the Department of Education – should not be encouraging people to link up with hate groups. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to know it’s actually illegal – even on this bigoted island.
So I was surprised to learn that a recent item on FirstClass, a Department of Education-run website ( homepage at https://www2.sch.im/ ) informs local mothers that: (an) “event, entitled Mum’s the Word, has been organised by national charity Care for the Family, whose aim is to strengthen family life and help those facing family difficulties. It will take place at The Mount Murray Hotel on Thursday 17th November from 730-10pm.”
So let us get something straight at once. CftF is not a Manx ‘national charity’, but a network of off-island charities, all cross-pollinating faith-based hate and ignorance. It began as an England and Wales charity, but is also separately registered in Scotland and Northern Ireland, though it fails to declare to any of those registries (as legally required) that it is a network rather than a stand-alone charity. As far as I can tell, it also should not be accepting money for charitable activities on the Isle of Man unless it has the specific permission of the Manx Attorney General to do so, because it is not registered here.
Although those with a little experience can track the structure, it also would not be too keen on the public regarding it as little more than a puppet of the even nastier Christian ‘education charity’ CARE (‘Christian Action Research & Education'), which has a strong lobbying team at Westminster, mostly thanks to links with the Conservative Christian Fellowship. The most obvious link is John O'Brien, a Care for the Family trustee, who is also a trustee of CARE, but I have little doubt that behind the scenes the management pyramid structure and policies are even more strongly linked.
To get a taste of CARE, this is a group who in 2005 sent letters to Scottish churches urging them to contact their local councils on the issue of civil ceremonies for same-sex couples registered under the new Civil Partnerships Act due to come into force that December.
The letter read: “CARE believes that it is not appropriate for there to be ceremonies associated with civil partnership registration. To hold a ceremony would suggest that registering a civil partnership has the same status as a heterosexual wedding, which it doesn’t.”
CARE also warned: “Some registrars are unwilling to perform such ceremonies and there may be issues of freedom of conscience if registrars are compelled to perform these ceremonies.”
That was because, from the time the original English Civil Partnership Bill was first passed, CARE put rather a lot of effort into writing to all registrars ‘advising’ them to try and opt out of conducting the ceremonies on ‘conscience’ grounds. As we all know, some did, and years later are still trying to take their case to Europe in a last ditch defence of religious bigotry and privilege.
Care for the Family, via links with Scottish and Northern Irish operations also not averse to taking public funds in return for truly cretinous ‘educational initiatives’, first got the chance to meddle in Manx educational affairs when David Anderson was Education Minister.
By the very oddest of coincidences this was about the same time that the Isle of Man Courier, picturing various happy university graduates, happened to report that: “Rachel Anderson, daughter of David and Jane Anderson, of Ballamoar, Patrick, has graduated from Durham University with a BA Hons in anthropology. She attended Peel Clothworkers' School and Queen Elizabeth II High School, where she was head girl in 2001-2. Rachel is spending the year as an intern with the charity CARE at Westminster, where she is working for an MP.”
The next year a third rate bunch of bible floggers posturing as a ‘theatre company’ got a nice gig at Ballakermeen School’s new ‘community art’ space. One of their trustees, Norman Adams, was another CftF trustee.
Small world, isn’t it?
Actually I spotted something even funnier in the FirstClass posting, which at one point says that: “Experienced speakers Katharine Hill and Cathy Madavan, who between them have six children, will share their own experiences of motherhood.”
Oops!
I hope their managers haven’t noticed that. Because I imagine even the idea of lesbian mums and artificial insemination would have made CftF go all queer – if you’ll excuse the pun. On the other hand, considering how many desperate wankers seem to be involved in CARE and CftF, maybe the kids were just in-house jobs too. After all, these fundie freaks seem to like to keep everything else in the family.

Another day, another 'one idiot short of an asylum' story

2011-10-29T17:50:00.005+01:00

This (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/help_to_design_a_logo_for_manannan_overseas_aid_1_3914976 ) intrigues and amuses me.
Initially, it was amusement because the prospect of yet more Manx ‘help’ being inflicted on Romania will be bad news for my many acquaintances out that way.
Almost weekly we get anguished messages from them laughing at the latest damage or general idiocy caused by a Manx-based ‘overseas aid’ group (usually faith-based, which immediately explains most of the idiocy) and asking if there is anything they can do to help shore up our economy and thus stop the constant Eastward flow of cretinism. As one of them says, Romania, like any country, has some village idiots in rural areas, but the Isle of Man now seems to be producing whole villages of the intellectually challenged and then exporting them, which is a bit like fly-tipping your entire country’s toxic waste overseas.
In addition, one acquaintance, after a brief visit here, is still dining out on his collection of Manx pothole photographs. His countrymen agree, even Ceacescu in his worst years would never dare let Romanian roads and pavements get to the state of the average Manx street. They also sympathise with our third world plumbing, the way the concept of even rudimentary home insulation has never been understood here and the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables. Some wonder we haven’t all died of either pneumonia or scurvy.
And then (as witnessed by those whose experience of the Manx is limited to seeing the buffoons who turn up there to ‘help’), there is our poor education system. Limited knowledge of geography or history is one thing, and poor numeracy or scientific knowledge more worrying. Lack of foreign languages may be almost par for the course for quasi-Brits, but what really tickles Romanians about the Manx (at least the ones they see) is that they’re even illiterate in English.
For all these reasons, this article makes me painfully aware that, in the near future, I will yet again be apologising to Romanians and the butt of yet another series of Manx jokes.
However, other things about it intrigue me. Such as the tenuous mention of a link with Florian UK.
Because Florian UK is not a UK charity. Florian UK (co. no. 03001330) was an English registered company, formed in 1994 and dissolved in 2009, apparently a non-trading property letting company, but (reading between the lines) probably forcibly closed by the companies registry after failing to file accounts or adequately explain what it was actually up to.
Operation Florian (England and Wales registered charity number 1054657), on the other hand, is a real charity. Essentially, it is something run by firefighters throughout the UK which sets out to do good deeds for folk in poorer countries. It seems to do fairly well at fundraising – I suppose based on the public goodwill for firefighters – but less well at actually keeping accounts and spending it. In fairness, that goes for a lot of small charities, so not a real danger sign.
So possibly no more than a simple understanding, but if it is linked to firefighters then why not just say so, and call it something obvious like Florian Isle of Man (or Mannanan) instead of a grandiloquent title which makes it sound like it’s a (or even the) major Manx foreign aid charity and invites confusion with the Manx government’s official overseas aid programme?
Additionally, of course, if it really is the continued adventures of a dubious Department of Home Affairs project which finds dumping redundant fire equipment abroad cheaper than scrapping it, and in the process links up with small town Romanian neo-fascists and US Baptists building a North Romanian business empire while stirring up ethnic conflict (see Chief Minister, international joke and Of spooks and spookchasers for more) then we have far more serious problems.

Poverty of Theory, Neglect by Government

2011-10-29T10:50:00.006+01:00

According to this (see http://www.manx.net/isle-of-man-news/3649/poverty-and-neglect-conference-aims-to-start-debate-on-social-issues) (which will now have reached the ‘proper’ local press) the Children’s Centre are putting on a conference, chaired by the Pretzel of Tynwald and a government ‘consultant’ on children, to determine if there is poverty and neglect in the Isle of Man.
If these overpaid parasites have to ask they are more useless than we already knew, and we really need to ask in return why they have claimed so much public money for decades.
They really should know how much poverty and neglect there is. Most of the Children’s Centre committee are married into the business and political dynasties which caused the island to become two distinct nations in the first place, and from talking to some of their kids I also know how dysfunctional some upper middle class Manx families are compared to, say, the average sink estate family doomed to a second generation of lifetime unemployment.
Then there is the odd selection of speakers.
We are told, for example that: “Mr McCann is a motivational speaker who encourages people to look at life differently, helping them to take a leap that will change their lives for good and make a real difference in the world.”
So he will be talking to ......who exactly at this pseudo-conference, and encouraging them to...... do what? The permanently excluded perhaps, suggesting that as local business interests have no use for them, and also have no intention of taking (even as individuals) their fair share of the local tax burden, they might as well get used to it?
But of course not. He’s just another stooge brought in, like the canting priests who harangue us from another direction, to parrot the lie that we are equally and individually responsible for our plight, and that social or economic forces have absolutely no bearing on the matter.
I hope they’re paying this pathetic, two-faced twerp good money to push that lie: I also hope it isn’t public money.
And if you really must legitimate political inability to tackle poverty and social problems with an ‘academic’ overview, why would you pick a lecturer from an establishment about which the Daily Telegraph once asked: "Is this the worst university in Britain?"
That question was asked in 2004, when Luton had an unusually high course drop-out rate, and was additionally proposing to relax consequences of students failing second year exams. Luton answered back that as it existed specifically to give chances to the kind of folk who cannot normally consider higher education the drop-out rate was be expected and extra attempts to keep students studying needed, which is fair enough in my book. But then I read elsewhere that: “The QAA conducted a thorough institutional audit of the University as a whole in 2005 (prior to the merger of the University), which resulted in the audit team’s questioning of the academic standards of its awards and its lack of confidence in the university's quality standards.”
It seems that after the audit was taken the QAA got further information showing some appropriate action in response, but it was only in July 2007 that the audit was finally signed off. Again, to be fair, University of Bedfordshire constantly polls somewhere around 70th in most ‘league tables’ of British academic excellence, which puts it just above the lowest third, but potential employers wouldn’t dismiss a 'Beds' degree nearly as quickly as, say, an MBA from the Isle of Man Business School.
Then there is the strange link with an outfit called the Institute for Optimum Nutrition. The ION is regarded by more scientifically-based nutritionists as a “controversial” organisation, and that would be putting it mildly. For example, founder Patrick Holford's apparent advocacy of vitamin C as better than conventional drugs to treat AIDS was once described as “very scary” by the British Dietetic Association.
This has not stopped the ION offering a Home Study Course and a three-year Diploma in Nutritional Therapy (DipION). Another perturbing thing is that the University of Bedfordshire previously validated the DipION as a foundation degree, and only withdrew this validation in 2010.
So, with a wealth of British academic knowledge in the social sciences to choose from – much of it cutting edge – those responsible in Manx government chose a minor academic with no peer reviewed work from a university with no teaching pedigree in the field (and who just happens to have a book to flog) to kick off a major important social debate?
Yeah, that would be about par for the course.

Oxfam would not take this tat. Why should we?

2011-10-23T13:55:00.004+01:00

I was intrigued, and even encouraged, by a small piece of graffiti I saw in Douglas yesterday.
On the wall outside the multi-storey car park, beneath a crude image of (presumably) a hammer or axe, someone wrote: “Art isn’t always well fought out”.
Someone else then crossed out “fought” inserted “thought” and scribbled “idiot!” beside the original graffiti. But I think they missed the pun, and the point.
As a cultural academic and veteran of numerous serious (if also playful) attempts to question the point of art (and in particular if all art inevitably gets commodified eventually, so we might as well give up and do something else) it was at least encouraging that someone thinks such questions might still matter. Especially on the Isle of Man, where – to be blunt – the local Arts Council was always run by water-colouring fossils under the thumb of small town politicos who were proud to know nothing about art but know what they like and things have now hit a sub-YBA low (YBA being ‘Young British Artist’, for anyone who still cares).
In the 1980’s I probably knew three Manx artists (at most) with some sort of internationally recognisable talent, social conscience or knowledge of contemporary art history – mostly gained from being around politicised punk like Rock Against Racism. By the late 1990’s, when I returned here tooled up by direct contact in Leeds with most of the original art theorists and armed with the opportunity to explore such stuff in a local newspaper column, even they had been replaced by a new generation of dull conformists. Younger, nominally qualified but more terrifying than the ‘ladies who paint’ one still meets at Manx art gallery openings.
Yes, there is public and private money being thrown at local art world hacks to prettify awful and socially pointless new buildings and shopping complexes, generally thrown up like a bad curry after a drunken Friday night out in the vain hope some gullible tourist will splash their disposable income around. But would any sane and socially responsible artist take it?
Are there any anyway? And why is there no public engagement or debate about the arts? Sorry, but ‘government surveys’ which filter out all attempts to comment on a pre-decided policy do not count.
Real questions need to be asked. We could start with basic ones, like would you rather have a concrete seagull stuck next to some harbour-side cafes or a home help? But we could ask better ones, like would you rather pay some spawn of a banker with an art degree to come up with ‘public art’ or plan something better with your neighbours........ or just not bother?
Off hand, I cannot think of one piece of art in the Manx public domain which actually contributes to a sense of well being or pride in a community. Honestly, I just cannot, and I am actually interested in art and the regeneration of community!
These days walking through Manx towns is like walking through a surreal scene in which the family of some recently deceased person, rather than donate the stuff to a charity shop, has dumped giant versions of 50p store paintings and ornaments out in the street, where they clutter pavements or lean against walls.
Oxfam would not take this tat. Why should the rest of us?

A new generation of parliamentary privilege

2011-10-23T11:39:00.008+01:00

An article (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=40226) by someone I recall as a local paper editor some years back caused me to raise an ironic eyebrow, and gave me a giggle or two. Nothing similar has appeared on radio or in the local print press yet, which doesn’t surprise me for the same reasons that it caused me so much amusement.
The thing is, I pottered about in Manx journalism 20 or so years ago when Hazel Hannan, then MHK for Peel, one day used parliamentary privilege to ask impertinent questions of the Minister for Tourism about Charles Kerruish. More specifically, she was trying to clarify what funding Kerruish might have received from the Tourist Board (as it then was) towards the costs of some holiday cottages he was having built, and with what guarantees.
Doubt later emerged as to whether they really were holiday cottages, and if any part of the possible grant conditions required him to pay back some or all of the grant if he, say, sold them on as private housing after a year or two because tourists didn’t rush to rent them – because tourists weren’t tending to rent a lot of holiday accommodation (or even to visit the island) at the time.
If this sounds familiar that might be because, some years later, similar questions about holiday accommodation were the undoing of a Chief Minister who Kerruish regarded as a protégé. They also went unreported until a court case some time after the questions were being asked, by which time most of the Manx public had obtained answers elsewhere.
Sadly, it seems only two journalists were in the Keys when Mrs Hannan made her enquiries. One was the hardworking Charles Guard from Manx Radio, the other was the equally conscientious and quite elderly Jennifer Leece, then working for the tiny Peel City Guardian, as was I.
Actually, this wasn’t unusual at a time before Johnston Press bought out the island’s two ‘rival’ larger newspaper groups. In fact it was something of a joke between Jennifer and Charles that the other papers only attended Tynwald if one of the MHKs who spoon-fed them was about to make a speech. Much of the time, so printworkers from that era who had to handle last minute page changes say, they just listened in to Charles’s reports and made notes, or used tip-offs from any MHK who was using them as unpaid PR, or just asked Fred Kissack (then Chief Secretary).
Charles, as I remember, did not include Hazel Hannan’s queries in his report that day. Perhaps, like Jennifer, he saw nothing startling in them. It was the usual practice, then as now, that any backbencher querying the actions of the political senility had been primed to do so by the subject in order that such wasters could make a carefully scripted reply to reassure the unwashed masses.
Jennifer, however, did report them, and they appeared in that week’s paper, as from my memory the editor also saw nothing remarkable and expected the Greatest Living Manxman (as he was then regarded) to make a routine explanation in due time.
Only he didn’t. Indeed, there were then claims the paper had misreported the questioning and the GLM even brought considerable influence to bear on both Mrs Hannan and the island’s smallest newspaper to retract all mention of such matters.
At which point the editor dug in his heels, backed the ever accurate Jennifer and said he would wait for the Hansard report to prove she had recorded it word perfect. Which she had. And then, as the editor also ran Manx Life, he continued to ask questions. Meanwhile, the island’s ‘national press’ remained silent, having simply not been there to hear the questions, even if they would be prepared to break the habit of a lifetime and for once demonstrate the gumption or tenacity to follow up.
Which they did not, as they also had not when senior civil servants (or even local police on at least one memorable occasion) ‘advised’ local newspapers not to follow up other stories in those years. The point being, unlike our shoestring operation, those papers received considerable income from government advertising and were expected, in return, to run numerous flattering stories helpfully and exclusively supplied to them.
There was, so I was told, an ‘understanding’ between senior civil servants and the two larger papers that government would prefer it if it was able to place public notices in two publications (as then and now required by various laws) but only pay once. Therefore it would sit back and wait while the papers got into a war for other advertising (which would handily also wipe out smaller, more troublesome publications) and reward the winner when the rival folded.
As it happened, Johnston Press was playing the same game on a larger scale around Britain, intent on monopolising the regional market which was then the only press growth area. When the two Manx rivals had near bankrupted themselves it stepped in, bought them both and captured the entire government contract. JP also found a huge potential one in return for bigging up drunken lunchtime pronouncements from finance sector figureheads who, in the name of all decency, should really be left to ramble incoherently into a hotel urinal until they pass out.
So, in these new and desperate times are we about to see elected politicians and the local press being told by senior government figures who lack even a public mandate what to ask, what to report, and about whom?
Or is just business as usual? In which case I predict the press won’t even need to be ‘advised’, as Manx journalists once were in quite a heavy-handed manner. They already know, and will.
As for the politicians in a parliament where procedure and access to power is controlled by characters who are not used to being questioned (or even having to suffer the indignity of seeking election)……
What do you think?

Alabama madness, coming soon to Ramsey

2011-10-15T20:39:00.006+01:00

A terrifying flyer fell out of my Courier this week.
It appears that Living Hell, having turned Port St. Mary into a smack-riddled trailer park within a decade, are planning to hasten the degeneration of Ramsey too. Frankly, with the Ramsey Degeneration Committee already destroying anything of local character, taste, interest or colour I’m not sure we need the help.
I can only think this is some sort of revenge attack by crazed Southerners for the Michael Starkey exhibition down at Port Erin Arts Centre, and if so nobody could blame them. Ever since his awful ‘muriel’ went up on the wall opposite a particularly nice Ramsey cake shop I’ve had to stop patronising it. I can’t leave the shop without feeling physically sick, and I don’t want the owners or potential customers to think my nausea is a result of something I ate there.
Anyways, starting tomorrow evening, the Batshits have booked the Grammar School Lecture Theatre twice monthly for (and I quote direct from the flyer):
“an evening of contemporary music, an encouraging, life changing message, a chance to encounter God and coffee and donuts too!”
Charming, and just when they finally got all the stains and smells caused by incontinent freaks at the last evangelical screechfest out of the assembly hall floor at the town’s infant school.
So that’s junk food and cringeworthy cut and paste ‘sermons’ (courtesy of an Ulsterman who couldn’t cope with equal rights in his home community, armed with a correspondence course divinity diploma) twice monthly from now until…whenever someone at the Education Department turns down the loot I suppose.
Which will be never.
Paying punters at such atrocity exhibitions deserve all the pain they get, but I hope that at least the neighbours (especially residents of two nearby sheltered housing schemes) are spared the UNITE Worship Band. Think of a Cliff Richard tribute band formed by tone deaf inmates of a long term mental institution and you would be on the right lines.
Scary thought, is it not?

Noon of the Dead

2011-10-15T18:46:00.002+01:00

Well, had other stuff to do today –such as the copy for the latest column bearing this name (yes, I still rant in print as well as cyberspace. I know, how quaint, how retro…). But I just have to pass on today’s encounter with the living dead in a supermarket.
There we were, one happy family, having successfully parked the jalopy in what’s left of the supermarket car park now that the powers that be have finally decided to fill the stonking great hole that appeared in the middle of it two years ago. In the process they’ve created a rubble pile three times the size of the hole, parked a digger which is fast disappearing into the ever-subsiding perimeter of the hole and managed to block off the recycling bins, but ho hum….whatever!
Next we successfully steered a trolley with duff wheels round shelves remarkable for the absence of anything vaguely fresh or edible, and even found a till with no queue staffed by a kid who actually seemed keen to serve us. As Her Indoors and Junior Management took up position ready to pack stuff as it was scanned, I placed the first item on the conveyor belt…..and then the nonsense started.
Some three-nippled, mouth-breathing old throwback in an IOM Steam Packet jumper (which is tantamount to an admission you only procreate with siblings and cousins) put one of those ‘next customer’ plastic things just behind my first item and then dumped a 24 pack of industrial effluent-based lager on the conveyor belt just behind that.
He seemed intellectually incapable of understanding that this, once placed on the conveyor belt, would not stand still and that the six free inches between my first item and it would not magically expand as I tried to unpack the rest of the contents of a large trolley into it.
Believe me, I tried to educate him. Politely, in words (short ones), and by pointing to my full trolley and indicating the vast difference in height, width and depth between the two spaces.
I even pointed out that there was a space at the end of the till which wasn’t part of the conveyor belt, where he could place his economy priced mouthwash without it moving. His answer was “Well, you could pack faster than that”, which suggested a worrying unfamiliarity with basic concepts of time and space…or anything else really.
Eventually I was reduced to moving his 24 pack back to the end of the conveyor after unloading every second or third item from our trolley, while he grumbled to a (presumably female) co-idiot with slightly less facial hair about the time it was taking me to empty my trolley so he could get served. The kid on the till was almost blue in the face in an effort not to laugh in case Barnacle Bill noticed and he got drawn into the action , while somehow I managed not to explode.
What more can I say? I bend over backwards to defend quaint Manx eccentrics against a harsh, unforgiving world, but there’s a limit.
Hopefully this Neanderthal was too old to catch any female relative over the age of, say, 12. He was also ugly as sin and unlikely to be economically active enough to pay for sex, so at least he can’t add to the sum of local stupidity.
However, simpletons like this are still a major factor in disasters like the election of Leonard Singer, the current Ramsey MHK who isn’t Allan Bell, and that has to be a cause for concern.

Beware of unsolicited texts from pestering pastors

2011-10-08T17:08:00.004+01:00

I really feel sorry for folk around Port St. Mary.
There was a famous TV advert a few years back in which a small girl had to choose between ‘Daddy’ and ‘Chips’, and chose the chips. Sometimes I think it could be revived for unfortunates around the island’s answer to an Alabama trailer park, except in their case it would be ‘Jesus or Heroin?’
Seriously, have you SEEN Port St. Mary since Living Hell (‘Living Hope Community Church’, to give them the current trading name) set up shop and anyone who could spell their own name tried to sell up and move out?
Which brings me to this week’s Manx Indifferent and an article under South News about a ‘community choir’ being formed to have fun and raise cash for charity in the process. Given that Living Hell are involved any sane person will disregard such myths as the ones about choir members choosing the music or the charity. Forget it, that money has a US bank account's name on it already, however many 'religious charities' it has to pass through to get there.
But a more serious word of warning – especially if you have a daughter who is slightly under the age of consent but could (especially in dim lighting) pass as older. In the near future your daughter may start to receive texts ‘inviting’ her to join the choir. These could become persistent, and will emanate from adults who have obtained the number via Education Department staff, though neither the Education Department staff nor the persistent pests they passed it to obtained it by legitimate means.
If this happens, also be aware of several other things.
Firstly, this has happened before, and even though one culprit was identified and an official complaint made to the school it was not investigated. The culprit continues to roam schools preying on under-age girls under the pretence of ‘mentoring’ and the Education Department staff member who illegally obtained the child’s mobile number and passed it to him was never reprimanded, or even questioned.
Secondly, as long ago as 1999, other individuals involved in the project helped cover the tracks of a Ramsey evangelist, also with an unhealthy interest in girls in their mid-teens. Though he was eventually charged over one incident of many alleged to have taken place in Ramsey, Douglas, Peel and Port St. Mary it was only due to the persistence of a family who later left the island to avoid the backlash. Other incidents were simply never investigated, due to the collective refusal of the church venues involved to cooperate and the lack of will on the part of appropriate government staff to make them (including, to my certain knowledge, at least one church elder).
Should a young relative be pestered as the result of the current project, my advice would be report it to the school and the Education Department, but before either of those to the police. Mud sticks eventually, and while evangelicals hold key positions in the Education Department and Police Consultative Forum thankfully they no longer do so in the police force itself.

Government 'advice' from the thick and the dead

2011-10-08T12:43:00.002+01:00

I had to laugh at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/cso/playapartinpubli.xml. I know by now you’ve read this in what passes for a local press, but I feel obliged to quote from the original, as presented to the press to regurgitate whole. Because, unlike certain public notices (see (Oh ‘L’) someone in the Chief Sickbag’s office WILL check closely, and if ‘independent’ reports are cut, so future government advertising may be.
This kind offer, on the surface at least, invites mere plebs to become public representatives on advisory bodies. Except, as anyone who’s ever encountered either the drawn-out, secretive and (frankly) dishonest application procedure or the kind of freaks who end up on these committees can tell you, it does not.
The thing is, the Chief Sickbag’s office draws up a list of ‘suitable’ candidates (generally over-the-hill figures from the ‘special interest’ groups who civil servants have accepted ‘free lunches’ from over the years) and the current one was agreed with the last Council of Ministers. This is only vaguely hinted at in any COMIN minutes, because the Chief Sickbag writes them.
Procedure requires that there is then a’public invitation’, unwelcome responses to which inevitably get ‘lost’ before the Chief Sickbag presents the names of those appointed to a future COMIN meeting to rubberstamp. In the case of the public bodies in theory considered later, the process is even more opaque. Frankly, if you can count to ten, haven’t subsidised a ski holiday for a senior government figure and/or aren’t gaga already, don’t waste a stamp or rack up a phone bill.
For example, I remember talking to one MNH member with enough self-respect to step down before his short term memory was completely shot (unlike, for example, an old biddy on another cultural advisory body who was marked present at meetings for around two years even as staff in her nursing home tied her into her chair to prevent her wandering off). He swore that, at one point, some members were so sedated and the need to rush new policy through so urgent that their silence was recorded as votes for the motion. I even wonder if, like Jeremy Bentham, the stuffed bodies of deceased members are wheeled in to make up a quorum, though I doubt if they’d be marked “present but not voting” as Bentham famously is at UCL meetings marking major anniversaries.
There was also the day that a senior figure in the heritage racket was rescued in Strand Street by a concerned bypasser, having not set foot there since the first mid-80’s redevelopment. Even as he was escorted onto the nearest bus back to Arcadia, he was still muttering ‘I’m sure you just turn left at the Dog’s Home…..’
(For those not old enough to remember, the Dog’s Home was a legendary 1980’s pub - one of the few where individualists of all ages could feel secure and rednecks never came to drink. It was the key building in a block of small businesses which was knocked down under a secretive planning deal involving compulsory purchase, eventually providing the site for the current Marks & Sparks. Few, if any, of the owners got enough compensation to continue elsewhere.)

Ignorance is not a traditional value

2011-10-02T12:40:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I saw yet more evidence that while, on the one hand, it is churches who claim to be the champions of community and local identity it is their members who, in practice, are fast destroying both. This example would be simply hilarious if it were not so startling and very, very dumb.
We were looking for a child’s birthday present, so thought we’d do the right thing by getting something that would encourage the child to learn something and also looking for it in a proper local bookshop, rather than Waterstones.
While there a bloke I’d take to be a fairly new resident came in and asked the staff for assistance. He had friends coming from across, and as they’d be here at the end of October, wanted to give them a suitable book on Manx folklore which might explain Hop Tu Naa.
For non-Manx readers, Hop Tu Naa is the Manx variant of those Halloween customs whereby kids dress up and go door to door asking for treats. The fun bit is they get to dress in witch costumes, but to get the treats they must also (a) carry a carved turnip lamp and (b) successfully sing the Hop Tu Naa song. So, most would agree, harmless fun stuff that gets kids away from the Playstation and keeps local tradition going.
Apparently not the shop assistant, who froze as if asked if they had anything on practical Satanism and child sacrifice, after a few seconds said, rather stiffly, they didn’t stock “that sort of thing” and then, when asked who did, uttered the phrase which is enough to get you slung out of the Independent Book Retailers Association, “Try W.H. Smiths”.
Seeing all this, and in particular the bloke’s dazed expression as he headed for the door, the Light of My Life steered him towards me and ordered me to list suitable Manx shops and book-titles. This I did, and duly put his business the way of a nice little guy who stocks old Manx books, posters, postcards and other memorabilia, just across the street from the bookshop as it happens.
The irony is, a few metres away from the shop assistant was an entire bookcase of local titles, mostly nonsensical whimsy but including several copies of Sophia Morrison’s Manx Fairy Tales, an Edwardian local classic reprinted in a ridiculously over-priced edition a few years back by Manx National Heritage to take advantage of the need to cover Manx culture in the school curriculum.
It’s a great book, something like a Celtic version of Grimms Fairy Tales, but also with several chapters on Manx customs and all very accessible to kids. The Manx elders who introduced me to it and other out-of-print local classics years back were, without exception, stalwart churchgoers and also, for example, involved in keeping things like mhelliahs (harvest produce sales), Sankey Evenings, carvals (Manx carols) and suchlike going in village churches.
By comparison, the annual Manx outcry about the ‘dangers’ of Halloween comes from a nastier, more recent Christian tradition (if something recently concocted in the half-mind of a deranged fundamentalist can yet be deemed ‘tradition’). This was predominantly introduced by exiled Ulster Unionists who, before fleeing a fairer, more humane Northern Ireland, discovered the advantages of US correspondence course theological qualifications and superchurch pyramid schemes. Like our worst politicians, they know nothing of morality (and never even study the big moral questions) but do know (in their case by filling in the blanks on those helpful sermon templates that come with the franchise) how to create moral panic out of tabloid non-stories.
It is they, and not ‘militant atheists’ or ‘aggressive secularism’, who are the greatest threat to Manx community life and common decency. But for now, as their entire lives revolve around material wealth and their pretensions towards ‘spiritual values’ are just ridiculous, I’m happy to laugh, or put them out of business by pointing punters towards proper, community-orientated, competitors who do deserve neighbourly support.

Different arseholes, same old shite

2011-10-01T15:18:00.003+01:00

Well, the Manx election is over, and now the dust has settled we see that although a few different arseholes got elected all we can expect is the same old shite as before.
My experience as a Ramsey voter was fairly typical of most working people outside the capital.
As there are few jobs in the town, most of the working population commute 15 miles each way to Douglas and back, which should have meant a rush to the polls after 6 PM. Nope, just the election supervisors, the candidates and their blue-rinsed back-up teams when I got there.
Only exception was the campaign workers for Laurie Hooper, at 24 the youngest candidate and one of only two brave enough to say that, if elected, he’d push for scrutiny of government spending and policy-making procedures. Neither he nor the other guy making that promise (a junior civil servant, as it happens) got in. Thankfully neither did the truly scary woman from Liberal Vannin – a party with a campaign run by Robert Kilroy-Silk’s former campaign manager, so more UKIP-lite than liberal in values.
Various crinkly folk tell me that all the top four polling candidates visited them, but no working people recall seeing more than one candidate on the doorstep – and he was a working guy himself who could only make the rounds over evenings and weekends.
In fact, one neighbour, a sprightly ex-schoolteacher, deliberately went on holiday to Italy during the election week. She correctly forecast that (1) almost all of the votes in Ramsey would be cast by retired people, as commuting workers won’t be able to get to the poll in time and the unemployable don’t vote, being too illiterate to read candidate names (2) knowing this, career con-artists always make a point of touring retirement complexes and known homes of retired people and (3) if elected they never keep their promises.
Therefore, rather than becoming so irate she clocked one of the lying sods (which would be undignified for a genteel lady of advancing years) she would sit in the sun until the lying stopped and the toads most able to get frightened, superstitious half-blind biddies to leave the house, daytime TV and the Daily Mail long enough to put an X in roughly the right spot were declared the winners. At that point the highest paid civil servants can continue cutting deals with the skankiest local employers and the rest of us can carry on as normal.
Incidentally, as a lapsed member of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party (I participated during the Wild Willi Beckett years, when a combination of inspired lunacy and more serious campaigns on homelessness and sleaze actually got us York and Bradford council seats) I will be informing the party hierarchy of a Manx politician canvassing under false pretences. In this story (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=39810), Leonard Singer is clearly sporting an OMRLP rosette with the centrepiece altered. Ironic really, as the original said: “VOTE FOR INSANITY. You know it makes sense” .
Come to think of it, the Isle of Man may be one of the few places outside Washington DC or Tehran where, rather than restrict the voting rights of the clinically insane, we just employ them as politicians to keep them off the streets.

DHA, more danger than strangers to kids

2011-09-24T18:53:00.007+01:00

If I haven't blogged for a while, it's because I'm trying hard to stick to my post-holiday policy of only spreading positive vibes - poking fun at a few local windbags and drains on the rates along the way but in general trying to cheer up decent folk just trying to get by on the Rock rather than add to their woes.
But this (see http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_170178.html) is worrying news.
It isn’t just that a government department is wasting public time, money and resources indulging the prejudices of some of the island’s least responsible, self-pitying bigots. It is also the bigots who government will use or employ to ‘look into’ the matter.
Given that the Manx government already wastes far too many public facilities to tittle-tattle about the rest of us and screw up our personal and family lives, I would also be surprised if they choose to share their toys with any unskilled, tabloid-reading (and believing) inappropriate morons who don’t already draw a government salary.
I definitely don’t think the government wants anyone with an ounce of sense knowing the ill-informed ‘intelligence’ they share freely about the rest of us, and I doubt if the worst offenders are on their radar anyway, given that Manx ‘childcare professionals’ never look at unpleasant stuff involving fellow fundamentalists when reported by concerned relatives and neighbours.
But what really worries me is that if it has got as far as this, then someone in either Social Services or the DHA has already formulated a policy and a way of pushing it through a bogus ‘public consultation’, just as they did with homelessness.
Having once wasted an extremely unpleasant evening with some civil servants from the DHA, DSS and various puppet charities, I’ve been through something similar to what is (in theory) supposed to happen here but (in practice) will not.
The official agenda at that meeting was to decide the format for an information-gathering exercise into the scale, nature and causes of Manx homelessness, in order to help government develop strategies to need it. Amongst the things I quickly discovered were:
(1) It doesn’t matter what it says on the agenda of such a meeting or who drew it up in theory. In practice both the agenda and the decisions the meeting will rubberstamp are set in advance by a DSS executive on a £100K+ salary, who will not actually bother to turn up to the meeting.
(2) I, the token ‘member of the public’, had more facts and figures at my fingertips, and knew more about the issue in general, than a group of people who, collectively, cost the public about £500,000 in salaries each year.
(3) Government employees don’t bother researching for meetings like this, and may even turn up not knowing what the meeting topic is, but happily put in claims for overtime anyway.
(4) Slum landlords and the DSS get along just fine, and the DSS are not about to allow any evidence to appear in a government document which would break up that cosy relationship.
(5) Nobody with dark skin or a foreign accent is safe in the care of the DHA, but if the DHA can find a way to blame all Manx social problems on such folk they will.
(6) Some key government staff not only go to the same fundamentalist churches which produce the homophobia, sexism, racism, physical, mental (and in some cases sexual) abuse which in turn is the primary cause of Manx teenage kids leaving home, they are also involved in the fundamentalist bogus charities which the DHA and DSS proposes to use to counsel and rehouse them.
So, in brief, nothing will emerge from this mess but more trouble for ordinary parents. If you really want a list of people who are a danger to children, you should start with the staff lists of any government department, bogus charity or government advisory body which gets involved in such a pointless exercise.

Oh, 'L'!

2011-09-05T20:45:00.003+01:00

Me and the Mrs are still giggling at a glaring error in a government advert prominently featured in last week’s Isle of Man Courier.
Well, we thought it was a typo, but it could be genuine.
After all, nobody with more than two working braincells gets to work in the Chimp Secretary’s office (for fear of upstaging the Chimp himself), and some of the folk who have ‘advised’ the Chimp’s Tea Party in the past have more than a passing knowledge of the adult entertainment industry. It’s an open secret too that internet porn takes up way more browsing time in certain government departments than, say, human rights, international law or the websites of the Economist or Financial Times.
Which might explain why, in the third paragraph of a quarter page public notice placed on behalf of the Chief Secretary's Office on page 48 and meant to invite expressions of interest for ‘Public Art Coordinator for Regeneration’, we read that: “In order to meet the public's responses for vibrant and interesting regenerated areas, the government is seeking Expressions of Interest to undertake the coordination of Pubic Art within some of the Island’s planned regeneration areas.”
But even that won’t be as funny as the tasteless tat chosen for production at public expense which results if this is nothing more than an unfortunate typo.

Good news and inspiration

2011-09-03T16:33:00.003+01:00

As nothing in the Isle of Man seems worthy of ridicule (or even note) this week, and what passes for UK atheism still seemed as irrelevant and up its own Little Englander backside as it was when I went off on holiday I wasn’t going to blog today.
Then I checked out the Pink Triangle Trust blog and read something positive, about an organisation and individuals whose boots British humanists will not be fit to lick for decades.
The PTT (see http://ptt-blog.blogspot.com/2011/09/ptt-donates-1000-to-nigerian-humanist.html ) has just donated £1,000 towards the cost of a conference being arranged by the Nigerian Humanist Movement.
I don’t recall now how I first came across the work of the brave and inspirational Leo Igwe, head honcho at the NHM, who has faced everything (libel actions and death threats from the powerful quacks and charlatans of Nigeria’s infamous, US-backed evangelical industry, beatings of family members and arrest courtesy of that country’s equally dishonest and unhinged police and politicians....) yet continues to talk sense, act for change and, in general, be everything a civilized human being could aspire to be. I only know that discovering his work, and just seeing e-mails with his name on, lifts and inspires me on even the worst day.
The blog quotes from the NHM website, which tells us that: “The Nigerian Humanist Movement was founded in 1996 to promote Humanism, defend secularism and provide a sense of community to all non-religious and freethinking Nigerians – atheists, skeptics, rationalists, agnostics and freethinkers. Nigeria is a deeply religious society. And in most cases people relate, interact and marry along religious lines. Religious affiliation becomes a decisive factor when one is seeking employment, doing a business or wants to be admitted into a school or university. Those who do not profess any religion are treated as second class citizens. So in Nigeria most non-religious people are in the closet. They lack any association or community they can call their own. The rights of non-religious people are not recognized. The voice and interests are not represented at public debates and discourse. So NHM was formed to fulfill this important need – to defend the rights and interests of Humanists and the general public and to realize a Humanistic society.”
As the website (see http://www.nigerianhumanists.com/ ) also says:” In a country plagued by poverty, ignorance, religious fanaticism and superstition, NHM will continue to work and campaign for intellectual awakening, social reform, cultural rebirth and renewal.”
As should we all, in countries perhaps less plagued by extreme poverty but equally riddled with other stuff and nonsense that none of us should have to abide.

Clocking on

2011-08-29T11:27:00.006+01:00

On August 6th, just before being dragged away reluctantly to warmer, more vibrant places for a while, I wrote that: “The optimist in me hopes I'll come back a chilled, kinder, less irritable person determined to spread only positive vibes…..”
It wasn’t just that the balance between the precious benefits of the quieter pace of life over here and the inescapable price (having to work in a sick industry which offers the only local employment) was getting out of kilter.
It wasn’t just the knowledge that (as the Manx education system is as riddled with small town prejudice and superstition as anything else) working parents with no link to the richest, thickest inbreeds need to take on the real education of our children, and treat ‘school’ as little more than a child-minding service where the kids try not to go to sleep while we’re away at work
It was also the reality kicking in that family responsibilities to relatives whose health is fast failing mean yet less time from now on for activities that actually interest me.
And the further knowledge that, even while away and theoretically on holiday, we’d probably be drawn into the lives of others whose problems dwarf our own.
Like the calm, unassuming folk who the drunk or loony always sits next to on the bus, me and the Mrs just seem to be magnets for anyone who can’t or won’t open up to ‘normal’ people or ‘proper’ family. Usually we don’t mind - and sometimes we even tap into something richer we would otherwise never have experienced - but even Nobel Peace Prize winners need a day off.
Well, I’m back on the Rock. Have been for a few days, actually, but still couldn’t bring myself round to blogging again.
Why?
Well, probably because (having studiously avoided the internet whilst away) I found nothing had moved on when finally checking back in here last week.
And I do mean nothing! Do the Toytown windbags who dominate the local media really think anything they have to say is of importance to anyone with more than a double figure IQ?
Really?
Seriously?
And probably because I have not even looked at a computer in almost three weeks yet the sky has not caved in. This brought home to me that, while 99% of anything on the Isle of Man is nonsense I didn’t miss, 99.999% of anything on the internet in general is mind-rotting twaddle exchanged between losers who seriously need to get a life instead.
And probably because the optimist in me did triumph over the blue meanies which dwell on the bad stuff, and though the problems of others did eat into time I’d rather have spent lounging under a tree reading a funny book it didn’t matter. Because the folk with problems were folk I love and want to see happier, and because I only had room for one funny book in my hand luggage anyway.
So..... chilled, kinder, less irritable, determined to spread only positive vibes?
Yes, I think so.
Mind you, I only actually go back to work tomorrow, so better give it until the weekend to be sure!

Abnormal service will be resumed....

2011-08-06T10:28:00.003+01:00

Just in case anyone was worried.....
I will be unable to blog for a couple of weeks because I have to go away.
The optimist in me hopes I'll come back a chilled, kinder, less irritable person determined to spread only positive vibes......
Well, we'll see when I get back.
Meanwhile, be excellent to each other.

As ye give, so shall ye receive

2011-08-02T18:57:00.003+01:00

Acolytes of the Zombie Carpenter have been dropping religious pamphlets through our letterbox again.
Not Ramsey ones, which I can at least excuse as they’re from cheery eternal optimists we sort of know just trying to be neighbourly and invite us to their shindigs. These chancers operate from Douglas – by the looks of it on a similar basis to those shysters who offer to buy your gold or tarmac your drive.
One leaflet asks: “Where will your soul be 150 years from now? Indeed, where will you be in Eternity?”
If these anonymous twerps want to ask pointless and stupid questions, I wish they’d at least make an effort to ask funny ones.
How about: ‘Where was the fairy from the bottom of your garden five minutes ago?’
Or why not: ‘How many unicorns does it take to change a light bulb?’
In another leaflet, they ask: “Can we be sure of forgiveness?”
Well, that’s an easy one.
No.
I don’t care if they’re deluded, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find they have learning difficulties. But that still isn’t an excuse for dropping litter through other people’s letter boxes, and as they were dumb enough to give a contact address I think they should pay for it by receiving it in return.
So, if anyone has any paper they cannot be bothered to take to the paper bank, why not drop it off at Switzerland Road Gospel Hall, off Queens Promenade, Douglas.

They see him here, they see him there.....

2011-07-25T19:36:00.000+01:00

Just when you think ‘the religulous’ cannnot get dumber, they prove you wrong again.
See http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/869759-jesus-christ-found-in-walmart-receipt for example - the latest in a stream of unlikely sightings for effigies of their poster boy.
As you’ll see from the other links on the pages, tracking such lunacy is itself booming as something of a niche industry. For example, Fortean Times (a magazine by and for those, like me, who love winding up fundamentalist rationalists as much as fundamentalist godbotherers) now has a page ('Simulacra Corner') where readers can send in their own photos of odd phenomena. This month’s includes the Virgin Mary as revealed in the rings of a cut down tree trunk and the folds of a record cleaning cloth in a CD rack, and Jesus on an onion and the surface of an old baking pan.
You just could not make it up, or as Poe’s Law states:
“Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.”

Hallelujah, give us a handout/Revive us again

2011-07-24T14:53:00.004+01:00

From this week’s local press (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/churches_facing_crippling_costs_1_3603130 ) it seems the largest local myth retailer wants more public cash to prop up a business selling produce hardly anyone has a use for.
I particularly liked the casual misdirection of:
“At St German’s Cathedral in Peel, the maintenance bill was £100,000 a year and urgent work to repair leadwork, gutters and downpipes, at an estimate cost of £80,000, needed to be carried out within the next year.
‘The big problem is that while congregations are holding reasonably well, the financial burden of maintaining ancient buildings is becoming too much,’ he said.”
This argument loses allure if you know that St. German’s, far from being ‘ancient’, is the charmless Edwardian equivalent of a Barrett Home, that it was extensively internally redesigned within the last two decades, and that a couple of years ago the Synod set up a new committee which – outwardly at least – includes business expertise and other denominations and whose sole task is to excuse massive government subsidy of parts of the building and grounds under the slim pretence of using it (or more accurately abusing vulnerable kids and adults) as an ‘educational resource’.
And just a thought, but, logically, should not at least economically minded Christians accept Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand of the market’ concept (which presumably in Christian form is attached to an invisible arm, somewhere beyond the knowable universe), and agree that what the market cannot support has passed its sell-by date and so it is time to restructure, scale down, and close unproductive retail operations?
Or am I just following the reductio ad absurdum which dogs all religious ‘thought’ through to its inevitably illogical conclusion again?
I also worry at:
“Bishop Paterson told the Manx Independent that Mr Brown was surprised the grants for ancient buildings were a one-off and had assumed that the £20,000 would be paid annually.
He promised to investigate the issue.”
Considering how many superstitious numpties advise him, I bet he will too.
And I would also bet that (unless forcefully prevented by a public outcry which I dare not bet will follow) at the same time as the Government is drastically reducing what little remains of public services, the Government will (under various pretences) drastically scale UP public outlay on buildings currently only used by two men and a dog on Sunday mornings (always providing it isn't raining).

Legislation, Bansturbation and Nudging

2011-07-20T20:54:00.003+01:00

I put up links to interesting sites here, but must admit I often forget to check them for alarming or hilarious updates.
For example, Dick Puddlecote has an excellent piece at http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.com/2011/07/alcohol-control-j-s-mill-rendered.html on ‘nudging’, and an astonishing excerpt from a UK government consultation paper advocating behaviour modification policies which are not, and will not be, open for public scrutiny or consultation.
By the way, love that term ‘bansturbator’ - and we have far too many self-righteous tossers of that ilk over here to let the term go unused. Damn Charles Wesley and all his pious progeny!
Then Dick has another startling piece on the nonsense which happens when paranoid emotional illiterates and politicians desperate for another few years on public benefits combine their idiocies.
See http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.com/2011/07/sexting-and-legislative-idiocy.html for a startling bit of US legislation which could brand cheeky teenagers as ‘sex offenders’ for life, just for one ‘inappropriate’ image on a kid’s mobile.
This is sheer cretinism.
Which is exactly why I’m worried some Fool on the Hill or the bible-bashing buffoons they spend so much time in broom cupboards with might pick up on it.
Update
For more on that startling UK government consultation paper, also see Rob Lyons at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10911/ .

Medium? No, that fat charlatan's at least an XXL

2011-07-20T20:11:00.002+01:00

As we have a much higher than average percentage of gullible, superstitious numpties with money to burn, it is no surprise charlatans are queuing up at Liverpool’s Ayatollah Khomeini airport to fly over and fleece them. In fact, the Light of My Life reports there are so many Morons and Jehovah’s Dipsticks currently wandering Ramsey in pairs you need a stick to beat them off with.
And then there are the ‘mediums’ (by the way, do all these lardy pyschics offend against the Trades Descriptions Act by claiming to be ‘mediums’ when it’s patently obvious they’re at least XXLs) who play to full houses.
See http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=37910 for example.
Tell you what, the very thought of these table-tapping twonks is bringing on visions.
I see…..wait a minute, it’s coming, it’s coming…….seems to be a building…yes…yes….a large white building….and outside is….oh, it’s a sign…yes, it’s a sign….black words on a…..is that a fluorescent orange background? Can’t be, surely…..yes…yes, it is….black words on a bright orange background on the front door…..it’s coming closer…… I’m being drawn closer….and closer….and I think I can read it now….it says……it says……oh, yes…it says…….

'CANCELLED DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES'

Child Safety 1, Bigotry -1

2011-07-19T20:45:00.003+01:00

I wasn’t going to blog today, then I read this (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8648317/The-Right-Reverend-Michael-Evans.html ), laughed at the pathetic lies in the intro and opening paragraphs and cheered.
For the record, Amnesty did not, as the poorly informed or dishonest tool who wrote it insists, “come out in favour of abortion” in 2007. Amnesty had (and still has after extensive , separate and independent debates in every national section), a neutral stance on the topic.
In fact, what happened was that the Vatican led an attempt to replace neutrality and allowing individuals and local groups to make up their own minds on individual cases with a blanket anti-abortion stance. If the theo-fascists had been successful anyone imprisoned for helping women procure abortions – or even just giving sex education which included contraception advice in a conservative country – could not have been adopted as an Amnesty ‘prisoner of conscience’.
Thankfully, common decency prevailed. The Catholics lost – badly - in every vote in every debate in every country where Amnesty has a national network, and so the international secretariat did not change the policy.
The Vatican (and conservative factions of the church in particular) reacted by causing Catholic churches, schools and buildings to withdraw any facility used by local Amnesty groups, to close Amnesty groups in Catholic schools and colleges, and not to allow Amnesty workers to talk to kids in citizenship lessons or Amnesty materials to be used in any relevant course.
In doing so they added to a situation where bogus ‘human rights groups’ and ‘religious charities’ have open access to British schools, but genuine human rights material is blocked on school computer networks and informed discussion of human rights cannot take place. A situation which, ironically, has always existed on the Isle of Man anyway, making it the last part of the British Isles where young people only gain a basic knowledge of human rights, social and political activism and democracy in general by emigrating.
As for a Catholic bishop wittering about the UN convention on the rights of the child while he knows his church used the Vatican’s diplomatic immunity to block all police attempts to investigate the widespread sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests…..
Sick, sick, sick!
Still, look on the bright side. One less over-privileged professional hypocrite to worry about.
A nation’s parents and children can sleep a little easier tonight.

Charitable hiatus

2011-07-17T13:15:00.003+01:00

Supporters of the Council for Ex-Muslims received a sad e-mail from Maryam Namazie, the Council’s spokesperson, this week.
For those who don’t know what this group does, it supports anyone who has renounced the Islamic faith – thus rendering them ‘apostates’ in the eyes of devout Muslims and possible hate targets of the lunatic fringe of that faith. Check the ‘One Law for All’ link to the right of the page for more details.
In Maryam’s own words: “..breaking the taboo that comes with renouncing Islam and challenging a movement that sentences apostates to death – is considered ‘controversial’ to say the least and makes it almost impossible to get support from mainstream funders.”
This means the tiny group’s volunteers start off fighting thugs and prejudices with both hands tied behind their backs. But now there is an extra handicap, courtesy of the England and Wales Charity Commission, which has just refused charitable status.
In its refusal letter the Charity Commission says: “Under English law the advancement of religion is a recognised charitable purpose and charities are afforded certain fiscal privileges by the state. The prohibition of any such financial privilege as called for in the demand made in the Manifesto would require a change in law. Similarly a separation of religion from the state and legal and education system would appear to require both constitutional reform and change to the law.”
As Maryam aptly comments: “There is something fundamentally wrong when the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain can’t get charity status but the Sharia Council legislating misogyny in its sharia courts can. And how absurd that defending secularism is not a charitable object but advancing religion is, particularly in this day and age when we are living under an Islamic Inquisition.”
Time for decent folk to come to their aid, I suggest.
But if the England and Wales Charity Commission can sometimes be bollock-brained, and the Scottish and Northern Irish equivalents are not far behind, at least there are structures in place which allow responsible folk to check where the coins they throw in the bucket actually go, who runs the charities, how much they get paid, who pulls the strings externally and so on.
In the Isle of Man? Nothing but obfuscation and minimal public information by the government department charged with keeping tabs on bogus charities – or as I often suspect, preventing the public from noticing just how hand in glove some of the worst civil servants are with some of the island’s most bigoted pressure groups.
For example, to the casual reader this (see http://www.isleofman.com/news/article.aspx?article=37791) looks like common sense. However, once you track the way the Manx government sets up puppet charities for functions which are properly the business of social services (in order to meet most running costs with grants from UK charities), and if you regard the IOMCVO itself as little more than a government puppet (largely run by people whose first point of contact is government e-mail and phone numbers), then you might be cynical.
The new thresholds mean that key social service functions are run by organisations which, by being registered as ‘charities’, have no basic staff and management details on public record, whose policies cannot be scrutinised, whose accounts are not on public record, which in many cases also avoid any external verification of accounts (which, in practice, means the puppet committee depends on the word of the puppet treasurer that books are kept), and the largest of whom avoid audit by anyone who, in theory, is professionally obliged to offer an objective report of their findings.
And you thought the worst Manx joke this week was the ‘election’ of a President of Tynwald who has had no mandate from the electorate in almost two decades.

When nether regions collide

2011-07-16T11:48:00.004+01:00

What does a pensioned off ‘charity worker’ from the local branch of a right to life group do for amusement?
It is the kind of job someone only gets if unsuitable or already past their sell-by date for real employment anyway. And, unlike ‘proper’ clergy, it isn’t as if worn out para-parsons can go into a home run by the firm.
So there you would be, reduced to howling at the moon or arguing with your cats for want of anything else to lecture, or joining some lonely priest trying to finish off the communion wine after yet another single figure audience.
I ask because a spy tells me that someone we spotted last year regularly trying to plant false images of the Manx in the comments section of the UK blue-rinse press is back at her old tricks. Someone who, in addition to her former ‘day job’ remonstrating (on public funds) with parents who fail to live down to her employer’s standards for dysfunctional families also fell for Freedom to Fester hook, line and sinker. In fact, to the extent of trying to act like an ‘Island ambassador’ replying to UK media stories.
For those who don’t follow this blog regularly, I should explain that, some time back, when A.A. Gill and others were having fun at the expense of some of our slower thinking fellow citizens, an over-the-hill marketing guru saw job opportunities for his redundant chums. The result, a vacuous ‘public campaign’ named Freedom to Flourish, was presented to the local public as an attempt to’rebrand’ the island.
In fact what happened was a shady deal between the Manx government and some third division PR outfits whereby the latter helped the former with a spot of Manx social engineering. The ‘public’ being ‘re-educated’ was not the outer world about the Isle of Man, but the Manx about the absolute rightness of everything our glorious leaders do for ‘our’ benefit, and at our expense. If you check out the Spiked website entries on ‘nudging’ you will soon get the latest version of an old idea.
One of the scams was an FtF proposal, heavily publicised by a media partner, that ‘ordinary’ Manx people should act as ‘Manx ambassadors’ by replying to ‘negative’ UK press stories. In reality, what happens is that such replies are ghosted by PR hacks and attributed to local halfwits whose businesses are in terminal tailspin. I wouldn’t know if money changed hands for this, and if it was paid out to the hacks by government or private sector halfwits, but it fits an old, old pattern so this seems quite likely.
One of the gullible public who fell for this was the aforementioned right-to-lifer, whose ‘disgusted of Braddan’ diatribes in reply to Daily Mail regurgitation of items from other papers became a regular source of amusement to anyone who can trawl through the Mail’s website without being physically sick.
As this was happening during working hours, one assumes this was written off as ‘work’ – especially as there was little evidence of her doing more elsewhere (other than turning up for the odd government liaison committee to try and siphon off more public loot).
So, having been pensioned off when her former employers scaled their Manx operation down, it was a surprise to see the comments resurfacing again this year, most recently on an unlikely Daily Mail story about a Pippa Middleton likeness which prominently featured her buttocks, made out of 15,000 crumpets, jam & Marmite.
We know right-to-lifers are unbalanced, and we know Daily Mail readers are equally unhinged, but when the two meet…..it’s hilarious!

I'll tell you what you want, what you really, really want

2011-07-14T22:05:00.003+01:00

Poor old Hugh Davidson. If the last real advertising campaign you worked on was probably the Playtex Cross Your Heart bra, how do you hold your head up in later years?
His 'official' profession wrote off such monochrome stuff in the 1980’s. As the publishing world, even then, was awash with pulped ‘memoirs’ from advertising’s golden era, he gamely reinvented his as ‘marketing manuals’ to try to cash in on the business guru/self-help boom of that hideous, shoulder-padded era. In turn his grateful publishers (I always suspect just to stop him hanging out in reception and scaring off newer clients) arranged a largely honorary ‘professorship’ at a ‘business college’ no truly ambitious teenage Sugar clone went near - being far too busy and successful knocking out dodgy videos from a barrow if we are to believe the hype.
When the wheels fell off vanity publishing and pedagogy, other geriatric marketing gurus were reduced to flogging their dubious talents to third rate offshore tax havens. It didn’t work out for any of them, because when the governments of such backwaters did their sums they found the rate at which custom was ebbing away was exceeded only by the ludicrous sums such chumps demanded for the alzheimer-induced ravings they passed off as ‘consultancy’.
Not to mention the tightening up of regulatory regimes, the OECD, etc., etc., which had the effect of getting the serious offshore world to engage with the real business community and the rest to go to the wall.
Except in the Isle of Man of course, where, as the finance sector and a few Treasury bods just got on with business, Uncle Hugh was talking to the swivel-eyed loons who run the rest of government. Entranced, like so many six year olds with learning difficulties, by his shiny baubles and fancy words, they sanctioned ‘Freedom to Fester’ – surely the daftest concept since…..well, the Cross Your Heart bra (which only MLCs are old enough to remember -and media trainspotters like me mad enough to trawl through old videos for in search of stone age advertising methodology).
Now the Alzheimers Army are at it again. See http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_159572.html for details of a ‘political poll’ which, reading between the lines, cannot even be flogged to the cash-strapped Fools on the Hill, hence Hugh’s kind funding.
To save you some trouble, I will explain something simple.
In genuine academic research involving public consultation, the academics choose an interesting question to answer, then find a way to structure the enquiry such that (a) the public get to say what they really think, know and do without helpful ‘prompts’ from interested parties (b) a reasonable cross-section of the public get to be involved and (c) ways to make sure unexpected findings, rather than preferred ones, are kept in (and all attempts by lobby groups and other interested parties to skew the evidence in their favour can be kept out) are sought rigorously.
As a result, however strongly they suspect certain findings will follow, the academics can never be sure what they will get, and whatever they do get will be fully written up along with the methods of getting them so that other academics can check for unintended bias or plain wrongheadness.
By comparison, a’marketing survey’ works the other way round. First the surveyors ascertain what the client wants the result to be. Then they plan the survey so that there can be no other.
The questions are loaded so that only the preferred answers will be given by a significant majority, with a few random ‘wrong’ ones from a predetermined minority of deviants. The sampling survey is rigorously chosen to ensure only suitable participants are included – this can include pre-surveying applicants, choosing only a certain geographic or economic demographic, a preferred ‘psychographic’ (e.g. conservative, suspicious, low in self-esteem) etc. etc. Added to this (and having enough friends at college who did this for pin-money I know for certain) the surveyors get bored, lie, make up answers and fictitious participants, while the public get even more bored and (as genuine researchers know) also have a tendency to try and guess the ‘right’ answer. Result – a ‘survey’ whose findings should not be trusted as far as anyone can throw them.
The only interesting question might be why, apart from boredom or egotism, anyone wants this survey enough to put up their own money to facilitate it? We may get the answer when the results are in and their sponsor tells what we want next.

Sarah's bores

2011-07-14T20:42:00.002+01:00

You have to laugh at this story (see http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_158966.html) on the latest in a halfwitted campaign to introduce ‘Sarah’s Law’ to the island.
“Over 20" campaigners?
So that’s a maximum of 10 once you take away the police, the media and the only MHK desperate enough to back you. Or less, if (as I suspect of anyone dim enough to want it) you cannot count higher than your fingers.
And considering the core audience for this nonsense, the organisers really should have worked out that the very worst time of day for such a ‘protest’ is when Jeremy Kyle is on.

Man talks sense on Isle of Man via YouTube

2011-07-10T14:27:00.006+01:00

I cannot get over the fact that Brian Cox not only came to the Isle of Man and spoke to local sixth formers, but that he actually made the front page of a local paper during Tynwald Week.
I also cannot get over the fact that the 'scientist' (actually just a philosopher of science and mathematician) wheeled out by Manx Creationists to back up their nonsense did not even get a mention in local print, audio or electronic media.
Two-Nil to common sense.
Matty has been in contact to say that the Villa Marina conference involving Brian Cox and NASA astronauts is now on YouTube. Just go to http://www.youtube.com/user/wimanxIOM and enjoy.
Three-Nil to common sense then.

Christian convictions

2011-07-09T17:20:00.003+01:00

I cannot help poking fun at the annual attempts of evangelical wowsers to organize a ‘Christian rock festival’. Despite a decade of disasters which include, for example, regularly calling the emergency services out to rescue godbothering dimwits on midnight sea-swims, outwardly they have faith that, maybe, this year - at last - all will be well, some kids might turn up and all the finances will not be outgoings.
But I had to laugh, then shake my head, yet again when in their latest missive (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=37557), poker-faced, the organisers claim that:
“Because it is a youth event run by the local churches, all of the artists are asked to sign up to a code of conduct which includes respecting the festival's no alcohol or drugs policy by showing up sober, avoiding inappropriate language or subjects and trying to provide a good role model for the youth.”
I laugh because since the festival first began the volunteers, over the years, seem to have included some fairly unsavoury characters – thankfully mostly long gone, though only twice due to actual criminal convictions here or elsewhere that I know of.
For example, at an early festival one ‘artist’ was a convicted Loyalist paramilitary, also with a separate string of firearms offences, who gained early release by ‘finding God’ and going into the business, with considerable help from the government grants then available to anyone purporting to run a ‘bridge building’ scheme in Northern Ireland.
He later founded an extreme ‘right to life’ group, aping the tactics of US Christian militia, which made a series of serious threats to UK nurses and doctors. That in turn led to more convictions for supporters of the group.
At the time of his Manx appearance, this ‘artist’ was officially bound not to leave Northern Ireland by the terms of his early release order. Knowing of such court orders from my time in Northern Ireland, I happened to ask various police officers not long after how he had been allowed to visit.
I could get no explanation of this obvious omission, despite prior advertising of his appearance and a system of Special Branch checks at the time under the Prevention of Terrorism Act which meant names of any convicted terrorists showed up as soon as their air or ferry tickets were booked. At the time Coleraine police were also investigating an attempt to burn down a family planning clinic, which deed the ‘militant’ wing of his organisation had openly boasted it was involved in.
And things get even more bizarre, because one of his other ‘good deeds’ was an ‘anti-drug’ lecture to Victoria Road Prison inmates. Back then several prison officers would have been former H Block guards who ‘relocated’ to the island as part of a deal between the Manx Department of Home Affairs and the Northern Ireland equivalent, saving the former a fortune training local prison officers and the latter an even bigger fortune in security arrangements which, at the time, were expected to be necessary for not just the serving years but the lifetimes of any police or prison officer.
Not, in short, a gentleman one would choose as a role model for any child, and not one whose government hosts could have failed to know his true character.
I hope recent and current guests and volunteers have less criminal tendencies, but can no longer be bothered to check each year. The only mystery to me is that the annual farce is repeated, but I cannot be bothered to solve that either, only to point, laugh, and be somewhere else when it is perpetuated.

List of 2,000 child health problems

2011-07-09T12:56:00.004+01:00

This (see http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_158602.html) must be a worry to any responsible parent.
2,000 ill informed bigots on the island, and once the last edition of News of the World hits the dustbin tomorrow nothing left to distract them.
The first local witterings of this appeared in the press a month or so ago. From conversations with workmates it quickly became apparent that the campaign was driven, not by concerned parents, but a loose network of welfare dependants messing about on Facebook at 3 AM while the plant food wears off.
Now, as a principled libertarian, it is simply not my concern if these dullards get off their faces every night. And anyone who has worked with such wasters probably prefers it if they stay on benefits and away from work environments, where their inability to concentrate while operating machinery or office equipment could take an innocent life - or at the very least inconvenience it while the clerical error is corrected.
Ordinary, self-disciplined people in a small community do not need to check with the police if a potential father (or a temporary sex partner and potential passport to more years on benefits) might be a sex offender. Because they would know him from schooldays, work or leisure interests, or at least have talked to the man long enough to know something of his history.
In fact, anyone who has even tried to bring a genuine sex offender (or even a parent who needs some support) to the attention of the relevant Manx authority knows how child abuse is covered up when the offender disguises it as 'church work' (and almost every Manx sex offender I know of has), while parenting problems which reflect on the failure of social services to do anything except keep two 'executive' parasites in their £100K+ jobs will simply be ignored.
To be blunt, most local parenting problems are not rooted in the wilful neglect of individual parents, but in the failure of public services, the superstition and bigotry of the ‘third sector’ which is being talked up as a stand-in, or just the callousness of many local employers towards parents working to provide what their child needs most.
The other night we were joking that perhaps we need to petition to know who has petitioned to introduce Sarah’s Law. With these loons presenting their petition, I suppose at least we can now note the signatories, and their desperate political sponsors, then keep such sad and silly folk well away from our nearest and dearest.

National Lunacy Day

2011-07-05T18:39:00.006+01:00

We’re just back from Tynwald Day. Not the colonial clown show itself, which only the mentally defective bother with nowadays, but the fair on the Tynwald Field behind it.
In theory, this is where all Manx human life is to be found on our national day - folk dancing, selling female relatives to over-subsidised farmers, ritually thrashing each other with wet rhubarb or whatever else wildly inaccurate guides to Manx custom written by senile Edwardian vicars (and recycled by Manx National Heritage) have to say on the subject.
In practice, it is where local charities and odd social reform groups lay out their stalls amongst burger vans and a few chancers taking a day off from E-Bay, but still a handy way to take the national pulse.
Which is pretty weak, judging from this year’s atrocity exhibition.
Balloons featuring cartoon characters were more in evidence than national flags, and burgers and crisps far outsold either heavily hyped (and largely inedible) ‘organic farm produce’ or just old fashioned traditional fare like bonnag cakes. And the quality of second hand tat on rabid right church group stalls was so poor that it wasn’t even worth playing ‘reverse shoplifting’ – an anarchist sport where you get points for the most unlikely and startling tape, CD or DVD you can slip into a case originally holding devotional product.
Not that traditional religious values were much in evidence either.
As far as I could tell, Christian evangelicals were heavily outnumbered by new age nuts. This was even reflected in the live radio coverage, broadcast over a big screen and watched by almost nobody, when an item in which the Bishop explained the deep symbolic significance of an old stick he was carrying was followed by a much longer item, in which the interviewer got a live tarot reading from an over-excited gentleman who appeared to have overdone his happy pills.
Frankly though, as long as legal privilege (never mind public subsidy) for the new charlatans does not follow and they stick to fleecing the clueless rich, who cares?
I must also point out the poor state of the modern military. Judging from numerous obese, khaki-clad adolescents with severe acne who were wandering around, the UK armed forces can still happily take our least employable youth as cannon fodder, but only by skipping medical tests, PT and anything resembling a balanced diet.
There was also an RAF band playing, which brings me to more evidence of military madness.
After all the penguin suited politicos and any associated freeloaders had been herded into St. Johns Chapel by an obliging Border collie, it was safe for normal people to look round the main field. Within 30 seconds my daughter had picked up a handful of band uniform buttons, and I was amused to discover these are now shoddy plastic efforts, not proper brass. If this is the standard of components on a Number One Dress uniform, no wonder they feel outgunned by Talibanimals armed with AKs salvaged from Russian scrapyards.
I also spotted a renowned nationalist pushing a life size dalek around the field. Intrigued, I took a closer look, expecting it to be a wry piece of political street theatre, with the dalek being named after, say, an MLC or overpaid public servant. Turned out he was just letting kids play at being daleks while he pushed them about: I asked around, but even his fellow nationalists had no idea why.
It was just that kind of a day. You had to be there, but believe me, you might be glad if you were not.

Do we expect the Manx Inquisition?

2011-07-05T10:57:00.003+01:00

Now here’s something, which one hopes is sheer coincidence rather than evidence of a church policy.
The Anglicans have made two recent announcements (see http://www.manx.net/news/2485/appointments-of-two-clergy-to-posts-on-the-island
and http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=37370) of new clergy coming to the island.
See a pattern in the former professions of two out of the three new clerics?
The two former police officers will join at least one retiree from the local force that I know of now serving as a hobby vicar. And other retirees from the local force are increasingly joining previous retirees from other forces who settled here in full time work with other churches.
This is no surprise if you know that only a decade ago there were enough church-going cops here to keep TWO Christian police organisations going, and two decades ago these organisations were instrumental in the resettlement of a number of RUC and H Block prison officers to the island. In the case of the younger ones officially to ‘save costs’ in training local staff (and benefit financially from substantial ‘resettlement packages’ from the security services), while the older ones invested their even more substantial retirement packages in local businesses far away from disgruntled former clientele.
The ‘church police’, when added to the number of recently retired senior civil servants donning dog collars as a weekend hobby, do suggest a worrying trend. Just at the point when those who screwed up our public services (while our police force only existed to serve a bigoted few) are finally put out to grass they go to work for the very institutions whose superstition, immorality and (at times) sheer pig-headed ignorance held back the island in the first place.
The more the decent elements in Manx society try to drag us towards civilisation, the more the worst elements in society take refuge in religious institutions, having now even been binned by the least civilised institution of all, the Manx government.

Things have only got better -again

2011-07-02T11:34:00.003+01:00

This morning local creationists are gathering to hear some Oxford butthead posing as a scientist excuse their folly, and paying through the nose for this dubious privilege. At least in theory.
In fact they had problems selling any tickets, doubly inconvenienced by the necessity of having a show of force from local faith leaders and political deadbeats to make it look like an ‘important national event’, and the reluctance of such folk to get up for even a three course breakfast in a posh hotel unless it is (a) free and (b) they can still put in a claim for travelling expenses to some public body.
Still, at least this means that when the local press run a fact-free, unedited ‘report’ on the event next week we will have a handy list of (mostly unelected) politicians and government advisors who favour fairy tales over science. Not only that, but they do their worst to inflict such nonsense on the general public and also charge us for not just the nonsense but their ‘professional services’ in inflicting it.
Read, note the names, and remember when they spout off cluelessly about other topics (and get an easy ride from a local media built on the income from government advertising).
Here, by contrast (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=37371 ), is a great little achievement by a Manx rationalist, and for everyone else a chance to see one of our heroes, Professor Brian Cox, in action on the Isle of Man.
One of Matty’s other achievements is to be the first Manxman to talk to someone in outer space, which wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows him, as I have since he left school, and since we both marked time working at the Castletown Golflinks Hotel.
We’d both been blacklisted from useful local employment for crimes of free speech via the local press. In my case, amongst many other sins, for modestly suggesting the Isle of Man joined the late 20th century and decriminalised homosexuality. In Matty’s, for offering a short history lesson on the true significance of the bhollan bane ( a flower traditionally worn by Manx dignitaries on Tynwald Day) to the godbothering throwback then posing as Chief Constable who refused to put a ‘pagan’ emblem in his buttonhole.
By the way, and further to that topic, am I the only local person who finds it ironic that a notoriously homophobic cop was recently awarded the Queens Police Medal?
Tune in on Wednesday, and enjoy the rare sight of an intelligent adult being allowed to talk to young Manx people.

Cheap shots or sheep shops?

2011-06-28T21:05:00.002+01:00

“Laughing at religious people and doctrines for being mad, bad and dangerous gives us the comfort of thinking that, unlike them, we are sane, good and peaceful. Good stand-up makes us question ourselves: but the contemporary ridicule of religion fails to do that. Instead, it just narcissistically affirms that we were right all along. It is not edgy, original or insightful. One might even be tempted to call it preaching to the converted.”
Says who?
Says a bloke called Patrick McKearney.
Who is he?
Well, apparently…..
“Patrick McKearney is studying for an MPhil in theology and religious studies at Cambridge University. A scholar of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme and Queens' College, he is researching the implications of the contemporary ridicule of religion.”
I am half-tempted to add “…or is he just taking the piss?”
No, but seriously folks, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/21/stand-up-comedy-religion and see if, like those he takes aim at, your jesting about the faithful amounts to more than
“tedious repetition of generic, flat-pack criticisms”.
I don’t for a second accept that of, say, Stewart Lee or a very few other comic talents. But I would admit acute boredom these days reading the kneejerk comments in reaction to stories on some of my old favourite secular sites, and wondering what closed minds came up with them.
On the other hand, I wonder how Mr McKearney got public subsidy to be at one of the world’s most elite colleges just wondering if the sky will fall in because the general public are less than reverent about a gaggle of gents in frocks who take themselves far more seriously than the rest of the world does?
Maybe his Imaginary Invisible Friend really does move in mysterious ways. Or maybe we live in an unequal society, still over-respectful of superstition, where purveyors of bible bunkum just have more sway with those who hand out grants and allot university places than they should. And it is also worth noting the close links between, say, the Cambridge Interfaith Foundation and the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which no sensible person has any faith in.
Funnily enough though, I read elsewhere of David F. Ford, one of the founders of the Cambridge Interfaith Foundation, that “He is highly regarded for his scholarship, wit and humour.’’
Shame his students and staff are not similarly blessed then.
No, but seriously, that is a cheap quip, and Mr M offers a valid challenge. The best humour does not enshrine prejudice and encourage lazy thinking, but strips away the pretensions and shortcomings of the powerful and, if really good, pulls out the rug from below our feet too. Where McKearney’s polemical argument collapses, as I hinted earlier, is that it fails to recognise the institutional power and privilege of religion, and settles instead for the whiney tone of other religious spoilt brats asked to share their toys.
But do we just mock comfortably from the distance, training our sights only on the less educated religious, or could we make better jokes that batter away at the privilege, reveal the links to power?
Interesting challenge. I may well take it up, and I hope others will too.

Wowsers on the wagon

2011-06-22T21:27:00.004+01:00

Today's ‘recommendation’ by yet another bunch of prod-nosed piss-artists that older people ought to go teetotal (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13863196 ) has, quite rightly, been greeted with contempt by anyone with an ounce of sense. See Chris Snowdon’s reaction at Velvet Glove, Iron Fist (http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2011/06/wont-somebody-please-think-of-old.html) for one of the bluntest, most succinct.
Mind you, the Beeb report does quite handily sort out some clueless, self-serving busybodies (Age UK, Alcohol Concern…) from those with more respect for the aged. It also highlights just how much time government agencies waste hectoring those who pay their wages, instead of just doing their job and being of genuine public service.
And what a bunch of puritan pillocks modern psychiatrists are compared to their predecessors in the heyday of that, now almost redundant, profession.
When I first read one of today’s reports, and after I’d finished laughing at all this codswallop posing as 'social concern', it struck me that, back in the days when I worked in those long gone old school mental hospitals that liberals shudder just thinking about, today's ‘recommended maximum daily intake’ was actually less than many patients could get on prescription. I should explain that in those days it was quite common for some of the old boys to get a bottle of Guinness off the medicine trolley.
Yes, really!
Not only that, but once a week, as a student nurse, it was my not-so-solemn duty to accompany a gang of our more mobile long term clientele to the local pub for a couple of hours, where we all got half-cut and struggled back up the hill to the hospital before the front door was locked at 10 PM.
The nub of today’s problem is summed up well by Emma Soames, editor of Saga magazine, who comments: "I think people will be infuriated by this. It's described as a public health problem, it's actually a private health matter."
As Chris Snowdon acidly puts it: “There are, let's face it, only two things that are likely to cause poor health: bad luck and bad habits. You can't do anything about the first and the second is entirely a matter for the individual. Those who interfere in private behaviour do not deserve to be described as part of a public health movement. Call them anything you like—busybodies, wowsers, puritans, zealots, neo-prohibitionists—but don't go along with the charade that the private is public.”
“Busybodies, wowsers, puritans, zealots, neo-prohibitionists”…that only just begins the list of alternative titles we could award to the local amateurs setting such policy for the Manx government.
And given half a chance, they will.

This squib just got damper

2011-06-20T20:29:00.004+01:00

A month ago (see Another year, another damp squib) I mentioned that Firestarter, the excruciating annual loonfest put on by a bunch of Pentecostal Peter Pans, was moving to yet another venue. I also predicted that the honeymoon would be over as soon as the new venue sent the bill and Firestarter’s cheque inevitably bounced.
Again.
Seems I was wrong. Because the ill-fated couple didn’t even get as far as their shotgun wedding. From a Manxnet news item posted today (see http://www.manx.net/news/2478/firestarter-festival-moves-to-union-mills ) it looks like either Ardhwallan’s owner did a quick credit check or, being a little short of punters himself, has at least decided to cut his losses.
And Firestarter’s over-the-hill organisers seem to be doing the same judging from the new lower ticket price. Or maybe they just cannot sell any tickets and have resigned themselves to a couple of days of paunchy, ageing ’youth pastors’ playing alone sadly with their water pistols.
Again.

Things Can Only Get Better (sing along now...)

2011-06-19T13:45:00.005+01:00

The lunatic fringe of the local Zombie Carpenter movement have another annual exercise in pointlessness on July 2nd.
It need not trouble the sane or rational amongst us, and as it involves getting up early probably won’t attract many Christians either - apart from a few die-hard masochists who are prepared to not only get up but stump up an admission fee.
Each year, as close to Tynwald Day as they can manage to pass it off as a tied event and roping in as many superstitious politicos as possible to pad out the delusion, these hopeless zealots hold a 'Prayer Breakfast' during which a Famous Faith-Head tells fairy stories.
Last year it was Richard Dannatt, who emphatically demonstrated why (with superstitious numpties like him running the show) so many British lives are being wasted and foreign civilians dying in the crossfire of pointless oil wars. This year it is John Lennox (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=36864), a notorious Oxford philosopher of science cum creationist with a book to market (two actually), as did Richard Dannatt last year.
The funniest thing is that, actually, there are excellent philosophical reasons why scientists need to acknowledge that ‘science’ is as much of a social construct or a ‘myth’ (in the sense of a self-perpetuating story whose ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ are similarly irrelevant) as ‘religion’. Dawkins and his chums have great difficulty with this, so much so that they prefer to ignore it. But Lennox, as far as I know, has never explored this either, probably because he cannot without also acknowledging the mythical basis of religion, or religion’s primary purpose as a method of social control which discourages democracy or dissent.
Also, interestingly, much of the groundwork for this was set by Willard Van Orman Quine, an American philosopher of science and mathematician who was of Manx origin. As it happens, it may also be of interest to atheists that Quine supervised Daniel Dennett’s Ph.D.
In theory, this early morning pantomime is underwritten by 200 paying punters. In practice, most of the tickets are given away because faith leaders and politicians have to be there to foster the fantasy that it is an ‘important’ shindig involving the great and the good, and they never pay to impose their fatuousness on anyone.
After the event I am sure the press will be primed with reports of how important and popular it all was, especially amongst young people. As none of the press will actually be there, they will be unable to substantiate this.
But there is a fair comparison, because Brian Cox, physicist superstar and former pop musician (oh, you all know the guy, no need to outline his career to anyone) is also coming to talk to schoolkids around Tynwald Day (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=36822 for more). The difference is that Cox not only sold out within hours of his lecture being announced, but had substantial numbers of the local adult population clamouring for either a seat anywhere in the house or a repeat performance at a bigger venue we could all get to. Cox, I suggest, could fill Nobles Park at midnight on a wet winter day.
Now, funnily enough, us ‘militant atheists’ know that Cox blows Dawkins off stage at the annual New Humanist ‘Nine Carols for the Godless’ bash. He makes no big deal of his lack of religion, though he does politely dismiss creationist nonsense as the naive foolishness it is if asked.
His enthusiastic explanations of the mysteries of the universe work, on whatever level you care to consider them, without once dwelling on religion. They are simply more colourful, more complex, more satisfying and more truthful than any bible story.
Science (given half a chance) trumps Superstition every time, even on the Isle of Man. More colourful than Manx fairy lore, more logical, more interesting and more useful than Manx religion.

Nowhere to run to, Baby

2011-06-10T16:25:00.006+01:00

Yes, I know, I haven’t blogged in a while. I could offer some feeble excuse, but the truth is I was off elsewhere having fun and I could not be bothered.
There is work, as in the unpleasant, done for the ungrateful in return for the stuff of which bills are paid, and then there is pleasure, shared free, gratis and for nothing with those I feel like sharing it with, when I feel like sharing it with them.
Look, my blog, done in my free time strictly for fun. As I keep saying, if you need more amusement, write your own.
Samuel Johnson may well have said that “no-one, except a blockhead, writes unless it be for money”, but in the 21st Century there are no blockheads offering to pay someone like me to write. Oddly enough though, I find it hard work reading anything contemporary produced by those who do get paid – sometimes lavishly – which is why recently I’ve taken to reading second hand books instead. Maybe Murdoch and his chums should pay the readers, not the writers, of this turgid twaddle. Until then, we should refuse to pay for it, and find ways to access the websites without racking up advertising.
But I had to giggle at this (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=36701) about Sentamu’s Apprentice going to Wales to play with Thomas the Tank Engine.
As keen observers of Manx tourist department bilge may know, he cannot play with it here because the Tourist Department cannot afford the licensing fees to run an event. Though even when the Bish was last photographed driving a Thomas train here one couldn’t help laughing at the irony.
We saw a clergyman, most of whose diocese does not exist, driving a train which serves no practical purpose dressed up for the day as another train from a work of fiction based on another C of E clergyman’s joke about one of the Bish’s predecessors – and particularly the non-existence of most of his diocese. Could you really make any of this up?
But maybe pontificating prelates could get fresh ideas from http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=36395 -a piece on the similarly non-existent Manx space industry.
When I read it for some reason I suddenly remembered Peter Sellers going to the Moon as the Reverend John Smallwood in Heavens Above , a 1963 film written by Malcolm Muggeridge, who went on to lend a hand to Mary Whitehouse’s Festival of Light cult and grumble about Life of Brian.
And I had a bright idea – well, bright by the standards of those pillocks in government who, not learning from our previous experience underwriting a Jurby airship that never flew, are now underwriting either new spaceships which will never get off the drawing board or old ones which will rust in a Jurby barn until the grants run out.
Manx evangelicals have a terrible predilection for ruining the lives of innocent people in poorer countries – or just stealing from them. I can never decide if we, the decent citizenry of the island, should get angry or just die of shame.
Alternatively, why not encourage them to follow John Smallwood into space?
An industry based around talking to the wall, led by freaks with monstrous egos who seem to have little difficulty parting the gullible from their savings? It ought to be a cinch.
Until then, we have to do something about these bozos instead of continuing to curl up in embarrassment every time they further inconvenience someone in another country run by crooks, charlatans and spook-fancying simpletons.
This, then, will be my contribution.
From this day, every time one of these nincompoops tells the Manx press about a ‘development program’ they are running, I will write a fulsome letter of apology on behalf of the Manx nation to the ambassador at the London embassy of the country concerned.
This is no idle threat. When some loathsome homophobes called the Christian Party started getting media coverage I discovered that their founder, a retired producer of gay anthems, ‘got religion’ on the island out of sheer boredom caused by our lack of any nightlife. From that point on, every time I see a mention of the Christian Party in any publication I write expressing regret on behalf of the entire Manx nation for any part we may have played, unwittingly or through sheer apathy, in the creation of this monster.
As I point out, we are one sad and sorry nation, but while this apology probably ought to come from our Chief Minister or the President of Tynwald, both are sad characters and neither appear to be capable of spelling the word ‘Sorry’.

Cinematic horror special

2011-05-30T21:17:00.002+01:00

I generally insist that people have a right to do what they want, providing they leave others to go about their own business too, but there are limits. And I have to report a case which exceeds them.
Because Living Hell (or 'Living Hope Community Church', to give them their official title) have a planning application in (number 11/00621/B) to set up another permanent base in the former gym by Douglas’s Palace Cinema.
Apparently they currently run their Sunday freak show in the Shearwater Suite. Now they want to start holding it in the Palace Cinema instead, setting the gym aside for a separate child abuse session.
I have to protest.
It is not just that parents in the cinema, eyes swivelling and mouths frothing as the lunatic at the front gets into his stride, will not hear their offspring screaming to get out from the gym. It is also a public health issue.
Years ago I worked in several large Victorian psychiatric hospitals, so I know what happens when largish groups of mentally disturbed people get over-excited. Apart from the obvious danger of physical harm to each other as they thrash about (though as the Living Hell acolytes are, in law at least, consenting adults that is their business) they lose control of their bodily functions too.
There is no way to put this politely. Places where this happens regularly develop stains and odours which no amount of bleach and hard scrubbing ever remove.
Adults may decide to put up with this if the film is good enough and the prices are low (neither, admittedly, seem likely at a Manx cinema). But the Palace Cinema is also a place where kids are taken to be entertained.
Any parent will have difficulties explaining to puzzled tinies why the place stinks like a blocked toilet and the floor appears to be stained with faecal matter. And sane or responsible ones would never allow the lights of their lives in such a cess pit in the first place.

Who needs a Manx 'Sarah's Law'?

2011-05-30T18:55:00.001+01:00

I was amused to read that there has been yet another call to introduce ‘Sarah’s Law’ here (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/campaign_starts_to_bring_in_sarah_s_law_here_1_3425237 ).
Apparently there are parents who would like to know about any dubious character who “poses a potential danger to their children”.
What on earth are these herberts on about? Those details have been on public record for some time, courtesy of the Manx government.
Just go to http://www.gov.im/education/support/ and http://www.gov.im/education/department/board.xml for names , addresses and pictures of the guilty.

Spot the real social problem

2011-05-29T16:20:00.002+01:00

I was laughing today at an old Auberon Waugh article in which, apropos of nothing useful, he complained that care of the handicapped was becoming a UK boom industry for the hard of thinking.
I laughed first because at the time the article was written (being younger, idealistic and still unwilling to live off laundered crime proceeds in the Finance Sector) I was being interviewed for a Manx job working with the disabled. Thankfully, the Manx public and voluntary sector was then being run by even thicker, more faith challenged dimwits than now, so I was turned down in favour of some superstitious village idiot, who probably now advises the Manx government on matters they know even less about. I shudder to think what a mess I might have made of my life if 'managed' for years by people handicapped by both religious delusion and severe myopia regarding the outside world.
Which brings me to the other reason I laughed, and a more serious matter.
From a story where, with government encouragement, local media wrongly reported (see for example http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_150964.html ) that a girl died solely because she took the ‘legal high’ MDAI, to the first precautionary amendment (see for example http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_150914.html) by the Coroner, along with admissions that investigations were incomplete, to the first intervention by the government body which bears the major irresponsibility for such futile deaths (see for example http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_151355.html ) we see a perfect example of the nonsense ‘Bron’ warned us about.
The sad, totally avoidable death of a Ramsey teenager points up everything wrong with Manx drug and alcohol policy, and that it is wrong because the Manx government (in itself a major source of ignorance) chose not to seek any expert or informed advice, and instead pandered to the whims of a bunch of cretinous, unemployable, faith-addled numpties who need to be kept off the streets.
Like the UK government (and governments elsewhere wasting resources in an unwinnable ‘war on drugs’) the Manx government could learn from criminal drug dealers, who are models of social responsibility by comparison.
For example, it was drug dealers and the better drug advisory bodies who enabled an informal ’drug testing’ information service in the 1990’s (known to clubbers and even distributed by clubs) by which rival ‘brands’ of Ecstasy were evaluated for content and purity, and rogue batches blacklisted and put out of circulation. Bear in mind, ‘E’, then as now, was illegal, so those involved risked both further arrest and loss of profit.
And also bear in mind that it was when clueless government drug czars made ‘E’ a Class A that, in the circumstances, both kids and dealers turned to older Class A substances which were cheaper and more deadly, on the basis that you would spend just as long inside if caught dabbling in either.
In those circumstances, is it surprising that Manx kids turn to ever more bizarre ‘legal’ variants of an illegal drug which, alone, has never killed anybody (because all the deaths credited by tabloid hysteria to Ecstasy, when properly examined by anyone with the patience to read autopsy reports fully, turn out to have been due to a mixture of substances – some, such as alcohol, legal – or simple dehydration, or a pre-existing medical condition)?
And is it surprising, in a social situation where their only ‘expert’ drug and alcohol advice comes from ‘professionals’ who rely on free handouts written by superstitious simpletons who, in turn, probably couldn’t scrape through GCSE Chemistry, never mind Sociology, that they turn to ever more bizarre suppliers?
‘Bron’, in typically black humour, went on to worry that the supply of handicapped people might run out before all the chumps can be found jobs negating the opportunity for such already put-upon souls to get on with their lives. Similarly, maybe the real reason we appear to be reading so many Manx tabloid scares about drugs, alcohol, homelessness, prisoners who cannot fit back into society, sexually transmitted disease and family breakdown is not because they are on the increase. Maybe, on any close analysis, the population percentages suffering such problems are the same as they ever were, or even declining.
Maybe they are just more prominently reported, and, knowing that few (if any) Manx reporters now actually find stories, go to events or even ring round contacts to flesh out the PR releases they are sent (predominantly from business and government) there is also another intriguing possibility.
Maybe a superstitious, previously privileged minority is terrified of people who take control of their own lives, and terrified of losing their ability to leech off social misery. So maybe, rather than the ‘great and the good’ dominating social care in order to abolish poverty and attendant misery, they are determined to dominate it in order to ensure it continues – or is at least seen to continue.
Oh tragedy of social tragedies, that vacuous godbothers might no longer find enough drunks, smackheads and other victims to pay the mortgage and subsidise their church expenses.

New appointment, new threat from old menace

2011-05-29T12:48:00.003+01:00

Yesterday’s announcement of the appointment of a new Anglican Archdeacon (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=36358) is interesting, and perhaps rather ominous.
Apparently: “Andie Brown has been Canon Theologian at Derby Cathedral since 2003 when he took up the post of Continuing Ministerial Education Adviser for clergy and lay people of the Diocese, working with the Mission and Ministry Team.”
Interestingly firstly because it confirms the growing rift between local professional clergy (or indeed any thoughtful Christians) and ‘area management’.
Traditionally, clergy used to come here as relative juniors and rise through the ranks. Take, for example, the career of the last-but-one Archdeacon, Brian Partington, who did just that – from a young curate who came originally to get a few church ‘youthies’ going and stayed until retiring as Archdeacon (a post older Manxies tend to believe he still holds).
Now the policy, officially, is to bring in ‘new blood’ rather than let ‘the professionals’ get rooted in the community, allied to both a major ‘cost-cutting’ exercise which sees retiring clergy not being replaced while their houses (and sometimes even churches) are sold off, and a new management structure which includes ‘honorary canons’ from other denominations and other outside influences.
While this policy is allied to a pretence that it even includes non-Christians (e.g. a laughable attempt to get public subsidy for the Cathedral by setting up a bogus management committee where ‘business’ and ‘other faiths’ have ‘input’) the reality is that, firstly, a senior Anglican advised the Manx government a few years back that there were no other faiths, thus no need for government to consult them, secondly Churches Together in Mann also refused to meet with other faiths to discuss ways of broadening ‘interfaith’ unity and discussion on the island and thirdly, while non-Anglican fundamentalist evangelicals are being handed jobs within the remit of the Anglican Church and both the Fundies and the Anglicans bang on about opening community facilities to church use (Fundies) and churches to ‘community use’ (Anglicans), neither party is using the obvious solution – the Church Sharing Act, a 1990’s piece of legislation drafted by the Vicar General which allows different denominations to share a church and bills rather than let empty buildings rot.
Odd, is it not?
Then we have Sentamu’s Apprentice saying that: “He brings skills in organisation, commitment to outreach, and experience of working with individuals and teams. I look forward to working closely with him in continuing to support churches in this diocese as they develop their involvement with their local communities.”
At the simplest level, this suggests that he has a track record for creating or excusing further interference by faith-challenged simpletons with our kids and communities, but to understand this threat more fully, you need to know that Derby University was, until 1992, a C of E teacher training college called Bishop Lonsdale College. And Anglicans, having flogged off the tastier campus facilities for redevelopment before the ‘upgrade’, still have more than passing influence on University life (see, for example, http://www.multifaithcentre.org/ ).
Also, as traditional academic faculties drop away, and government funding increasingly goes to places of lower learning which prepare students for the McJobs which British McIndustry wants, the course range gets more bizarre (golf course management, alternative health?) and subsidised by McResearch facilities.
Take, for example, http://www.derby.ac.uk/social-care-and-therapeutic-practice/applied-social-and-community-studies/research-groups/society-religion-and-belief-research-group, which enjoys a regular income from both public and private sponsors of ‘study’ which, rather conveniently, ‘validates’ ever more public money being micturated away on ever more right wing faith groups under the pretence that they are the glue which holds communities together (all evidence of their bigotry and divisiveness being, even more magically than transubstantiation, strangely absent).
So, keep a closer eye on your kids, your community and your taxable income in future, as all are under new threats from old, unsavoury quarters.

Bible stories

2011-05-24T20:57:00.008+01:00

You probably cannot help but notice the ‘celebrations’ around the 400th anniversary of the first publication of the King James Bible.
Radio 4 devoted an entire day to people reading excerpts from it, there have been TV programmes, newspaper and magazine articles, etcetera, etcetera…et pigging cetera. Apparently the non-religious are not supposed to object because the ‘KJB’ (as those in the delusion flogging business call it) is, after all, ‘part of our heritage’, a ‘cultural icon’, and so on.
And this racket also has dodgy entrepreneurs trying to flog old horses and new funding applications over here too. Not that there’s anything new about shady characters trying to steal public money with dodgy ‘heritage’ product on the Isle of Man, of course.
OK, I am certainly not buying the ‘part of our heritage’ lie (and I am always on my guard ANY time a prat in a dog collar starts sniffing around Manx schools looking for fresh victims) but I will accept that the King James Bible is one massive chunk of lush 17th century English prose, not to mention hundreds of rich phrases that decorate our everyday speech.
So when the Mrs noticed a newspaper article where a local church was asking folk to go along and copy out verses from the Bible in their best handwriting for a UK-wide project that aimed to celebrate the KJB’s 400th anniversary, and she, being capable of some pretty elegant script, fancied a go I was OK with that. I even thought The Prodigy might want to be part of this ‘historic’ project.
The article had no contact details (typical Christian attention to detail there) but vaguely mentioned the Methodists were running it so we wandered into a church social to ask the score. They didn’t really know about it, but knew a woman who did, so took our details to pass to her, who would presumably get in touch……..
And almost a month later did, with a vague promise to come round some time when she could….
And almost two weeks later did, having been delayed by the promise of loads of verses being written in church events going on around the island (where we later found, hardly anyone wanted to know).
And so, to get to the point, we were given some paper and asked to write out Psalm 54. Fair enough, the Psalms feature some the best prose passages in the King James Bible, so I rushed to get out my granny’s old copy……
At which point the organiser explained that they weren’t actually using the KJB for the text, they were using the New International Version. For those who aren’t up on this guff, that’s a twentieth century bible edition written in ‘modern English’ for thickos. It reads like something compiled by a committee of marketing trainees for a BTEC project.
To get some idea how awful the NIV Bible is compared to the KJB, imagine Hamlet’s soliloquy read aloud by a top Shakespearean actor. Then imagine the same speech rewritten as a report for a particularly dull corporate entity, typed up by an office junior who can’t spell any word with more than six letters and read out by some kid on work experience who just wants to go back to texting her mates.
But that’s Christians for you. They have a resource that is at least worthy of secular respect, but they bin it for something duller than ditchwater in a frantic ‘we gotta get down with the kids’ panic.
But they still want your cash, they still demand the right to pester your kids on the pretence that this is a project of massive historical, cultural and educational interest……..
And I still cannot take them seriously.

Offers that can't be refused

2011-05-21T16:00:00.006+01:00

The latest evidence of a cutback in social services and care of the elderly was announced this week. What is laughingly described as a ‘live at home scheme’ for North Douglas pensioners (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=52196 for more) is an additional insult to older people from self-seeking superstitious nitwits, in that yet again government has collaborated with churches to further screw up the lives of folk who cannot defend themselves, but must still pay to be insulted.
The loon in charge claims…“the idea is to offer support with friendly faces in the community, and anybody who would like to get involved will be made very welcome”.
“It is not, they are not, and they will not be”, would be my response to that pile of old cobblers, based on evidence from elsewhere.
For example, a couple of years ago a friend of mine in his nineties moved back to England after several happy decades here in the North of the island. Being non-religious, he had little choice when his wife’s Alzheimer's became more severe and he had no local relative to help.
Both the ‘official’ social support workers and the 'third sector' (i.e. Christian fundamentalist) charities in his area pointedly ignored his plight. No surprise there as (a) my friend was an eloquent critic of local Christocentric cranks and (b) some of those cranks were and are bigwigs in both social services and church-based charitable drains on the public purse.
Down south, the situation is even worse. So bad, in fact, that an evangelical inside source not only confirmed half-joking complaints I had heard from the relative of one victim as typical, but suggested the real situation is far worse. This is worrying as a Southern scheme controlled by some pretty obnoxious Baptist freeloaders is now being rolled out elsewhere.
The story told by the relative of one housebound geriatric was of youngish bible-bashers charming their way into the house with the story that her name was on a list of vulnerable pensioners they had been ‘asked’ to ‘help’ by ‘someone from social services’. After one visit which was some sort of ‘appraisal’ (at which they drank the old girl’s tea and ate her biscuits but gave no help) they returned to ‘invite’ her to a church event as a way to ‘get her out of the house’. It then started to be suggested that it would be ‘unfortunate’ if the old girl did not go along or let them into the house to ‘check’ and one day she was, for example, to fall on the floor and nobody could hear her cries for help.
After a relative heard this she quite bluntly warned these pondlife to stay away or face police action, pointing out to them in the process that they were worse than the Krays because (a) the Krays picked on people their own size and had more respect for the elderly and (b) solved practical problems – permanently - in return for protection money.
An inside source, who is an evangelical and candidly admits his early public sector career opening and subsequent rise through the ranks is due to church contacts, not only confirmed that the story was credible but that he knew of church meetings at which this and similar strategies to drain public funds and gain government influence were discussed. Church-goers in public sector jobs in particular have been asked to tip the church leaders off to possible future openings and told that, in return, senior government figures would ‘intervene’ when promotion prospects or regrading came up.
So Jesus saves yet again, it seems, but only because the rent and other office expenses, utility bills and pensions of his thuggish little helpers are being met from our taxes.

Dying Matters, but not to the Manx Health Department

2011-05-21T10:04:00.002+01:00

Apparently, this week has been Dying Matters Week, though from the Manx government’s take on this (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/dhss/departmentofheal35.xml ) you could be forgiven for thinking it was just another excuse for Christian fundamentalists to make our public health system worse.
If the health department’s ‘independent researcher’ on dying well quotes Cicely Saunders once that suggests poor education and very narrow research parameters. If she quotes Saunders twice it suggests something bordering on learning difficulties, and that has to be a worry to the public.
As I mentioned before, the only thing anyone needs to know about Cicely Saunders is that she picked up a million smackers from the Templeton Foundation the year before they similarly ‘honoured’ Billy Graham and just a few years after they gave the loot to Mother Teresa, who wrote character references for financial criminals and dictators in return for laundered cash.
But on the Death with Dignity website yesterday I learnt that:
“Monday then saw the launch of Dying Matters week. Dying Matters is a national coalition of organisations, of which Dignity in Dying is a member, which aims to "change public attitudes and behaviours towards death, dying and bereavement". They provide a wealth of resources to help people talk more openly about death, including leaflets and posters to talk with others about dying”.
I wonder why a Manx Health Department presided over by a paid up member of LIFE, and where another senior figure admitted to me once that she never takes a moral decision without talking it through with her priest, forgot to tell us that.
If you want to know more about the real Dying Matters Week go to http://www.dyingmatters.org/site/resources . Unlike the travesty which will inevitably feed into a Manx government pseudo-consultation on dying well, you may learn something.

Churches, community, architecture and balance

2011-05-07T17:08:00.004+01:00

I blogged recently (see Parish Capers) on the difficulties up at Jurby Church. Just the week after, the Northern News section of the Isle of Man Examiner mentioned a proposal for the church to become an arts centre during the week, with ‘business as usual’ on Sundays.
This, I fear, is desperate folly. Does the island really need yet another naff ‘arts centre’ where no actual arts can be experienced or practiced?
Honestly, those island galleries which get public subsidy would be substantially improved if they just took the pictures off the walls and left them bare. And shops run by duff daubers which pose as art galleries flog tat which even Jurby Junk would not take. As for Port Erin Arts Centre –who amongst us can recall the last time any art happened there, if ever, apart from some creative accountancy?
Come to think of it, our arts community may be even less popular than child molesters or tub-thumping evangelicals amongst those with even half a wit. Frankly, I would put these clueless, anal-gazing galoots lower than lepers on the social scale, and I do so as a well informed party.
I spent my early twenties working on the experimental fringe of the UK arts scene, back in the days when working class people could at least get a foothold in an industry now run entirely by wealthy inbreeds with two figure IQs, no natural talent and no incentive to develop any through hard work or practice.
But the dilemma of these small church communities, and this suggested compromise, is worth more serious thought.
As the bishop himself admitted in the last copy of Together, the Manx Anglican newsletter:
“I have been surprised by some statistics which reveal that between 1989 and 2009 this Diocese declined in numbers by a greater proportion than any other diocese of the Church of England: we are down 40% over that 20-year period.
There will, of course, be some who excuse this by saying that the Island was probably more religious than England in 1989. Then there will be others who respond that, since the Island’s population grew significantly during that period, the decline is actually worse!”
Add this new bombshell to that infamous report co-sponsored by government, Manx Heritage and the churches, which showed that by the admission of church leaders themselves some 40% of island churches are ‘surplus to requirement’, and it is clear we have a crisis for the churches, or more particularly for their dwindling congregations. But as someone who (it may surprise folk) takes a keener interest in church architecture than many actual church-goers, and who certainly cares about the quality of life of my community and neighbours (even religious ones) I am not sure I want to cheer. And I certainly do not want a decline in church-going to be yet another ‘investment opportunity’ for the thugs in the property development racket. We have lost quite enough decent Victorian, Edwardian and Art Deco landmarks to that already, if you don’t mind.
So if sometimes quite decent buildings, made with care and craftsmanship and where centuries of personal history have been played out, are not to be flattened to make way for (empty) luxury flats and office blocks or just car parks, but can be retained for some useful community purpose, which in the long or short term also allows ageing churchgoers to worship close to home with their friends, what should be the ‘ground rules’?
I raise the issue because I am genuinely interested. Using the case of Jurby as an example, I cannot see how the right balance is struck between the need of the church-goers for a certain moral and spiritual ‘ambience’ and the need for at least one place on the island where, for once, we can have real creative industry and discussion without having to worry about ‘offending’ religious bigots and their tiny, crypto-fascist view of the world.
I know we cannot trust either the churches, the politicians and civil servants or venal property developers to run this debate. But if we want better lives, and to retain better buildings for better, more varied use, perhaps we had better have it.

Another year, another damp squib

2011-05-07T11:10:00.005+01:00

The Micturant Tendency of the local evangelical community have announced details of their annual August freakfest.
If you are a concerned parent or householder, see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=35566 for the times and places to avoid.
Interesting choice of venue. Surely nothing – I repeat nothing – to do with them being thought beyond the pale even by the standards of the German religious cult that has taken over The Crossags (or possibly just because Firestarter still haven’t paid the utility bills run up at previous Christofascist damp squibs held there or in St. Johns).
And surely nothing – I repeat nothing – to do with Ardwhallan’s owner being a prominent member of the golf club whose secretary used to annually write to Ramsey Commissioners complaining about the noise from the festival.
Maybe these penny-pinching oddballs were just made for each other, or maybe, having fallen out of favour with every other Christian landowner, the honeymoon will end yet again when Firestarter get invoiced – and try to pass that invoice on to their parent churches, who try to pass it yet again to an inter-church youth committee which has eventually dealt with it in the past, but may no longer be able to do so, having been put further and further into the red by a decade of bills run up by childish, over-the-hill bible-bashers.

An island nation of unemployed telemarketers

2011-05-01T15:50:00.004+01:00

According to http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/publicviewssough1.xml our Minister for Child Abuse and his cohorts have announced another public pseudo-consultation, this time on dumbing down kids for the workplace.
What an awful idea.
While, admittedly, the very idea of the Welfare State reached us almost by osmosis when the adjacent isle developed it, there used to be the idea that even a state education should invite children to be all they could be, not what vile, venal employers who cannot even compete in the UK market want them to be.
My parents were never so proud as the day, when I was about ten, Mr Fretwell, my Oxbridge educated form teacher, urged them in his cut glass accent to make me aim high, maybe Oxford or Cambridge, maybe the Classics. This was, to use Blair’s phraseology, a “bog standard junior school”, and ironically enough it was Cherie Blair’s maternal grandfather who, only a year later, encouraged my Dad to similarly aim high, stop throwing away the musical talent his parents had invested in so heavily, and get himself a university degree so that he could nurture that talent in other council house kids.
This was 40 years ago and Mr Fretwell may be long gone, but are there no teachers today who still think like that? Are they all too terrified by an educational industry which seems to chew up young talent and defecate prematurely aged mediocrity to …. well, do their job?
The thought that Manx children should have standards of education (already almost non-existent for too many) further lowered to raise new generations of call centre dullards is, frankly, horrific. The irony is, the call centres and other techno-sweatshops in countries which undercut our costs and laugh at our pitiful service standards are staffed by graduates who already have all-round educations our children can only dream of. As I saw only last week, we struggle to achieve basic standards of English, while graduate employees of our clients for whom English is a third or fourth language send back our sloppily written professional documents for rewriting with spelling and grammatical errors highlighted.
It would be funny if it were not so tragic. Can the nation which once, within a period of five years, produced both Randolph Quirk and Frank Kermode really be reduced to this?
The main reason those young Manx people who haven’t had all self-worth kicked out of them at school in the first place must “engage in lifelong learning” is that they learnt so little at school either. And the main reason most of them won’t even be able to benefit from lifetime learning (at least through on-island sources) is that the Education Department has dropped all the adult evening classes where we used to be able to do that. All that remains are a few second-rate flower-arrangers and new-agey nonsense, with the ‘serious’ emphasis on Micky Mouse vocational retraining courses to meet the requirements of employers who can thus pretend to be offering ‘professional development’ while retaining dumb, compliant employees who cannot afford to leave.
Were an eleven year old Randolph Quirk or Frank Kermode to be going through our current school system, what would be the highlight of their curriculum? Probably Business Studies, IT, and Marketing, I suspect, especially if, like Quirk and Kermode, they were children from modestly off families with no social connections.
If we throw away all hope for our children like this we sentence ourselves to become an island nation of unemployed telemarketers within a generation.

Save the Children

2011-04-29T18:30:00.006+01:00

I must be just one of many Manx parents relieved that the Department for Miseducation and Child Abuse have dropped a controversial attempt to introduce a ‘Children's Bill’ which would have given numerous halfwits carte blanche to snoop, tittle-tattle in secret and in general screw up the lives of Manx children even more than they do already.
In a press release put out last thing yesterday in the hope nobody will read it until next week (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/childrenbillwill.xml) we learn that:
“The then Department of Education consulted the public over the Bill last spring and there were 76 responses, with views submitted by Tynwald Members, Government Department and Boards, local authorities, teachers and teaching unions, church groups, organisations and individuals.
Eddie Teare MHK, Minister for Education and Children, who extended the consultation period when he took over at the Department midway through the exercise, today announced that with 76 per cent of those who responded against the Children Bill, and a further 10 per cent having reservations about it, he wouldn’t be proceeding with it.”
The thing that hacked most off – which we only found out about due to the efforts of a determined local civil libertarian, Tristram Llwellyn-Jones - were the plans for a secret database to log information about children, which would have been comprised solely of contributions from cretins who no sane parent would allow in the same room as a child. This database, linked to sweeping new powers which social workers and other, equally unschooled, busybodies intended to award themselves, had the capacity to break up families and put kids in care, yet no child or adult mentioned on the database could have challenged the information - or even discovered what lies had been spread about them.
Sadly though, this is not the end of the matter. What the Manx Kinderstasi cannot get by public consent, they still intend to get by a legal process which none of us will have the chance to object to.
There is a hint of this when the press release mentions, almost casually, that:
“..the Department of Education and Children will, via a new Education Bill, proposed for some time after September’s General Election, establish an alternative to the Safeguarding Board, if it’s considered appropriate, and may use the Bill as a vehicle to establish a post similar to that of commissioner to look after the rights of children.”
Actually, given their past record for ‘protecting’ children so well that a double murder took place in a state children's home (run on the cheap by criminally incompetent godbotherers, which they dealt with by appointing another bunch of even less competent godbothers to take over the contract, for even less money), the only serious thing the Manx government could do to protect local children is to issue a shotgun to every parent. Then they could give a legally binding pledge that if a politician, civil servant or any other drain on public funds comes within a mile of a child parents can blast away with impunity.

Parish Capers

2011-04-27T21:35:00.005+01:00

Now here (see http://www.manx.net/news/1961/public-meetings-for-the-parishes-of-lezayre-and-jurby ) is an odd story. The Manx Church Commissioners calling public meetings to discuss the future of two churches.
This has never happened before, so why do it now? And, apart from the falling away of congregations which all Manx churches are experiencing, is there anything unique about either failing church here?
Well, a few unique things actually.
Lezayre looks like a picture postcard country church, and has the kind of catchment area that ought to bring in enough well-heeled punters to tick over. Problem is, both Lezayre and the tiny Auldyn Church down the road used to be run by the local Freemasons. In fact Auldyn Church was built with Freemason money for strictly masonic purposes, and, amusingly, without a funny handshake no-one gets through the door to a church so architecturally challenged it would make a gargoyle puke.
Then the Lezayre vicar got a bit concerned because these rolled-up trouser merchants kept picking his parish council. When he put it to them that such bodies are supposed to be open for any churchgoing villager to participate in they demurred. After all, they also pick the Commissioners, and the (anti-)social programme for the village hall, and make sure only their mates get planning applications through (even if it means blind or disabled people can’t get their homes adapted)…
In fact, nothing in the area happens without Masonic approval. So when they decided the vicar was a bit too uppity most of what’s left of the congregation (as subservient hat-tippers who need what unskilled work remains in Ramsey, being unemployable anywhere else) left too.
Jurby Church is a different matter.
If Jurby was twinned with Chernobyl then Chernobyl would be insulted – that’s how bleak the landscape is. And that isn’t my cheap crack – some kids visiting FROM Chernobyl actually said that! Some great, if impoverished, folk live there, and they’ve tried to make it a decent community – despite the Manx government – but they’re on a hiding to nothing.
It grew out of an ugly housing estate built round a run-down military airfield. Then the airbase closed, then the collection of Nissen huts that used to house an eclectic range of junk shops that made a great Sunday out closed. Then the government grants to various enterprises that were supposed make it a thriving industrial estate ran out, and that closed.
Most recently the racing circuit on the airfield lost the ACU licence because the approach roads which formed part of the circuit were too potholed by heavy lorries delivering materials to construct the new prison…..at this rate even the new prison will close. Actually, that wouldn’t surprise me either, as judging from the build quality who knows how much money was skimmed off the ludicrous sums paid to the local contractors (not counting what they saved by employing cheap foreign labour instead of local workers).
Jurby Church is a windswept building clinging to the coast just outside of all this. It has a tiny, elderly congregation who, most Sundays, probably can’t even brave the Force 9 gales to get there. The one thing that might save it is some Norse/Celtic stonework enclosed in the entrance, which the Manx government is not allowed to lose for the nation (though they would probably give it a go).
On the other hand, Jurby School is infested with visiting evangelicals, and the Methodists must have worked out that Sandygate Chapel – a mile or so in the other direction - is a pretty, well situated building which any developer would pay enough for to clear the Isle of Man Methodist Circuit debt. Oh, by the way, Lezayre has a saleable little vicarage too. Oops, almost gave the game away.
So, various possibilities there then. Sadly, none of which will benefit ordinary decent churchgoers, but it will be interesting to see which scams win, and how they are excused.

Nepotism, Jesus and Chips

2011-04-23T15:16:00.006+01:00

When it finally became legal to register a Civil Partnership over here I posted (see Game Over for Manx Christian Homophobes) on the hypocritical behaviour of churches and faith-based pseudo-charities. Having blocked progress by every petty-minded, vindictive method open to them (and having so many government friends, they also had many chances to do so), one such outfit then tried to jump on the Bill as a handy method to advertise minimal toe-dipping into 21st century waters.
As I remarked at the time, these chancers are so dim they think just dropping the words ‘Church’ or ‘Christian’ from their working titles will fool the Manx public. Anyone who ever had dealings with such noddies knows better.
But they still peddle the myth that government outsourced social services are not under the thumb of spook-fancying ignoramuses, and that careers with the same do not depend on the approval of blokes who wear their collars backwards.
Oh, really?
Take a look at http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=35194 .
Maybe you can work out why a theologian is such an obvious choice to get the community handing over their spare change to one of the island’s worst obstacles to family life, and an absolute health hazard for all kids and responsible parents.
Maybe it was not straightforward nepotism, which would be a nice change for a governmental or quasi-governmental post. Perhaps she just had a helpful reference from a former employer, Frank Cranmer (see http://www.law.cf.ac.uk/contactsandpeople/CranmerF ), whose name may be familiar to anyone who browses religious right blogs for a good laugh.
Funnily enough, Central Lobby Consultants probably would not be flavour of the month with local nanny staters either - at least if they were vaguely acquainted with the real world and capable of some basic research. SpinWatch, the outfit that keeps a jaundiced eye on dodgy PR firms, has a basic item on CLC at http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/Central_Lobby_Consultants , which is part of their Foodspin project (see http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/Foodspin ) on front organisations for the junk-food industry.
Religion, well placed family help and junk-food. That's quite a lethal combination.

Drop the Living Dead on a Donkey

2011-04-22T21:03:00.005+01:00

Tomorrow the Manx public heavily subsidises yet another grubby attempt to pack new punters into churches. Either that or an afternoon out for the unscrupulous few who already doss about these undertaxed faith barns of a Sunday.
The same pack of freeloaders on the public purse who foist the Christmas on the Hill nausea-fest on us are behind it, and posters have been in all the usual ghettos for the last few weeks. Curiously though, not a word in the media until yesterday when this (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/story_of_easter_1_3308791 ) was the front page of the Manx Indifferent. Could it be even idle Manx hacks got so bored by this twaddle that they couldn’t be bothered to cut and paste it?
Anyway, avoid Peel later on Saturday afternoon unless you want to get caught up in a twonk parade, because:
“Saturday’s free event starts at the Creg Malin car park at 4pm – from where Jesus (played by Alex Brown, head of the Scripture Union Ministries Trust) will ride a donkey along the promenade to Peel Castle, which will have been transformed into Jerusalem.
From 4.30pm, the family-friendly reenactment, involving a cast of about 80, will continue inside the castle.”
So, it seems, yet again Manx Heritage, an organisation which has almost single-handedly blocked or destroyed any serious chance to record genuine Manx history, is also involved.
And no, you did not misread that. Because Manx Heritage, within a generation, has destroyed the Manx history project. It is no longer possible for a serious academic to collate primary source material or get either grant aid or Manx government assistance for an objective historical project.
What we got instead for the last decade was laughable Celtic mythologising in a desperate attempt to jump-start a tourist trade which died when cheap air travel was born. And now, having even bored off the kind of middle aged office workers who like Clannad and buy any old New Age ‘alternative therapy’ they’re going really downmarket, in the hope a few low rent evangelical thickos will buy some tourist product while ‘exploring their Celtic Christian roots’….. or some such guff.
It is tempting to just point and laugh, but there are serious questions here.
For one thing, will the god-botherers pay to enter Peel Castle, or be excused the usual £10 or so charge? If so, how do the entrance staff know which are honest families on a day out and which are faith-based freeloaders? Glazed expressions and tasteless 100% polyester clothing might be a rough guide, but is that enough?
And who meets the costs of the extra policing, the parking and traffic problems? Peel ratepayers, or the island as a whole?
Come to think of it, how much did we pay in policing & other costs for Christmas on the Hill? While those responsible will have made sure that this never reached the minutes of any political or civil service committee on public record, it was probably excused on the premise that acolytes of the Zombie Carpenter went on to shop at Stepford Central (owned by Christian zealots who, coincidentally, also run the Police Liaison Committee).
And even if this line is being taken again, what commercial spin-off is there for Peel, given that (a) the event is scheduled from 4 PM to 5.30 PM and (b) Manx Heritage destroyed Peel retail over a decade ago when they blocked all public transport and traffic schemes except one which forced tourist cars and coaches to skirt around Peel itself, straight on to their House of Mannanan tourist trap and then back out of town to do their shopping and refreshing, if any, at Stepford Central?
But there is a bright side. For one thing the press unwittingly did local parents a favour when it published a prominent picture of one of the island’s worst dangers to kids.
For another because:
“It is a one off event – and organisers say Christmas on the Hill won’t take place this year either, after three successful events.”
That’s because it was crap. Hardly anybody went except the organisers, so in all likelihood the cost of extra policing alone didn’t even balance the additional takings at Stepford Central. And, on past performance, I doubt if VAT or other taxes paid by Stepford are anywhere near the grant aid ploughed into developing a ‘shopping experience’ not seen elsewhere since the hilarious ‘zombies on escalators’ scene in George Romero’s Dawn of the Living Dead.

Imminent election, first race card played

2011-04-13T11:02:00.002+01:00

You can tell there is an election coming when our dimmest politicians, having gone through the other horse-frighteners in the pack, play the race card.
So see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/education/places_at_nurseries_1_3276571 to spot an MHK who is desperate.
Knowing Malarkey’s history, you can see why. He piggybacked on the new Liberal Vannin party network to get into the Keys. Once in there, he immediately jumped ship. The whole point of Liberal Vannin was to stay on the back benches and hold government to account. Peter Karran, the party’s leader, has done this for years by (a)not signing up as the ‘political member’ in any government departments, where his sole role would have been to plant Tynwald questions which make ministers look good on knee-jerk topics, and (b) not getting sidetracked into pointless ‘committees’ which, like the government departments themselves, simply rubberstamp policies pre-decided by career civil servants with little or no knowledge of the public sector area they run down or hand over to even less qualified private and ‘third sector’ companies and faith based charities.
I saw exactly where Malarkey was going when I saw him huddled with semi-pro temperance nazis at a conference they held at Nobles to try and validate folk myths about ‘rising’ drink statistics. That, in turn, got them government grants for another two years, and Malarkey a seat on the Chief Minister’s Task Farce on Drugs and Alcohol. He is well qualified for that, having not only no professional or academic knowledge of the subject matter – which puts him on a par with his fellow committee members – but also a total reluctance to ask questions about the source or validity of the folk myths passed off as ‘academic research’ or ‘expert opinion’ which keep them all in a job.
By now, there is no excuse for such pig-ignorance. Check http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.com/2011/04/more-binge-drinking-fiction.html for a recent example of the prolific debunking of myths peddled to excuse government interference into everyday life and keep self-appointed alcohol ‘experts’ in business. Or you could look at http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.com/2011/04/another-day-another-lie.html to defuse a new myth which will soon be expounded to the financial advantage of not one but two classes of parasite on the Manx public sector host.
So why is Malarkey now playing the race card? I suggest because a couple of years ago the BNP paid a well publicized visit to the island to leaflet his constituents. Any politician of principle would take on the racists, but in my time on the island I have yet to see one candidate in any of the constituencies where I have lived who has not groveled to racist scum on an election manifesto. And until one does, is there any point in voting?
But the funniest thing about his question is that newcomers to the island are more, not less, likely to use private nurseries. For one thing because places in education department schemes go first to families registered by social services as ‘problem families’ (i.e. the work-shy or those rendered unemployable by past education and social policies) and not kids with working parents, for another because we have a public sector culture where professing bigotry or general ignorance, rather than education or social commitment, remains a valid career choice.
Both our civil service and our politicians are living proof of that.

Public health warning for Douglas on 17th April

2011-04-10T13:01:00.004+01:00

While we were in Douglas yesterday for a spot of retail therapy a Care in the Community case shuffled up and gave me a leaflet.
Fair enough, I thought, they need a hobby and some pin money, so they might as well get it handing out flyers for sunbed shops and closing down sales. Then I looked at it and laughed out loud.
Yes, the product was dodgy, and yes, the trader is fast going out of business, but it wasn’t quite what I expected.
Ladies and Gentlemen, time for another of the Deluded Herd’s annual get-togethers. Our chums at Living Hell, Port St. Mary’s most infamous madhouse, are having an Easter event at the Villa Marina.
UNITE@easter not only features the deranged ramblings of one of Ulster’s many redundant preachers (AKA ‘Jonathan Stansfield, Lead Pastor’), but also (cue drum roll)…..the UNITE Worship Band!!!!
Actually, I was unavoidably detained in locked rooms and forced to hear these prize herberts once or twice, and they are unforgettable (unfortunately). Imagine that freak show of failed contestants they feature on the final of the X Factor, led in tuneless song by a demented harpie who accidentally took a shedload of magic mushrooms and thinks she’s being rogered senseless by her Magic Invisible Friend and you won’t be far off.
Priceless.
The flyer is a bit vague, and some of the copy is even accidentally regurgitated from their New Year bash, so not sure what else to warn you to avoid on April 17th between noon and midnight. Witches may well be accused and burnt for all we know, small kids and folks in wheelchairs could be trampled underfoot when pitchforks are wielded and torches lit by a howling mob.
I doubt if there’ll be any chocolate bunnies though, not even Fairtrade ones, because rednecks don’t like that kind of pagan idolatry, and being End-Timers who eagerly await the Rapture they’re not about to help anyone in the developing world unless the kickback is 100 times bigger than the investment of other gullible people’s money.
Of course, this is also happening just across the road from their Broadway rivals, so an all out turf war for the day between our local evangelical Crips and Bloods could be on the cards. Punishment bible beatings, spray-and-pray random leafleting, drive by sermons…. who knows what else.
Just stay out of the area between around noon and midnight next Sunday would be my advice.

Game Over for Manx Christian homophobes

2011-04-10T11:46:00.006+01:00

It’s been a funny old week in what passes itself off as the Manx press since it finally became legal to register a civil partnership.
To summarize briefly, we finally won the war for common decency over here, but in coming months there are a few religious snipers to be picked off. Which will happen, as they're not very clever, definitely not very popular and their old government friends are either retiring or popping their clogs.
So what we see now is a backlash by local faith leaders to the legalization of civil partnerships, now that they've totally lost the battle to stop them.
See, for example, http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=34889 in which the Anglican area manager peddles a line last used by the Christian Institute as an either/or ultimatum to block the original Civil Partnership Bill in the UK.
It all sounds quite reasonable at first, but read closely and what he's doing is dissing gay marriage as a self-indulgent whim and trying to put some distance between the concept of Christian heterosexual marriage as 'proper' marriage and any form of 'partnership' as nothing more than a handy legal contract which might save you a few quid in tax benefits.
For the record, the current bishop wasn't here when the CP Bill Public Consultation took place back in around 2005, but his predecessor made no public comment on the subject and the Anglican submission was written by an Archdeacon who only retired last month. It did not take the Christian Institute line, did not oppose legal civil partnerships, and only wanted reassurances that clergy would not be under legal pressure to perform church ceremonies.
Those reassurances could not be gained through open discussion in Tynwald, because it would have shown up the churches as homophobic throwbacks who wanted the income from legal church weddings without the commitment of proper civil registrars to treat grown-ups decently. It was gained instead by their stooges in COMIN (Council of Ministers), whose meetings are not open to the public and whose minutes are not published until three months after the non-event, by which time the sleazy little deals have been nodded through Tynwald without risk that a member of the public could tip off their MHK.
Then there’s http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=34863 , which again looks very promising on the surface. But I think not if you know who is behind it, their history and their management structure.
Until a couple of years ago the Isle of Man Adoption Service, the charity paid by government to run our adoption services, was called Manx Churches Adoption and Welfare Society. All that changed was the name.
Employment, policy and committee membership are still under the control of the Anglican Church. The treasurer, for as long as I can remember, is a paid up member of Forward in Faith, one of the Anglican breakaway cults that can't deal with women priests, gays...or most other people!
It's one of about half a dozen such government-underwritten church charities in the social services sector who are dim enough to think that if they dropped the word 'church' or 'Christian' from their name, nobody would know how they're run.
Sorry, but some of us look at charity and company formation docs every day. We know the difference between registering a name change and registering an entire new constitution. We check, and we DO pass information on to people who can use it.
What's been happening is a desperate shortage of people adopting, and what MCAWS (as most people still know them) are really up to is relaxing, of necessity, an approval system that checks if potential parents run 'good Christian homes' (yes, they really used that phrase to someone I know) and allowing unmarried or divorced Christians, possibly even single parents, to adopt if enough fully lobotomized, church-spliced spouse-and-child-abusers don’t come forward.
They've been unsuccessfully trying to advertise this for the last year or two, but could not bring themselves to use 'the G word'. Annoyingly, they've been approached numerous times by gay and lesbian couples in recent years, without success, and in truth there never was a legal barrier anyway, just the personal prejudices of those vetting.
I suspect that MCAWS jumped on the first day when civil partnership ceremonies could be booked as a handy free advert, but that in practice gay couples will be the last resort once they've worked through any other applicants. For the sake of Manx kids who need good homes, I just hope the cultists don’t come forward, and government stops offering enough money to make child abuse a Christian business prospect.

Stamping out crime around schools

2011-04-05T20:47:00.002+01:00

According to this story (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=34804 ) the Department of Miseducation and Child Abuse want to stamp out anti-social behaviour on school property outside of normal school hours.
Well, that’s good news, so being a socially minded person perhaps I can tip them off to a few of the worst culprits.
They could start with Ramsey’s infant school, where judging from screams which can be heard on the adjoining estate each Sunday morning, some awful form of mental abuse is going on. I know no-one brave enough to look in and identify the torturers or their methodology. All I can say is that a random collection of individuals with glazed eyes are seen to emerge soon after. Thankfully, I hear from another source that, having emptied the purses of most gullible victims to the extent that weekly takings are smaller than the petrol costs, the torturers may be calling it a day and concentrating on victims closer to their home base in Douglas.
I hear similar stories from workmates living close to two Douglas primary schools, and have also heard of teachers being approached by what they suspected were devotees of a sinister cult which is known to prey on substance abusers, the elderly, and the housebound in the Port St. Mary area.
Jurby is another deprived community reporting a cult making dummy runs at gaining Sunday access to the school. There it was even suggested a keyholder helped them, and that one culprit has been seen regularly entering the prison a few hundred metres away from the school. It wasn’t clear whether he smuggles illicit materials in or out of that particular institution, but the most worrying factor ought to be his well established links with the Department of Home Affairs, a shady organisation responsible for most (if not all) of the island’s worst crime.
Having been offered this information, maybe the police can now get some of the island’s most despicable characters off the streets, so respectable folk can go safely about their business.
Or is that too much to ask?

Big Mother is watching you - or the battle between 'nudgers' and 'nannies'

2011-04-03T11:53:00.004+01:00

For a while now I’ve been looking for a way to introduce the subject of ‘nudging’ to this blog.
The term ‘nudging’ was popularised by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Wealth, Health, and Happiness. It refers to the political use of behaviourist techniques, rather than outright bans and law changes, to get the general public to stop doing stuff politicians, civil servants and other busybodies have decided we should not do.
In the UK Cameron established BIT (the Behavioural Insight Team) to formalise the nudging of what ex-Etonians obviously see as the fat and feckless masses into slimmer, duller lives. This replaced an old Brown/Blair approach which wanted to achieve the same aims, but by outright bullying from prim and proper nanny figures.
To get a useful introduction into this quiet further intrusion into our lives and freedoms, and the current behind-the-scenes battle between ‘nudgers’ and ‘nannies’ take a look at http://reason.com/archives/2011/03/30/nudgers-vs-nannies by Brendan O’Neill. It’s from an American site – hence the odd spellings – but if you want to know more on the topic from a UK perspective, it’s one that crops up regularly on Spiked, so check out the link to the right of the page.
Over here, it might be a while before the Manx great and gormless can lose their ignoble tradition of nannying the rest of us to death. But even a brief look at this article reveals the pseudo-therapeutic methodology increasingly being adopted by Manx civil servants, ‘government advisors’ and other unelected, publically unaccountable busybodies – often superstitious, semi-literate or plain stupid, by the way.
Take a look, then check out Spiked for more. The similarities between the UK examples and some of the ‘health conscious’ psychobabble being spouted in recent months by Manx government departments may alarm you. Maybe it will also help you spot the signs when these anti-democratic village idiots try to slip more past us in the future.
(hat tip to Dick Puddlecote for the link)

Crime and prejudice

2011-03-31T21:17:00.006+01:00

I also read today (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=34682 ) that the Clarksons have had fence posts and gates ripped up around their Langness cottage.
Locals will know that there’s a long-drawn out battle over rights of way going on between the Clarksons, other landowners and what journalists euphemistically describe as ‘ramblers’ (and most others just recognise as rubber-necking, bobble-hatted, slack-jawed simpletons with scabby dogs).
In the 1980’s a Falklands vet working at a nearby hotel memorably christened these loons ‘Bennies’ (after the Crossroads character). Apparently the name was originally given to the stylistically challenged Falklands islanders by the Marines during the invasion. The name stuck, though no Manxman will admit it since A.A. Gill caught on to the term on a weekend visit here and told the world through a Sunday Times article that even upset our Chief Benny.
A local paper today reported that the Bennies have denied involvement in this vandalism.
Well they would, wouldn’t they?
But I tend to believe them, because digging up fence posts is hard work, while for most Bennies, the nearest they get to a hard day’s work is pressing their noses against the house window of someone who has a job.

A good read for a bad man

2011-03-31T21:13:00.002+01:00

Reading today that MP Jim Devine is being jailed for his expenses fiddles (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/mar/31/jim-devine-sentenced-expenses-fruad ) made me laugh. It’s not just the idea of a real crook being put behind bars for once, but that I remembered me and Jim have some history.
Thing is, a year or two ago there was a half-baked campaign for humanists to send a copy of that Dawkins tome The God Delusion to every UK politician. This seemed to hinge on the idea that politicians actually read books or newspapers, rather than getting researchers to scan them for useable material. So, not thought up by anyone who has ever watched the political animal in action then.
The geezer behind the plot was given contact details for BHA affiliated groups, and, me being secretary of Isle of Man Freethinkers at the time, he was soon bending my ear. Bit of a dullard to be honest, who couldn’t grasp that we can’t elect politicians to Westminster (though they impose a bishop on us) and wouldn’t take a polite ‘maybe’ for an answer. So, to get him off my back and go back to….well, staring at paint drying or some far more riveting pastime than listening to him waffle on…..I agreed, and was alloted Jim Devine.
I duly sent Devine a copy of the book, suggesting that if he didn’t want to read it he could just bung it at any passing bishop with my compliments.
Well, if Devine didn’t do that, and he’s still got it lying around somewhere at least he’ll have something to read in the cell.

Frightening the horses, but nobody else

2011-03-29T21:21:00.007+01:00

It seems the island’s most demented pro-lifers are up to their old tricks.
Judging from http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/renowned_lecturer_to_give_euthanasia_talk_1_3213057 they’re planning to scare some horses at Stepford Central next Saturday. Mostly elderly ones who don’t get out much or read newspapers, I suppose.
Friends who know I played a major role in Pat Kneen’s momentous Manx Right-To-Die campaign a few years back pointed this out, thinking I would froth at the mouth or at least pen a letter to the papers. The truth is, it doesn’t concern me, and it also shouldn’t worry anyone who wants Manx law changed to let terminally ill folk choose their end.
But on the principle that I should show at least polite interest in such nonsense, this (see http://www.johnling.co.uk/ ) is the chancer who’ll be trying to put baseless fears into vulnerable minds. This (see http://www.cis.org.uk/resources/interviews/john-ling ) explains a little more about where he’s coming from and who his friends are, and this (see http://www.christian.org.uk/pdfpublications/map_jan_2007.pdf ) is the kind of obscurantist twaddle he produces, and for what audience.
The funniest thing is, he can’t even sell this guff to some of them.
Today I discovered that Ling also tried, but failed, to get some of his nonsense published in one of the UK’s most rabid evangelical rags. As these awful papers usually jump at the thought of a contributor who can even demonstrate a three figure IQ, never mind an academic background, this was quite a stunt.
The Manx cabal of LIFE are no threat either. Funnily enough, only a year or so ago they managed to annoy both local doctors and even chemists by kicking off about one of Ling’s other obsessions, the so-called ‘morning-after-pill’.
I have it on good authority that GPs got most irate when the closet pro-lifer then running the health service (as opposed to the openly pro-lifer who runs it now) tried to foist some very dodgy LIFE literature on them with the apparent intent that they should both read it and take it seriously. When LIFE then tried to ‘suggest’ to local pharmacists that they should refuse to cooperate on grounds of ‘conscience’ (something they picked up from CARE’s similar campaign with registrars on civil partnerships) they just got another flea in the ear.
Maybe both parties (having a more than tabloid understanding of the subject matter) were just so underwhelmed by the Ling argument as sponsored by the Christian Institute featured above that they now avoid anything associated with LIFE, or other simpletons. Leaving the pro-lifers (such an innacurate term, by the way, for misanthropic know-nowts) to gather what small change they can from other churchgoers who have nothing better to do this Saturday.
Meanwhile, the rest of us can just do something better in peace.

Beware of freaks bearing collecting tins

2011-03-27T12:40:00.001+01:00

You might have acolytes of a religious pseudo-charity banging your door and demanding money in the next few days according to http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=34573 . Please feel as free as I will to tell them where to shove their collecting tins.
The Adventist Development Relief Agency UK (England and Wales registered charity number 1074937) is a front organisation for the Seventh Day Adventists. If you haven’t come across these bozos, they’re a conservative Christian sect.
Amongst their beliefs they condone Creationism and Millenarianism (also known as ‘End Timers’ – freaks who believe the end of the world is coming so you shouldn’t do anything to stop that, such as stopping wars, or even recycling or adopting environmental policies). They’re also homophobes and don’t believe in birth control outside of marriage (that’s heterosexual marriage, as they believe any other kind is an abomination).
Quite how flat-earthers like that get to run a ‘development agency’ or expect to be of any use to humanity beats me. Even by the usual standards of the biblebashing throwbacks preying on Manx unfortunates this lot are wired to the moon.
By the way, that stuff about them collecting ‘legally’ can also be treated with a large pinch of salt. It’s an offence for any charity not registered on the Isle of Man to solicit funds here.
Thanks to some flat-earth friends in Tynwald some of the bigger parasites are able to ignore that law with no danger of getting their collars felt. We might watch with interest to see what happens when this particular bunch of chancers not only break the law but have announced their intent to do so on the ‘national’ radio station.

Foul-mouthed pervs strike in Manx schools

2011-03-26T17:18:00.006Z

Just when you think the number of Christophiles crashing into Manx schools and wrecking young lives has peaked, you find more evidence of our public servants colluding in such attempts to drag kids back to the Middle Ages.
For according to the March edition of Together, the IOM Diocesan newsletter:
“Open the Book is an assembly scheme designed to enable every child to hear the story of the Bible at school in their primary years. Ordinary people like you and me from local churches come together as a team of storytellers and deliver 10 min assemblies where Biblical accounts and stories are retold. Open the Book is providing a vehicle to help churches build a bridge to 99% of the primary age population. That’s potentially 99% of the primary population moving on to secondary school having heard at least 33 Biblical accounts or stories…”
Now, to me, that’s clear evidence of institutional child abuse, so as a concerned parent I just want to know when someone at the Department of Miseducation will be sacked, or even prosecuted, for allowing it to happen. Either that or an equal opportunity for, say, fans of the Brothers Grimm or Terry Pratchett to introduce kids to some far better tales of fantasy and myth.
Scripture Union Ministries Trust, an organisation which really should be proscribed for the sake of all our children, do not see it quite like that. They do admit they’re doing “serious damage”, but only to “a 20 yr decline in Biblical literacy”.
So there’s our child protection services, on the one hand, indulging in tabloid fantasies about 8 year olds checking out online donkey porn or something. Meanwhile, as the headteacher looks on benignly, some semi-professional perv is reading aloud to the whole school from the world’s best known one-hand mag.
So far only two teams of SUMT yawn-troopers are being let loose in three schools. But apparently, later this year, our clueless government will allow four gangs to practice their potty-mouthed antics in between four and eight more primary schools. As they boasted openly of this in a publication that is, theoretically, available to up to 5,700 locals it is only reasonable to expect the police should act before more young lives are destroyed.

I can't go on....I'll go on

2011-03-20T18:14:00.001Z

Oh, it's no good!
Stewart Home once said his Art Strike was "the dumbest idea -ever", but that was (kind of) the point anyway.
I had a few folk asking me to think again, but I tried to stick to my word and not touch this blog again until January 1st 2012.
Then I wondered, is this blind adherence to an abstract principle - even if tongue in cheek and camp as a row of tents - any better than religion? But still I held out. I was hardly twiddling my thumbs either, but while I got on happily enough with other things since January 1st I also watched, with growing horror, what seemed like the total surrender of the local press to a tide of PR bilge - often temperance nazi trash and other pure faith led cretinism.
And to make it worse, it seemed like every last critical voice on the island had taken a more serious New Year resolution than me to just give up asking questions, poking fun....or anything else.
On any given day since January 1st I could have poured scorn at the new folk myths posing as 'news' and 'community action' repeated uncritically and without even a vague attempt at sub-editing or balance through what passes for the Manx media. But I kept cool and instead carried on reading my collections of satirical writings from days before churnalism was invented.
So why change my mind now?
Oh, I don't know. Maybe it was the guilt at knowing that if, say, campaigns against stoning or forced marriages had emergency appeals I couldn't pass that on. Or maybe it was just having to pick up on an event of huge Manx historical importance like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMiskrFz-vY from an off-island source, because it hardly got a mention in the local press. They would prefer to run tripe like http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=34360 instead.
I will write off the Sodor Trust briefly and bluntly. The parent is http://archbishopofyorkyouthtrust.co.uk/ , whose website is somewhat economical with the truth, as you'd expect from a parasitical outfit whose only raison d'etre is to milk the public purse. Look up England and Wales registered charity number 1129075 to find a little more, but you still won't get far past the public image.
Also spend a little time wondering what faith healing has to do with youth work, and if you cannot work that out see if you can explain why one of the trustees, the Reverend Beatrice Brandon, is not only a faith healer but even manages to run her own charitable trust with the help of senior Anglicans up to and including at least one bishop.
And ask yourself why Anglicans are going in for the newest evangelical scam on the rates -'street pastoring' - and if they plan to do it here. I know of at least one bunch of Manx happy clappies who have been sniffing around the Department of Home Affairs, but I didn't think even the Police Liason Committee were falling for that one, and I know officers policing Douglas's weekend club scene didn't, never mind anyone in the Manx Anglican hierarchy. Maybe innocent clubbers really do have to worry about a new threat to public order - late night scriptural muggers.
And that's just today's news.
OK, I'm going to go halfway on this. I really have too much serious stuff to do elsewhere to get back into this on more than an occasional basis. But maybe the odd item is going to come up I cannot ignore, and the odd Sunday afternoon when I can't resist giggling at it.
The miserable, doomstruck characters of Beckett are not my idea of a role model, but as one of them says somewhere (oh, I can't even be bothered to look up where): "I can't go on....I'll go on"..... or rather, as a real Irish comic creation always says: "......go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on......GO ON!!!!!"

Blog Strike

2010-12-31T14:39:00.000Z

Today I will cease writing this blog. I will not blog another word until at least 1st January 2012.
My inspiration is a piece of ‘performance art’ (for want of a better term) called the Art Strike, which a similarly named, similarly aged prankster called Stewart Home carried out from 1990 to 1993. Google it if you’ve never heard of it.
Like my sometime associate Home I regard anything I do for fun, rather than to pay the mortgage or for my family, as an experiment, and almost everything else as an utter bore and a complete waste of time. I started the print column because I was invited to and so will continue that until I’m disinvited, but I started the blog as an experiment, so when it is not interesting to blog, not interesting to observe the reaction, then there is no reason to continue. Or maybe I’ll just observe what happens when I don’t blog, because that may also be interesting.
One reason for the Manx content has been that I never understood why nobody else was doing it when so much nonsense goes on here and, for strictly economic reasons, the local press will not talk about it. But I also never understood why, once I’d proved it could be done, nobody else joined in.
And I never understood why the level of analysis or research by commentators on local websites…......well, frankly, why there isn’t any! If I’m terribly honest, I also despair of many 'atheist' websites and organisations too, for the same reasons.
Does nobody ask the most basic questions of news stories?
Where this or that assertion, statistic or ‘fact’ comes from?
Or who?
It ought to be patently obvious to anyone who has even briefly encountered ‘media studies’ that at least 80% of the local, UK or international press is written by PR companies, government spin-meisters and pressure groups, so why do they not ask where the story came from?
Or why they planted the story?
Or why the Manx government spends millions on PR projects which they tell us are meant to improve the international image of the island, but which even the thickest, most academically illiterate marketing assistant in the naffest local company or government department should know from their sub-GCSE marketing course notes is actually a piss-poor attempt to make locals ‘think positive’?
Oh, so many questions, so little time. So, I’m off, to read books, study and try other projects I’ve had tucked away if I find the time, or just (as every disgraced Tory politician says) to spend more time with my family.
No, I’m not bored, or angry, or disheartened. No, I’m not available for anyone else’s projects which they can’t be bothered to see through themselves.
I’m just not here for the next 365 days.
If that’s a bother, it took me about 20 minutes to set this blog up from scratch with no IT experience. I did it for the same reason I churned out punk fanzines when I was 18 and have contributed to all manner of odd, obscure publications ever since.
Nobody talked about anything that related to the world I live in. So if that’s true for you, stop whining and do it yourself.
Go on punk, make my day.
See you in 2012.

Yulelogy in the sad absence of morality

2010-12-25T14:59:00.000Z

I briefly looked today at a website where local bigwigs like to first post their diktats to the rest of us. Well, it is Christmas Day, so traditionally a time when the great and the good like to tell us plebs where we’re going wrong and why we’re going to Hell in a handbasket, or how we might do better.
But instead of beatitudes, or even platitudes, all I found was, well.......... tweatitudes.
This (http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=31926 ), for example, from an unelected political parasite, imposed on us by foreign dictators.
This (http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=31947 ) from a Minister for No Fun, who asks that we live our entire lives as lies.
And this (http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=31855 )from an enforcer for unscrupulous gangsters, whose fellow thugs at this time of the year like to stop ordinary car drivers at random, mainly in order to keep the road clear for drunken civil servants and legislators on the way to or from one of a myriad of publically funded events.
I think you see the problem at once.
There is just no voice of moral authority any more. Nobody on the island who I can offer to my small daughter as a reference for anything good, or decent, or human.
But I suspect, from her dealings with various po-faced liars who turn up at her school, she may be gathering that already. She’s going to have to work it all out for herself, as are we all.
Oh well. At least life is never dull if you spend it making up the rules as you go along.
Have a Cool Yule, and try to spot the jokes, rather than electing or otherwise subsidising them.

Public Health Warning for St. Johns

2010-12-23T17:48:00.000Z

If there is a deity, he is celebrating his birthday with a sly joke on his thickest local disciples.
Because smack bang under a warning that a virulent new strain of MRSA may have hit the island I found http://www.manx.net/news/1037/christmas-on-the-hill-st-johns-christmas-eve on the Manxnet news page.
Well, that saves me having to warn Manx people that St. Johns is again becoming a Yuletide Disaster Area. But as the police have mentioned it, I’d recommend the rest of us just avoid the area altogether for a few days. Leave it to the fundie throwbacks, the BNP and similar Manx rednecks no decent person should be seen around or risk catching something nasty off.
One other question. If the local police are doing advertising for publically subsidised flat-earth gatherings like this, doesn’t that suggest that it is high time for a new Police Liason Committee?
The two key figures of that unelected committee (whose new members are selected by the current committee, not the police, the DHA or Tynwald) are not only fundamentalists but run the shopping centre next to St. Johns Hill which will reap any financial benefit from this event.
That, I would have to suggest, is another joke. Much sicker, if very indicative of the real way in which Tynwald goes through the motions of ‘consulting’ the public on government policy.

A Religious Marriage of Convenience?

2010-12-23T12:21:00.000Z

Tucked away in the Order Paper for Tynwald this Tuesday (see http://www.tynwald.org.im/papers/orders/2010-2011/ko21122010.pdf) we see as Item 4:

“The Hon Member for Glenfaba (Mr Anderson) to move –That under Standing Order 4.34, on the petition of the Promoters, John Bingham, Robert Terence Easton and Avril Kneale Teare as the Trustees of the Broadway Baptist Church, and as the Trustees of the Alpha Centre Trust, and of the said John Bingham, Robert Terence Easton, Avril Kneale Teare and Clive Graham Swift as the Trustees of the Well Trust, the petitioners having certified the required compliance with Standing Orders, leave be given to introduce the Broadway Baptist Church Bill 2011.”

So, what’s that all about?
Well, if anyone was to ask officials at our second most bonkers local evangelical cult, they’d probably explain that the 19th century charitable trust which established the church was a little out of date, and so they’re tidying up a little, also combining the charitable trusts which established their bookshop/café and their various ‘outreach’ programs.
This is true – sort of – in that charitable trusts can only carry out the tasks mentioned in their charter, and benefit those named. Charity law – even on the Isle of Man – is irritatingly obstructive to faith-based fraudsters and tax dodgers, especially if the trust was drawn up way before the modern business and charity law which paved the way for our offshore finance sector.
But closer analysis of the Bill reveals more interesting things.
What the Batshits are actually doing is winding up the trusts, in particular the 19th century one for the church itself. The problem is, winding up a trust requires that you hand what assets are left over to the named beneficiaries, who my guess would be are something like paid up bona fide members of the church or other local Christian worthies, and my other guess is those now controlling the gaff don’t want to do that.
What they actually want is for real ownership and power to pass from ordinary local Christians (who can’t be trusted to go with the program the cabal running Broadway Baptists are drawing up) and to an English silent partner in their shady deals. The way they seem to be planning to do it is to close the charitable trusts and regroup the assets and enterprises into a limited by guarantee company, which will also be registered as a Manx charity.
The main advantage of this is that a limited by guarantee company has named guarantors (usually three or four folk playing a trustee-like role who agree to contribute a token pound or so if the company is wound up) not named shareholders. So, the real ‘owners’ of the company are not on record, or even traceable through any nominee shareholders who represent them.This would be extremely advantageous if those owners were, say, a religious organisation in another country which doesn't want the world at large to know it has offshore assets, or religious zealots in an offshore jurisdiction to know that their place of worship is owned by money-grubbing foreigners who will flog it to the highest bidder.
The real clue comes in section 8 of the explanatory literature, that dealing with dissolution, where it casually mentions that “The ultimate beneficiary shall be Spurgeon’s College”.
Oh dear!
Just a short guide to trust law jargon here. Trusts have ‘beneficiaries’, who are individuals or institutions who the person or institution settling the property of the trust wants to have some day to day benefit – could be, for example, a relative of the settlor needing school fees, the homeless or someone getting a grant to study something. The ultimate beneficiary is the person or thing that gets everything when the trust is wound up.
Another clue is in the blurb about the ‘Statement of Faith’, and the desire to change this so as to fit in with the Evangelical Alliance ‘basis of faith’. The EA has come up in this blog a few times (for example, their attempts to prevent civil partnership ceremonies, their opposition to schools tackling bullying of seemingly gay pupils, their strange decision to revise the definition of a ‘cult’ so as to allow the dangerous Jesus Army cult to join the Alliance), but would be familiar to anyone who studies nutjob evangelicals of the UK.
To anyone else - they’re Fruitcake Central, with numerous links to Westminster, seats on all the QUANGOs going, and also pretty much run the religious advisory bodies at the BBC. Most baffling of all, although they’re amongst the most homophobic and sexist elements of the UK Christian community, their head honcho, Joel Edwards, sits on Equal Opportunities bodies on the dubious basis that he and a few other EA figures are black, ergo nasty educated liberals and gays are somehow ‘discriminating’ when they object to the theofascist cretinism sometimes spouted by EA affiliates as ‘sincere’ faith.
Spurgeon College , which is named as ‘ultimate beneficiary’, is, by the way, the EA’s ‘educational resource’ – more accurately, a fundie bible college which actually detracts from the sum of human knowledge.
This, added to various adverts which have been appearing since early 2009 in UK Baptist newspapers and magazines unsuccessfully appealing for a new Broadway pastor, suggests that the place is in serious trouble.
Will it close?
Sadly, I fear not, and I also doubt that it’s a sign that pitifully poorly informed civil servants and politicians will finally pull the plug on dubious ‘social outreach’ schemes which run from the Alpha Centre.
What it might signal is that the only serious asset the church has left, i.e. the property, is being lined up for sale and redevelopment at a convenient future point. The area immediately around it is deteriorating fast and, as coincidence would have it, the property developer most likely to snap it up used to employ the retiring Attorney General (to whom the whole current deal has to be referred) and also the only local legal authority on ecclesiastical law.
Convenient coincidence or cunning planning?
We may have to wait another year or so to find out.

Exporting lies, extracting money, destroying community

2010-12-17T11:16:00.000Z

There is a rash of recent Manx press stories at this time of year which suggest that local schools, businesses and other social groups have helped people in poorer countries to have a better Christmas. You can read one example at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/telecom_staff_send_off_festive_cheer_in_shoeboxes_1_2853540.
To be blunt, they were conned (and I include local organisers in this), and they haven't.
To get some idea of the parties really behind this scam take a look at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/12/sarah-palin-haiti-visit , and note the stories of past 'aid projects' from 1994 and 2001.
I could also tell you that, a few years ago, I spoke to a Lutheran minister in Romania. She was one of a remarkable group of clerics led by a bishop whose sermons were so popular that, when the Securitate tried to break them up, it kickstarted a chain of events which eventually led to the overthrow of Ceacescu.
This cleric told me that, frankly, Samaritans Purse and other evangelical US missions were the cause of more community tension than Ceacescu and his crew ever managed to stir up in order to keep themselves in power and privilege. Foreign 'charity' was simply not necessary in communities where neighbours looked out for each other and shared what they had.
Local churches worked perfectly well and perfectly openly and were respected even by non-religious neighbours. Local public services, schools and hospitals were staffed by dedicated, if underpaid, professionals despite the open corruption of Romanian politicians.
Actually, it is a good thing they do, because after a quick photo or two for next year's publicity appeals, as in the Palin example, the SP are gone. The boxes, if ever distributed, go as a sort of token dividend to poor folk who've signed up and paid up through the nose to US churches, most of whose profits go back to the US.
Franklin Graham's empire has a $500 million annual turnover in the US alone, and being a religious 'charitable foundation' pays no tax. It owns planes, fleets of trucks, printing presses, state-of-the-art film and recording studios...... Do you really think it needs your £1 coins too?
Or look at it another way.
Romanians, like people in most of the countries where religious scams like SP work, show a level of community solidarity that puts us to shame and which we long ago lost. They may have older houses, cars and clothes than some of us, but it isn't a problem to them.
They get by and, unlike us, look out for their neighbours. The idea that a pensioner in, say, a dormitory village like Kirk Michael could fall over and lie on their kitchen floor for a week without a neighbour noticing is unbelievable to my friends and relatives in East Europe.
So why are you helping pondlife like Graham to not only steal from those communities but destroy them?

Sick survey, dead loss

2010-12-17T10:58:00.000Z

This week’s local press prominently featured a lump of astroturf planted by parasites on the local health sector. If you’d rather read this pack of lies in the original form just go to
http://www.gov.im/lib/news/dhss/isleofmanendofli.xml.
On 10th December, in a piece entitled Isle of Man ‘End of Life Care Project’ set for launch, some of those who contribute most to the sum of Manx human misery when folk die told us that:“The Department of Health and Macmillan Cancer Support have joined forces on a new initiative aimed at improving end of life care on the Isle of Man.
The two year project will work with patients, carers, health and social care professionals and the voluntary and faith sectors on the Isle of Man, to produce an agreed end of life care strategy and to develop an implementation plan for improving end of life care across a wide range of life limiting conditions. “
Which probably sounds very impressive to an innocent reader, especially if they or folk around them are likely to die in the near future.
The con artists continue: “The Isle of Man End of Life Care Strategy will aim to identify what people’s preferences might be at the end of life and examine existing health, social care and voluntary support systems that will enable people to die in the place of their choosing. “
That is a bare faced lie.
To understand why, consider these three things.
Firstly, in the life of the current Manx parliament there will be an attempt to introduce a Bill on assisted dying.
Secondly, in the last two decades, care of the island’s terminally ill has left the hands of the public health service and gone to an ugly coalition of private and pseudo-charitable business interests. They have a tidy little racket going whereby the lives of the terminally ill are spun out as long as possible, and each painful unit is costed out at the maximum possible rate to vultures ranging from aromatherapists and other unqualified floggers of unregulated alternative woo-woo through to those with some semblance of professionalism but who also, in practice, do little more than pat semi-corpses on the head while extracting the contents of their wallets. If you’ll excuse the pun, it is one sick business.
Thirdly, the current Health Minister is a pro-lifer. To be fair, he is absolutely open about this and, for example, lists his membership of CARE (Christian Action for Research and Education) amongst his parliamentary interests. He holds his views and expresses them as a Christian, not a medical expert, and, to my certain knowledge, has not taken a penny from any company or individual which benefits financially from the current status quo. In that alone he is head and shoulders above many of his fellow political layabouts, whose inability to, for example, award a government contract without a skiing holiday, ‘fact-finding mission’ to exotic countries, seat on the board of a company when they retire from politics or (in the most extreme 1980’s cases) holiday homes in sunnier climes is a national disgrace that puts us on a par with their worst Irish role models.
Note also that the entire pseudo-project has been underwritten, not by government, but by one of the bogus health charities with most to lose if dying people were able to get the deaths they actually want, not ‘choose’ from a menu of overpriced, whimsical nonsenses, and that it will be conducted by an employee of a faith-based partner in crime.
While we’re at it, we should also consider that vacuous fluffy quote from Cicely Saunders, founder of the UK’s hospice con. In order to understand the true mentality and morality of Saunders, it is only necessary to know that, in 1981, she won the Templeton Prize. For those who don’t know, the founders of the Templeton Prize (until 2001 known as the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion) intended to emulate or even dwarf the prestige of the Nobel prizes. The only way in which they truly outdid the Nobels was to offer more cash. Otherwise, it’s just an open £1,000,000 bribe to any public figure, preferably with a scientific/medical/philanthropic or quasi-scientific/medical/philanthropic background to come up with reasons why such fields should be dominated by religious, not rational, thinking, or to muddy the waters in such a way that it is impossible to go about those disciplines without one leg in a barbed wire garter. Once you know that, the year after Saunders, Billy Graham got it you can appreciate what 24 carat crap the whole deal is, what kind of moral pygmy takes the loot and why you should dismiss anything they ever said about anything.
My advice to anyone who is approached by this survey is, firstly, insist on written communication, not a verbal interview, and secondly ask if assisted dying is on the menu for discussion. If it isn’t, then, say you don’t think it is a true research project into what dying people and their friends and relatives want and refuse to co-operate further. And make sure you get all this in writing.
It is important that you do this.
Firstly because this survey is a deliberate attempt to only allow participants to give answers those behind the scam have pre-decided, in order to pretend it is ‘what the public wants’ and further excuse the lack of choice and theft of public funds.
Secondly, because this survey will work itself into the arguments used by such parasites to derail an assisted dying bill.
Thirdly, because when they do all this, it is important that we can challenge such nonsense, and provide evidence of the way in which our attempts to give our true opinions were blocked by those, in theory, charged with gathering such opinion.
Bogus research is a growing industry in Manx government circles, increasingly used to excuse the most outrageous waste and theft of taxpayer money. It is our civic duty to stop it dead.

Twin-set and Pearls Pervs - Are Your Kids Safe?

2010-12-12T16:13:00.000Z

A while back (see Attack of the blue-rinse conspiracy theorists from September) I mentioned a paranoid campaign by the Mothers Union against the ‘commercialisation of childhood’.
I suspected then that the local twin-set and pearls mafiosi must be just going along with their UK godmothers. What I hadn’t realised until last week was just how serious this particular organised crime spree is. Seemingly, it goes right to Downing Street itself.
This BBC report for example (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11923107) shows beyond doubt that not only are the deranged fantasies of superstitious, upper middle class whackjobs taken seriously by others who miss the institutional rent boy racket that passes for ‘private education’, but that the Old Girl Network is as prolific as the better known boys club in Westminster.
The more serious worry is that this also has shades of Tipper Gore and the infamous PMRC (Parents Music Resource Centre), the bandwagon-jumping, horse-frightening US campaign which caused ‘Parental Advisory’ stickers on CDs, and whose side-effect was to guarantee sales for any potty-mouthed rapper on major labels only sold through chain stores, while hastening the demise of independent record and video labels and stores in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Thus, while principled musicians (from Frank Zappa to Jello Biafra) fought the censorship and exposed nonsense like the ‘Satanist lyrics on LPs played backwards’ myths (through lengthy senate hearings and court battles) the sexism, homophobia, violence and other genuine social evils the PMRC might have tackled actually increased in popular music.
Perhaps God-fearing middle American parents just don’t worry about that sort of stuff. Certainly they have a long record of sponsoring it.
But what really makes me laugh is that the Mothers Union is run by a bloke (unless Reg Bailey is some Joyce Grenfell clone of a gym mistress whose sexual realignment isn’t complete). Whoever he is, I don’t want him or any of his sex-obsessed friends anywhere near my child, and neither should any sane parent.
Note again that the ‘research’ they did is confined to Mothers Union members. Therefore it does not represent the reasoned views of well balanced, well informed parents who engage with the real world, but of paranoid ranters afraid of the dark and unhealthy interest in child sex some of their best friends haven’t managed to sublimate or deal with properly. Just because media-illiterate Christians are filthy-minded pervs who can’t bring their kids up that doesn’t mean everyone else is.

All Frilly Surplice And No Knickers

2010-12-12T15:27:00.000Z

One of the dimmer Tynwald layabouts had some objections to the Marriage and Civil Registration (Amendment) Bill which went through in April. Apparently the chump was worried it might lead to a spate of ‘wacky weddings’ which would make the outside world laugh at the island.
Oh Eddie, really! The world laugh at a place populated by folk who not only let you take executive political decisions while skulking in a government broom cupboard but even pay you, even though you can’t get elected? As if!!
The sadder thing was that the main hold-up to a fairly modest bill was the Bishop needing an assurance (which he got) from fellow unelected political rejects and chancers that if a clergyman was to be illegally passed information from a confidential register of transgendered people, and refused to conduct a marriage of that person, then neither the clergyman nor the faith-biased and homophobic civil servant would be prosecuted.
Some people wonder why I laugh when Manx church leaders or government departments try to tell us they want to stamp out racism, sexism or homophobia.
But a few weeks ago I noted another blatant example of the kind of tasteless tat that passes elsewhere for a ‘dignified’ church ceremony. Take a look at http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/847874-dog-gets-elaborate-church-blessing, where some herbert spent £1,000 having his dog blessed in a village church. And there was me thinking those ‘bring your pet to church’ Sundays local bunny-huggers love so much were a bit over the top.
It does make you wonder about all those Manx church pretensions to high mindedness and solemn dignity. As one of the more personable senior clergy once grumbled to me over a decade ago, he’d never known a place like the Isle of Man for rich, thick and sentimental punters, and church advisors who’d sign him up to fulfil their oddest whims at the right price. “Anything that can’t run away, they want me to pray over. If it’s got legs, wings or fins I’ve been asked to christen, marry or bury it. If it doesn’t move they want me to bless it.”
By comparison, I’ve yet to hear of any Manx gay couple with such poor taste that they wanted to get married in a church. Some people just have to much taste, and self-respect.
Which makes Manx Christian objections to gay marriage ( and even the long overdue, yet to be implemented, arrangement for civil partnership ceremonies) all the more risible.

Evidence that Ramsey isn’t quite sane, number 99

2010-12-04T11:32:00.000Z

The number of people at an outdoor religious ceremony to mark the 101st anniversary of a ferry sinking: 86 (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=48954 ).
That includes a grief-mining local politician, lifeboat volunteers whose obligatory attendance required time off from work, directors of the foreign-owned, over-mortgaged ferry company which poses as the national ferry service and some Scousers on a freebie holiday.
The number of people at the switch-on of the town’s Christmas lights (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=48956 ): 6.
These were the Chairman of Ramsey Commissioners, his daughter and one other kid, someone from the bank sponsoring the lights, someone from the bank’s nominated charity and the obligatory health & safety officer.
Sometimes people wonder why Ramsey’s retail and tourist sector is in decline.
Could it be because neither the Black Death nor Foot and Mouth hit the town?
Or is it just that Ramsey events are only run for the benefit of the retired, the feckless and semi-professional parasites, and while those whose taxes keep them in comfort are at work (mostly in Douglas as there are no Ramsey jobs, and no government policies for creating any)?

To Henry and Edna, a son

2010-11-29T10:52:00.000Z

I was THIS close to being taken in by a letter in last Friday’s Manx Indie.
One John Eoin Douglas, of Edinburgh, wrote to congratulate South Africa in supporting a recent UN vote to remove sexual orientation from a resolution calling on countries to protect the life of all people and to investigate extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions that are motivated by prejudice and discrimination.
Mr Douglas went on to opine:
“It would seem that South African politicians have finally realised that appeasing the homosexualist lobby and accepting this perversion has led to many of the current fractures and ills in their society. In addition to removing favourable treatment for homosexuals from their Constitution, perhaps they will now also get round to reversing their 1961 adoption of Decimal Currency which most right thinking people see as the start of the slippery slope to untramelled liberalism.”
Which had me both amused and completely bemused.
Was this guy for real? He wouldn’t be the maddest Brit to write to the Manx press in vague hope of putting a paranoid delusion into print, so it was hard to be sure. On the other hand, I was sure I’d seen that name before somewhere….
Eventually, I asked Garry Otton, writer of Scottish Media Monitor and author of Sexual Fascism, the book which names and shames every scumbag involved in the attempts to spread homophobia and retain Section 28 in Scotland. If anyone knew this character, it would be Garry, who let me in on a running joke I just have to share.
High culture satire fans will remember William Donaldson’s Henry Root Letters, in which Donaldson’s alter-ego wrote to the great and the good with wild suggestions, and subsequently collected both the letters and their replies in a best-selling book.
But in Prick Up YourEars, John Lahr’s biography of the common as muck and twice as shameless queer playwright Joe Orton, we can read about Edna Welthorpe, a snobbish lady literary critic whose bizarre opinions dotted the letter pages of the regional press, and who later concentrated her spleen on Orton’s plays. Orton, a prankster whose many other hilarious outrages fill the first half of the book, WAS Edna Welthorpe.
So, ladies and gentlemen, before anyone writes to the Indie, may I refer you all to the long lost funny bastard son of Henry Root and Edna Welthorpe,whose collected letters to many uptight publications who really ought to know better may be found at http://johneoindouglas.blogspot.com/ .

11,510 self-pitying losers, and still rising

2010-11-27T12:34:00.000Z

Christian self-pity has plumbed new depths in the UK with the launch of Not Ashamed, a campaign run by CCFON (Christian Concern For Our Nation) and CLC (Christian Legal Centre) the UK’s two leading merchants of theo-fascist codswallop, underwritten by even battier Yanks. If I tell you, for example, that one of CCFON’s ‘partners’ is Oral Roberts University, a private US college run by fundies where graduates accept endtimer and creationist twaddle that shouldn’t even fool a UK 10 year old, you have some idea what manner of foolishness we’re dealing with.
It was the Reverend Doctor Peter Hearty, who runs Platitude of The Day (see Fave Sites & Fellow Travellers list) who spotted the link at http://www.notashamed.org.uk/about.php.Take a peek, and try not to die laughing.
11,510 whining bigots as of the time of writing this, and the campaign doesn’t even launch officially until December 1st. It makes a belief in transubstantiation look almost rational by comparison.
All the usual suspects are lined up. If you ever wanted to know “where do clapped out professional bible-bashers go, when even the nitwits who employ them decide they’re totally senile and/or crackers”, you now have an answer.
I only know of one open Manx link to the CCFON, though knowing the depths to which Manx fundie asinity can plunge I don’t doubt other twonks will be quietly affiliated. Friends and Heroes, the biblically bolloxed cartoon made (or at least reproduced) here in Ramsey got the one and only ‘award’ it will ever see from a CCFON front group, which acts as a sort of marketing agency for Christian/family values media morons.
Frankly, the fairy tale view of Christian 'persecution' fabricated by Not Ashamed , and the bonkers characters involved, would probably be too far fetched for even kiddie cartoons. Though I probably shouldn't propose it in case some numpty fundie tries anyway.

Who guards the guards?

2010-11-26T20:03:00.000Z

I had to laugh at this report (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=31002) of a building on Homefield Road having 20 windows smashed some time “between Friday, November 19, and Tuesday, November 23”, apparently without anyone noticing.
The thing is, I can only think of one large building on that road which is set back enough from the road for anyone to smash that many windows without either the racket alerting the neighbours or the glass covering enough of the main road to bring traffic to a standstill.
That would be the Department of Home Affairs offices.
So, in addition to demonstrating what the Great Manx Public really thinks about those who misrun our police and prison services, this incident also suggests that there’s not much work going on there. Either that or the civil servants and self-selecting advisory committees who claim to be ensuring we can sleep safely at nights are deaf and blind.
I’d suggest they need a decent Neighbourhood Watch scheme, except that the last time I looked the Manx Crimestoppers project was effectively under the thumb of Group 4 Security, which many suggest obtains more money under false pretences from the court and prison services (and therefore the public) than 'official' criminal types would dare to in their wildest dreams.

FCIOM

2010-11-21T20:48:00.000Z

It was time for the family to dip another tentative toe into the Manx cultural backwater today.
We’d promised to take an elderly friend to a concert at the Villa Marina. She’s German, so in Ramsey she might as well be from Mars. Her Indoors and The Prodigy seem to attract such folk, and usually they’ve had interesting lives and can broaden my daughter’s experience of the world, so it’s no hassle spending a few hours a week with them.
So, it all seemed harmless enough – a French themed afternoon with noise provided by the imposingly entitled Isle of Man Symphony Orchestra, and matching movement from local dance schools.
After jumping up and down for two national anthems (Manx and French), with most of the audience badly miming words to the Manx for fear of losing their benefits and warbling by a minor celebrity soprano impressionist to guide us through the French, the racket started in earnest.
To be honest, I wish it hadn’t, but not half as much as I wish they’d tuned up before the concert started (rather than after the third item, when it seems to have first dawned on the players) or that they’d invest in a metronome.
Curiously, playing or singing in time seems to be a common problem for Manx musical ensembles: maybe Traa Dy Liooar (Manx Gaelic for ‘Wait until tomorrow’) applies to music as well as (non-) working practices.
For the second item one of the dance groups took to the stage. I’m guessing this may have been planned to divert attention away from the bum notes of the orchestra; unfortunately a bunch of plump farm girls crashing round a stage like so many heifers in tutus doesn’t really cut it either. At least at Young Farmer shows the comedy is intentional.
By this stage our elderly friend was humming along happily enough while we three were biting the backs of the seats in front to stop laughing. And it got worse.
The final item of the first half was a Ravel violin solo where, for some reason, Ravel chose to mimic gypsy violin tunes without actually incorporating any. Don’t ask me why; maybe he was just another Gallic racist who ripped off others without a tenth of the original’s flair.
An item like this is always going to be a problem to this family. In Hungary, so many gypsies can play that Csardas thing before they can walk that they’d have to stand on their heads and juggle chainsaws at the same time before punters would pay to listen.
So, admitted, bar a little high here and I don’t care if today’s soloist did study at the Royal Northern. In Budapest, if I threw a stick, any gypsy kid I hit would have made him look just what he was; a musician who hadn’t practiced the solo and didn’t think the audience would notice.
It was the one time in the gig I got genuinely annoyed (rather than highly amused) at the breath-taking arrogance of some local musos, and I wasn’t the only one. A Polish couple in front we’d got talking to turned and raised ironic eyebrows: an orthodox Jewish guy in the row behind actually had his head almost in his lap and his hands over his ears.
Then it was the interval, and yet again my daughter and I experienced the inadequate Villa catering facilities for all except alcoholics as we queued for ice cream, only for yet another bunch of well heeled geriatric gobshites to push in after we’d been there 15 minutes.
So, another important lesson for a small Manx kid. Doesn’t matter how old or how rich they are, the Manx ‘great and good’ have far worse manners than any sink estate five year old, though if other locals weren’t willing to be used like so much human bog-roll they’d have sorted it out years ago instead of voting such pondlife into office.
There was a part two to the concert, though we slept through most of that too. A Saint-Saens symphony which finally provided a chance to utilise the Villa’s most expensive white elephant, a church organ.
You’ve probably never heard it (the symphony,though no-one’s ever heard the organ either as it has a far from adequate amplification system), but it might be described as an entire orchestra fannying about like a French waiter for 15 minutes before the organist butts in with the theme tune from Babe.
After it all stopped, they handed out flowers to every muso and clodhopper in sight and the audience ran for it before the cheeky sods could sit down and start an encore. Apparently there was a guest of honour from the French consulate, so I hope this doesn’t cause a diplomatic incident.
Luckily, Manx ice cream is also great, so with luck there won’t be tears before bedtime. And after today she won’t be half as stressed about her violin progress either.

Not dead, just indolent

2010-11-21T11:50:00.000Z

In case anyone was seriously worried, no, I’m not dead, and no, I haven’t given up blogging.
Just been a busy month with other things, and others had more need of my time or this computer.
Still, I should at least give a plug to the inaugural meeting of a Manx dying with dignity group. Following a well attended talk by a Death with Dignity speaker a couple of months back(hosted by the Political Action Group) around 20 folk showed enough interest to take things further.
Things get started at the small meeting room of the Archibald Knox, Onchan, on Thursday 2nd December at 2.30. That’s the flashy pub behind Onchan Shoprite if you don’t know the area, and so, yes, there’s adequate parking space next door to the venue. Quintin Gill, who was one of two MHKs behind the Tynwald committee which reported on similar matters a few years back, has agreed to speak on where things are at present.
As the organisers readily admit, not the best time for all who might like to get involved, but it’s a start. Look out for press reports, and if they’re not as full as they should be, I’ll do my best to fill in some gaps here.

Manx Christian tolerance... and flying pigs

2010-10-30T11:01:00.000+01:00

Apparently: “The contribution Tynwald continues to make in its work to advance the cause of inclusivity in the Isle of Man has been recognised by the Island’s churches.”
We know this because Radio Cowshed said so today (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=48290 , though if you’d rather read what they were told to say and by which press officer from which church organisation you could have read it yesterday at http://www.manx.net/news/615/island-s-churches-acknowledge-tynwald-s-commitment-to-an-inclusive-society ).
I was intrigued to know that: “ In making the presentation, Canon Alger, who was joined by representatives from other churches in the Island and who is soon to retire from his ministry at The Church of St Mary of the Isle, said the Covenant for Mission, in the spirit of Freedom to Flourish, reflected a desire of the Island’s churches to move forward, recognise differences and work collaboratively in mission. He added that the churches’ recognition of diversity was mirrored by that of Tynwald which similarly acknowledged the importance of shared awareness and mutual respect.”
Oh yes, and pigs just flew over the Tynwald building in a perfect V formation.
The thing is, even the reason both Brendan Alger and Robert Paterson have to appear in the presentation picture might be food for thought. One reason is that Mr Paterson is an unelected politician with our upper house of legislative layabouts, and was effectively chosen by his own management and Downing Street, not the Manx public or even church. Mr Alger may be nominally head of Churches Together In Mann at present, but the executive of that body is just four men (and it always is men) from the four largest church denominations, who can overrule any decision made by the working committees who advise them, and who in turn have continually voted to exclude certain denominations from membership.
The most embarrassing example of this was when local Quakers ran the only Manx charity to gain off-island recognition (rather than discreet investigations from Interpol) and in order to trade in on it, a Quaker had to be granted special observer status to a CTIM sub-committee set up in order that CTIM could present 'evidence' to Tynwald, which in turn claimed the charity as an example of local Christian endeavour when reporting back to some international bunfight (sorry, 'conference') which a couple of elected layabouts were using as an excuse for a foreign holiday at public expense.
And the other funny thing there is that for years there’s been a tradition where the Catholic and the ‘free churches’ representatives at either committee or executive level ring the chairman ahead of such meetings. If the other party is going to be present, they don’t turn up.
In fact, in previous years, some ‘free church’ representatives have been so sectarian they wouldn’t even attend the Tynwald ceremony if there was a guest from a Catholic country. And in general, the evangelicals prefer to do their government negotiations separately and in private (often via Noel Cringle as it happens), rather than risk the Bishop at the time relaying a CTIM message to government which reflects the broad church view, not evangelical economic interests.
And even leaving aside the continual in-fighting, sectarian hatred and editing out of all but the most powerful religious cult interests, it’s who and what the churches are deciding to collaborate against that should really worry us.
Because, in general, they are collaborating against the rest of us, against decency and honesty, against progress. In fact against anything that brings to an end their centuries of privilege, and their ability to hold us all back with their hate, their ignorance, and in particular their fear of democracy.

What a waste

2010-10-28T20:48:00.000+01:00

I had to laugh today at a Radio Cowshed headline which read: "MHK welcomes rubbish initiative".
Can anyone remember when one of the Wedding Cake's inmates welcomed anything that wasn't rubbish, and/or expensive, and/or involving free foreign holidays or brown envelopes full of used fivers?
Still, ever optimistic and expecting a rare piece of honest reporting, I went to http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=48258 for a closer look.
Sadly, it was just a political layabout trying to make something out of the astoundingly dull if sensible news that two villages will use the same dustcart.
The only remotely newsworthy aspect of all this is that an elected official from our Deep South actually had enough braincells to suggest it, and that others could be dragged away from the church or lodge meeting long enough to vote.
Still, if any MHK was that serious about waste, they could always jump on the cart, instead of the bandwagon.