Freak alert

As if older people on the Isle of Man don’t have enough to worry about (what with the second worst pensions in Europe and the closure of most useful government-run care facilities) now Manx wrinklies have Esther Rantzen leeching off them. At least, that’s the public warning I read today behind http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=47484.

I doubt there is any serious comment on Manx social life to be made by a professional prodnose and child-frightener who, almost single-handedly, could be held responsible for the explosion in British child-abuse, the decline of professional childcare and the seemingly unstoppable growth of the cod-psychological quackery industry that passes itself off as ‘child protection’. Faced with the growth of such emotional fascism and village-idiot level hysteria any halfway decent and responsible parent may sensibly decide to get a pump-action shotgun and be prepared to use it any time one of these freaks raises its empty head anywhere near the fruit of your loins.

I think that is becoming rather clear to many of us. Which may be why the goofy-toothed ‘mare is now being let loose on another vulnerable age-group, one which market research has indicated can be made into ‘victims’ ripe for exploitation by the lowest form of social menace known to humanity, the third sector ‘care professional’.

Anyway, what is this 21^st century Matthew Hopkins (or at least whoever is feeding her local lines) on about?

 The worst social isolation for older Manx people I am aware of involves bright individuals getting on  a bit who find primitive superstition tiresome, and who are not only bored senseless by nonsensical small town chitchat, the maintenance of Edwardian social hierarchies and other such nonsense but have actually admitted it. The problem here, I humbly submit, is caused by a combination of a lazy, incompetent public sector and the churches too many of them go to (and which don’t even realise they are dead yet). Such numpties are therefore the last people on earth anyone should throw money at in order to ‘solve’ problems which they alone create, cause or perpetuate.

But as the likes of Rantzen say so often: “(Insert uncritical endorsement of your venal and exploitative pitch for public funds here). That will be a thousand pounds plus expenses please.” 

Nursery crimes

For the last week or so (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/mums_present_petition_against_nursery_closures_1_4269434 and http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=43682 for example) the pseudo-local press has been full of ‘stories’ about Manx government cutbacks in pre-school services.
Being a cynic, I am not surprised that all this ‘people’s press’ guff kicks off just at the point when the Manx government cut all the public notices which used to subsidise Johnston Press’s advertising rates to the offshore finance sector, which in turn was the only reason they set up shop here in the first place. And as I once worked for the last newspapers not owned by Johnston Press before they finally put us out of business, they could, in turn, fairly comment that I would say that, wouldn’t I?
But another thing; let us admit at once that ‘pre-school education facilities’ are not education facilities. They are government child-minding facilities, offered on the discreet understanding that as long as both parents need to work full time in order to pay taxes and buy private housing they cannot spend the day at home with small kids. No child actually gets educated at them.
And let us admit another thing. In practice they are not even that.
For one thing because of the unofficial racist screening of parents which ensures that such facilities are always ‘full’ whenever an obviously not local mum enquires about them, yet remarkably can always squeeze another one in when a relative or churchmate of the school secretary asks the next day.
For another, because there is a longer running class prejudice against people from council estates who have been failed by the Manx education system for generations.
The small town (and to be frank pig-ignorant) elite who perpetuate such bigotry ensured that a previous generation left school unemployable just as local work outside the finance sector was drying up. For a decade or more now, they have been branding the generation that followed as ‘unfit parents’ and building up a nice little racket in ‘social care’ and ‘parenting skills’. It always cracks me up that upper middle class halfwits get to run local childrens charities and organise highly pointless seminars and conferences to address the supposed problems of this ‘lost generation’. Meanwhile their own kids, deprived of any parental attention, are the key customers of the local drug dealers.
The end result of this is the farce we see played out every day outside my daughter’s primary school, and probably every other one on the island. My wife waves goodbye at the school gate, tries to avoid every other working mum speeding off to work, and waves to two women who run small private nurseries as they drop off some older kids before heading back to the nursery to take over from a part-time assistant who is minding the tinies. Meanwhile a clump of professional welfare mums drop their kids at the ‘pre-school’ class at the infant school, light up another fag and go home to watch Jeremy Kyle.
Not that I am blaming the welfare mums. Because this is what a lot of government policy and money has reduced them to. Educated out of the work force, now even judged unfit to be parents because of the very process which, first, saw them targetted for compulsory parenting classes run by semi-retired churchwives, and which in turn saw secretive files being drawn up on their unfitness to parent which, paradoxically, put their kids to the head of the list for pre-school education (because, being illiterate and innumerate, the testing revealed they would be unable to help their kids begin reading or counting).
Against all this, do I really care a jot if goods which were never as described or fit for purpose are no longer on offer?
Well, No, and Yes.
No because the future non-existence of something which was never there for me or any other working parent not born here is not a genuine problem. The day I arrived here I saw this place was, though of great natural beauty and with some residents of incredible charm and warmth, also a racist toilet with no social superstructure, so I never relied on anyone outside my family and close friends for anything and never will.
Yes, because of that odd little admission at the end of the first report, that: “Education and Children Minister Peter Karran MHK has previously said the government hopes to lease out the 11 sites for private and voluntary agencies to run.”
Who might those ‘private and voluntary agencies’ be?
Knowing that both Health and Social Care are now overseen by superstitious pro-life throwbacks with a track record for handing government contracts to their equally disreputable and bigoted friends, and knowing how many full time religious bigots are sniffing around for extra income to compensate for the total lack of public interest in their Sunday shenanigans, and knowing how ordinary members of evangelical churches who work in the public sector have been offered career advancement in return for spotting business opportunities for those churches…..
Well, frankly, knowing all that it is not hard to guess. What any decent parent or caring, reasonably educated Manx citizen really needs to work out is what to do to prevent the island becoming a place run by, and only fit for, parasitic village idiots.
Probably exactly the same as we did yesterday, but with even more determination and wit.

Freaks and zombie-lovers go back to school

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?

Child Safety 1, Bigotry -1

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.

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

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.

Damp squib

More evidence yesterday that the evangelical lunatic fringe is in recession.
I’ve blogged once or twice on the desperate efforts of the Scripture Union to recruit smaller and smaller kids, and how despite Education Department support they’re failing. ‘Take the Smarties and Run’ – must be the most popular game in some junior school playgrounds these days.
Now see http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=11214 , and a near relative at http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=28288&area and discover that even the most barefaced bible-blaggers this island can churn out are losing. Also, nice to see them admit what we’ve always known, that the numbers attending their annual hyped-to-hell-and-back ‘yoof fest’ are minimal.
Once the usual visitors (three or four extended families from a part of England best known to medical experts for extensive inbreeding) are detached we’re left with….....what exactly? Half a dozen preachers trying to outshout each other, any kids too young to stay home in case someone from the DHSS peeks through the window, recognises them as the same kids they’ve already counted as some other godbotherer’s and cuts the whole congregation’s benefits…....and that would be about it.
Think about this – if expecting up to 100 is their biggest year yet, what must the real figures have been in previous years? Also bear in mind, after unfortunate incidents in early years which only went unreported due to favours being called in, the organisers don’t let local media on site to look around or take photos. Thus all reports and pictures are from the organisers themselves.
For off-island readers, Firestarter is run by some dubious characters from the island’s most notorious evangelical cult, with much of the cost underwritten by even more dodgy folk. This year they’re back in their old venue – a campsite set up with grants from government and churches which was meant to cater for a fictitious Christian tourist trade.
Last year the whole freak show moved to St. Johns, heartland of the local BNP and godbothering rednecks. Not sure why – could have been part of a concerted effort by the island’s most notorious faith-biased parasites to establish the site of the Tynwald Ceremony as ‘Christian’, though more likely because there was a government grant going begging or the usual campsite actually expected them to pay all the gas and electricity bills they ran up.
Might have been because the white-flighters who hang out at the golf club bar next door complained when howling godbotherers drowned out their vacuous drunken rants. Might have just been because Ramsey’s RNLI volunteers point blank refused to pull any more dozy Christians out of the water, where they had a tendency to go paddling late at night (while blissed out after marathon prayer-fests) then get right out of their depth.
Anyway, they’re back up here. Sadly I have a previous appointment in a sunnier clime, so when the inevitable happens and the golfers and godbotherers bump into each other again I won’t be there to see which sad act comes out on top.
Oh, and you might want to take a note of the sponsors too. There’s really no excuse for this nonsense, so no respectable business would go near it.

Subsidising the abusers

Yet more evidence of the insidious merging of public services into faith-based centres of excrement today. See http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/allwelcomeatfami.xml - on the surface just another clumsy attempt to keep the music service going at the Department of Education and Institutional Child Abuse. But note the junior choir venue at the end of the press release.
I don’t get it.
On the one hand the absolute dregs of the local zombie-worshipping community whine because the Manx government won’t let them turn every school into a makeshift church (so that the parasites running the cults can pocket all the collection without having to maintain a church building). On the other, the DEC yet again pays to use church buildings which would otherwise be empty, and thus keeps them going with yet more quiet public subsidies.
We shouldn’t just object to yet more public money being given here to a homophobic organisation. We should object to something advertised as a public sector service being offered from a premises dedicated to perpetuating a misanthropic view of humanity.
We should also object to Manx education department premises being hired out to parasitical hate groups posing as religious organisations, while the same premises (thanks to the private prejudices of education department staff) are not available to groups who fight for human rights or to otherwise benefit humanity.
This isn’t public service. This is public subsidy of sexist, homophobic, neo-colonial, anti-democratic (and eventually anti-human) thinking.

Horrible history

The sheer cretinism of Isle of Man Department of Education staff beggars belief sometimes. In particular, their willingness to hand vulnerable kids over to fundamentalist pondlife really is a national disgrace.
Take last week, when according to the Isle of Man Courier, nine and ten year olds from local schools attended Lifepaths, a week of evangelical brainwashing at Rushen Abbey co-organised ( in theory) by the Education Department, Manx Heritage and…Scripture Union Ministries Trust.
Supposedly, the Education Department used Manx Heritage to give the kids a historical experience. Fair enough, even though Manx Heritage’s idea of history is (at best) fact-lite plastic patriotism and (more often) little more than tourist-orientated shite.
So why were SUMT there?
Well, again according to the Courier, to give “perspective on being a younger Christian in the 21st century”. In short, to brainwash kids too small and scared to fight back.
This (see http://www.connect2charity.im/charities/charity_92271.html) is the official line on SUMT. And if you check under ‘events’ you’ll be interested to find that:

“Lifepath is an education day for Year 5 pupils, they will have the opportunity to come and explore the concept of faith, prayer and the lifestyle of a Christ follower, through the life of a Cistercian Monk from the 11th Century.
300 children are coming to join SUMT across the week. With a team of 60 volunteers throughout the week each day will be packed with energy, craft activities, songs, drama, laughter, wigs and a whole lot more!”

So, pure Christofascist brainwashing and nothing to do with objective education then. And so again you have to ask, why were the Education Department letting a dangerous bunch of fundie flat-earthers with form for child-molesting loose with hundreds of local kids?
Because, make no mistake, SUMT are not just harmless sad-acts with an imaginary invisible friend.
Amongst last week's volunteers, to my certain knowledge, were people who in 1998 helped ‘persuade’ the victims of a notorious faith-biased kiddy-fiddler not to give evidence in court. Thankfully, though most caved in to the threats and so the full extent of this perv's actions were never revealed in court, one family stood their ground and he was convicted. His friends (including a protege of James Anderton) 'stood by him' as he went to jail. The brave family who stood up to the evangelical scum left the island soon after to avoid retaliations.
Also amongst last week's SUMT staff was a character who has, several times, been reported to the Dept of Education for harassing under age girls with text messages while, in theory, ‘mentoring’ teenagers at a local school.
Needless to say (at a time when the Education Minister was himself of notoriously fundamentalist views) the Department of Education took no action. Even worse, two Education Ministers later and this sad, middle aged loser is still ‘mentoring’ (i.e. pestering teenage girls whose personal contact details he obtains with the help of schoolteachers who share his sad delusions about imaginary friends).
At least SUMT’s tactics aren’t working at my daughter’s primary school, where she tells me their sad efforts to run a lunchtime Bible club are being outwitted.
In an effort to draw at least a few kids in, SUMT volunteers are reduced to offering handfuls of sweets to anyone who’ll enter the room. So, in response the kids have created a new game called ‘Take the Smarties and run’.

Childcare handbook, fit only for morons and spookchasers

More depressing news of the Manx Kinderstasi posted last night at http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=10284 and http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=10283 .
Note in particular that:
"The Parenting Network is an interagency group made up from representatives from the Department of Education, Social Services, CAHMS, Alcohol Advisory Service, Health Service, The Children’s Centre, Mother’s Union and Care for the Family."
That’s probably all we need to know to be worried.
Fundamentalist nutjobs, Anglican busybodies who haven’t been near a child since the Blitz, Social Services where nobody except a couple of £100K parasites actually work directly for the government, a Department of Education which hasn’t been politically overseen by a graduate in a decade, ‘charities’ which create moral panics and pass off small town chunterings as ‘research’ to justify more public subsidy…….what more do you need to know this mob aren’t fit for purpose?
Along with a Childrens Bill which introduces high-handed police and legal tactics not seen since the Diplock Courts (Northern Irish court procedures during the Troubles - so extreme even apartheid-era South Africans looked on with envy - involving prosecutions without juries made on the basis of allegations by individuals who could not be identified or cross-examined) all decent Manx parents and their children are under attack from the State.
We are being told how to bring up our kids by dangerously deluded, superstitious numpties who no sane parent would even allow into the same room as a child. They keep tabs on our kids from birth, tittle-tattle amongst themselves in private, keeping their cretinous allegations in records we have no right to see but which can be used to put our kids in care, where they would have even less rights than they did before the State’s previous screw-ups led to a double murder in a secure unit run by faith-biased incompetents…..
Just how much more will it take before Manx parents tell these plonkers, very, very forcefully, just where to get off?

Sign up, sign up against Jeebus Freakery

Some excellent petitions on the web asking for international signatories.
Each, in their way, a chance to protest the privileges afforded by the State to religious figures and organisations who have done some downright disgusting stuff, often to innocent kids.

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/bring-the-clergy-to-justice.html is an Irish petition which asks:

"Please sign this petition if you think that clerical child abusers and all who covered up for them should be brought to justice for the horrific crimes that these criminals have perpetrated.
Since the publication of the Ryan and Murphy reports, the government has done as little as possible under pressure from the victims and the public as they wait for this issue to blow over. The government, the religious and the media are talking about compensation but few are talking about bringing prosecutions. If as many people as possible sign this petition it will be evidence of the anger of the Irish and international public and our insistence that these criminals be brought to justice."

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=186233218119 is another Irish petition, this time to have the Papal Nuncio expelled from Ireland.

It states:

"The Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse in the Dublin ArchDiocese clearly states that the Papal Nuncio, the Diplomatic representative of the Vatican, refused to reply to investigators.
This is not acceptable. The Irish Government has the power to expel diplomats.
If we are to take the report's findings seriously, we must expel the Papal Nuncio."

And finally, good old Peter Tatchell has succeeded in getting a petition on the Number 10 website protesting the visit of Benny the Boy Nazi to the UK. You can find it at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ProtestthePope/

The petition reads:

'We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to disassociate
the British government from the Pope's intolerant views ahead
of the Papal visit to Britain in September 2010. We urge the
Prime Minister to make it clear that his government disagrees
with the Pope's opposition to women's reproductive rights, gay
equality, embryonic stem cell research and the use of condoms
to prevent the spread of HIV. We ask the Prime Minister to
express his disagreement with the Pope’s role in the cover-up
of child sex abuse by Catholic clergy, his rehabilitation of
the Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson, and his decree
paving the way for the beatification and sainthood of the
war-time Pope, Pius XII, who stands accused of failing to speak
out against the Holocaust. We also request the Prime Minister
to assure us that the Pope’s visit will not be financed by the
British taxpayer.'

Indulge in a bit of proper democracy. Be an active citizen. Wind up a faith nazi........

Look, just sign up and help put these nonces in their place!

Bibles wreck your teeth

The young ‘un’s just come home from school with a funny story that’s made our day.
Most of the lunchtime clubs have a steady flow of kids, based on no more than teachers outlining the choices and times in the first week. Gladdens your heart – so much for today’s kids being lazy or lacking interest in learning stuff that won’t fit into the regular curriculum.
But one is failing so miserably that it has to bribe the kids with sweets. That one being the Bible Club. So, not just mind rot, tooth rot too.
Sad bunch of deluded kiddy-fiddlers. High time some teacher showed them the door for public health reasons.

We're still exporting ignorance to Uganda

I blog about Manx evangelicals helping theofascist nutjobs screw up African lives until I’m sick of the subject.
Sadly I see from http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=9050 they’re still doing it.
Most recently I posted on Southern Poverty Law Center’s work exposing the role US Christian charities are playing in a witch-hunting of Ugandan gays which has to be compared to the build-up of German anti-semitism in the 1930’s. See http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/06/17/anti-gay-conspiracy-theories-debunked-by-christian-professor/ for more, and be sure to follow up the links to Boxturtlebulletin.com.
As there’s now a major fundraising effort to bring a crocodile tears, fact free expo about Anne Frank to the island’s major centre of religious wrongheadedness I have to assume ‘irony’ isn’t a word Manx Christians understand any better than ‘humanity’ or ‘decency’.
I can only repeat, yet again, what I said the last time I posted on Ugandan human rights abuse funded by Western Christians, who prey on ignorance via the charity system to screw up young lives….
“That people on the Isle of Man still give money to evangelical ‘charities’ who stir up such hatred disgusts me. The sheer stupidity and cluelessness of Manx Christian charities always amuses friends and relatives in countries where they consolidate the island’s reputation as a third world backwater and major exporter of village idiocy. Our role in Uganda, though, is in a whole other league, and far more deadly.”
Still, at least there’s one advantage to catching this twaddle as ‘community news’ on Manxnet before it hits the local media. When it appears in the 'proper press' under another byline, we’ll know exactly which ‘Freedom To Fester’ goon planted it, and which journalists are too lazy to rewrite it.

Child abusers or lunchtime losers?

My daughter moves up to junior school in September, and last night was that school’s open night for new parents.
All seemed fine until we noticed ‘Bible Club’ listed amongst the lunchtime clubs. Most of the others are harmless enough pursuits (penny whistle, choir, folk dancing…) run by interested teachers, so there may just be a biblebasher on the staff helping the spawn of other addicts to regress even faster. Or it could be something more worrying.
A couple of weeks back, on the page in our local free paper where an idle sub pastes uncut copy from dodgy ‘charities’ passed off as ‘community news’, the Southern Rednecks (Port St. Mary’s ‘Living Hope Church’) had their latest plan for world domination. In addition to stealing from the dispossessed in other countries and raising new Manx cathedrals to pig-ignorance, this includes more schools workers for the Scripture Union.
On the one hand, it astonishes me that an island this small can fund so much cretinism, and that local government is so incompetent it isn’t weeded out at the planning or grant application stage. On the other, teenage Manx Baptists lack the numeracy to spot the sell-by date on Tesco tins and are too illiterate to fill out a benefit form, so I suppose their not-so-wise elders need to find something resembling employment for them.
In the past the SU was just wasted wet lunchtimes in secondary schools, where the kids are generally big enough to ignore them unless (as in the recent Castle Rushen case) they get pestered at home on private mobile numbers by a middle aged man too fat and ugly to seek extra-maritals from adult women. If these sad and sorry losers are now allowed to inflict their social inadequacy on eight year olds that is another matter entirely.
If the Education Department was responsible about this they would just add some new characters to the kind of comic strips which help small kids avoid other health risks. Then again, most of the worst health risks to Manx children already work there.

New arse, same old excrement

I’ve followed news about about the new Archbishop of Westminster with increasing hilarity.
I laugh because it proves that all rationalists need do now is sit back and watch Anglo-Catholicism chew itself to bits.
Forget recent attempts at positive spin by the church’s PR wing and look at the real signs.
The Daily Telegraph has long been Anglo-Catholicism’s real mouthpiece, and by that I mean not just those ‘officially’ within the church but fellow travellers secretly wanting to abandon Anglicanism but unable find a new paymaster for reactionary twaddle.
As I’ve mentioned before, the paper’s ‘official’ religious correspondent reported back on the views of insiders at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/5067037/Bishop-of-Leeds-favourite-to-become-next-Archbishop-of-Westminster.htm. He went into more detail at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/4991585/Leading-candidate-to-be-next-Catholic-Archbishop-criticised-by-fellow-bishops.html, from which we learn that, not only do many other bishops despise the new guy, but the Vatican’ s own London ‘ambassador’ briefed Benny the Boy Nazi against this ‘career churchman’.
So unsuprising that when the new Westminster Weasel had to be announced to Telegruff readers the PR team bypassed their usual cheerleader and went for someone blander with http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/damian_thompson/blog/2009/04/04/ten_things_you_should_know_about_archbishop_vincent_nichols_englands_new_catholic_leader.
By the way, do we really care about any of those ‘ten things’ and isn’t the only relevant question something much simpler?
Murphy O’Connor's record on clerical child abuse was abysmal. So will his successor, when faced with evidence of priestly improprieties involving kids, co-operate with police enquiries? Or will he simply follow diktats put in place by Benny when he was just the ‘Defender of the Faith’, i.e. use the Vatican’s ‘diplomatic immunity’ and send the papers direct to Rome to be hidden away in a big safe long enough for victims not to be able to press charges?
Think we know the answer to that!
Then again, no-one in their right mind these days leaves vulnerable people in the same room as clergy, so why not just laugh from the sidelines as they screw each other’s lives up.

Watch out, professionals about

I was sorry to read on the Manx Government website that ‘Multi Agency Teams are being established throughout the Island as part of an approach to help improve the lives of children and young people’ and that ‘Representatives from social services, health, education, the police and voluntary sector are joining forces in order to achieve a number of common goals’. Don’t bother with tidied up press reports, read the original government propaganda at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/dha/ceo/multiagencyteams.xml.
Translated into plain English, that means that, in future, when someone acting on behalf of the Manx Government screws up a child’s life no individual or agency will be to blame.
That isn’t so different from past practice, when you think about it.
It just means that now the original balls-up will be even harder to trace back, because nobody ever took a decision or acted. Things just somehow….emerged from…..well, not even from a single meeting, which wouldn’t have been minuted anyway, and even if it had you couldn’t read the minutes because you’re just a lowly member of the public and not a ‘professional’ so you wouldn’t understand.
You’re just there to pay their wages. Who do you think you are asking questions, an aromatherapist?
But Manx people are used to public sector professionals who are not to blame when kids get hurt.
No-one was to blame when schoolkids were locked up in Victoria Road jail in the 1980's and 1990's.
No-one was to blame a decade ago when godbothering professionals ‘advised’ the families of victims of their kiddyfiddler mate not to go to court and give evidence. No-one was to blame when those who did were ‘advised’ to leave the island afterwards.
No-one was to blame when two kids were murdered in a government-run care home.
No-one was to blame when a ‘multi agency’ meeting including government departments such as Home Affairs and Social Services and various voluntary agencies decided to reduce a three page questionnaire from Shelter (meant to be used in all instances where such agents encountered the homeless in order to build up a Manx government database on homelessness) to a 10 question tick form.
Purely coincidentally of course, the form was weighted towards picking up off-island or ethnic minority homeless, and totally ignored all the factors usually associated with housing problems (racism, sexism, homophobia, slum landlords, unhelpful employers, government facilities not available at crisis times, thick and disinterested civil servants….). I was at that meeting, and say with absolute certainty that I have never, before or since, been in a room so full of vacuous racist knuckledraggers all posing as ‘social workers’, or been so astonished that apparently nobody (except me) was there from an interest in tackling homelessness yet all were claiming overtime from the public purse.
I've since learnt not to be astonished at this. After all, just a few weeks later I was at an even bigger event attended by even more public and 'third sector' parasites not interested in learning facts about or discussing policy on drug and alcohol consumption either.
In short, try to keep your kids safe from the professionals. You have more chance of being cured of AIDS by a pentecostal lunatic than getting justice if (or more likely when)they make another tragic ‘mistake’.

Not praying, just preying...and desperate

Can I give fair warning that a prominent voodoo merchant plans ritual child abuse in public on Peel Beach on April 12th, in front of an audience who are unlikely to escape with their wallets.
Don’t believe me? Go to http://www.iomtoday.co.im/west-news/News-from-the-west.4865538.jp and see for yourselves.
See what I mean? Who but a state-sanctioned spookchaser could half-drown an innocent baby in public, and even get the police diverting traffic instead of arresting him? If David Blaine tried this he’d get jailed or sectioned – possibly both.
But if you think about it, this is godbotherers admitting defeat.
Look at the date – Easter Sunday. One of the two most important dates in the Christian calendar, and barring weddings or funerals the only two when the wider public step into a church to keep elderly relatives sweet. So, instead of a setpiece sermon in the cathedral, with guaranteed radio coverage, the most overpaid, overprivileged cleric on this island is …..standing with his trouser legs rolled up in six inches of seawater, sprinkling tapwater on a rugrat.
It’s over. They can’t baffle us with bullshit, can’t convince anyone outside their tiny, ageing flock they have any moral authority… they’re all washed up. Nothing left but cheap showbiz tricks.
You could see that too last weekend, when our own Southern rednecks, Living Hope Community Church, put on an anniversary show in front of paying punters down at the Villa Marina.
Not just Rev Jonathan ‘I had breakfast with George Bush’ Stansfield at his most mouthfoamingly manic, not just ‘local celebrity guests’, not just live adult baptisms, but a rock band ……. FROM LEEDS!
It was supposed to be a massive attempt to drag in new punters, but even with the local business equivalent of the KKK pooling their funds for advertising (which in turn guaranteed several Manx Radio plugs and a spacefiller in the Courier) it was a disaster.
I know that for a fact, because an office colleague had to attend to placate some mad relative. Even though the colleague is a regular churchgoer, she described the entire proceedings as a freakshow where even the freaks weren't getting off on the parlour tricks.
For example, the rock band weren’t a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band, and didn’t play Sweet Home Alabama, nobody drowned in the bathtub, hardly anybody spoke in tongues or thrashed around on the floor… in fact the faithful were so underwhelmed they went home without lynching anybody.
Actually, Stansfield might as well have wrapped up his sermon in the immortal words of the knackered ‘droid in Blade Runner.
‘Wake up. Time to die!’

Freaks Out Now!

There's a petition at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/infiltration/ I'd encourage anyone sick of evangelical wierdos being allowed to roam around UK schools to sign.
It was put there by a Torbay parent, Alan Urdaibay, after an outfit called the Linx Trust was given unrestricted rights to pester kids at his daughter's secondary school.
In a letter to the school, he said:
"We write with great concern regarding the presence of Nigel Taylor and Linx in the school. Nigel Taylor is not a member of staff. In our view Taylor and other members of his group are undesirables and we want them to have no contact with our daughter. None of them is to address our daughter or communicate personally with her in any way. She is not to be approached at mealtimes, in the corridors, or any other location within or without the school.
Additionally, our daughter will not participate in any aspect of the school mentoring system until such time as its integrity is not compromised by the participation of any Linx member in any way. It is our view that any mentoring system within the school should be entirely secular and the government's 2007 Children's Plan indicates it should be carried out by a member of staff. Religious groups with an agenda of their own, especially those with unacceptable attitudes towards aspects of sexuality, have no place in mentoring in a non-faith school.
Linx describes itself as being associated with the Baptists, a fringe religious group whose representation in the UK is about the same as the Scientologists. Admitting no central authority, and not technically a denomination, they are a fractious grouping holding widely differing beliefs. Linx has no published doctrine or teaching and confines published material to banalities with the occasional attack on witchcraft. What is apparent is that Linx is a fundamentalist group responsible to no-one and which, despite its claims, does not reflect mainstream Christianity. Taylor has effectively created his own religion: a fringe of a fringe, so to speak. It is the case that Torbay school is not a faith school and that nothing about its prospectus or web site suggests that it is anything other than a normal school. It should not give privileged access to any religious group, either mainstream or, in the case of Linx, an extreme minority with no identifiable teachings.
Linx has the admitted purpose of inveigling its way into Torbay schools by offering free services not directly related to religion in order to gain access to other people's children. We consider this Machiavellian 'over the heads of the parents' approach to be unethical and it should be blocked by all schools. Parents' satisfaction with the school in general should not be used as a mechanism for lulling them into accepting input preferentially from any religious group, not least a fundamentalist one. Even the establishment of such a thing as a bible study group needs to be viewed with caution. A long-established bible club held at my daughter's school has been taken over by Linx and is tolerated by the school only because it is nominally independently run by the girls. It is certainly a deceitful attempt to go over the heads of parents. While my daughter was at [this school] I asked to speak to Mr Taylor about his religious views, but was refused.
It is our view that a school should be a place of safety away from sexual predators and no less away from religious predators. The objective of any participation by a Linx member in any class or school activity, is, directly or indirectly, to serve their proselytising agenda. They are certainly being funded with this in mind.
By giving Taylor a privileged platform within the context of assemblies, the classroom, and, shockingly, even in the refectory, he hopes to achieve a moral authority from which he can groom the vulnerable to participate in his religious beliefs and practices. These ways of gaining access to children are deceitful and should be stopped."
That struck a chord with me. Baptists are being allowed to hold services each Sunday at my daughter's infant school, Auldyn, not counting the number of times she's come home saying evangelical con-artists were there begging under the pretence of helping Eastern Europeans or something equally ridiculous. Having been visiting East Europe since she was 18 months old my nipper's more likely to wet herself laughing at such pillocks than fall for their twaddle, but Manx schools put no effort into checking such chancers out.
Almost as soon as I mentioned the petition above, I had a reply from someone who knew of a 15 year old getting pestered by our very own Southern Baptist throwbacks last year. Apparently a Port St. Mary based youth pastor is allowed into Castle Rushen to 'mentor' kids. When one refused to play music at his sad little youthie he started texting her out of school hours (where'd he get the number is another interesting question!). No action has been taken, and Isle of Man College is another place where such evangelical trolling is going on.
Also, interestingly, while our Sexual Offences Act has measures to stop 'grooming' of kids under 18 by adults from numerous community groups, church organisations are quite specifically excluded. This though the worst cases in recent years of underage Manx kids being preyed on sexually by an adult involved pastors and youth workers at other evangelical church youth clubs.
My informant on the Castle Rushen case suggests it might be time concerned folk got up a petition to get these freaks out of our schools. As someone with a lower opinion of evangelicals than drug dealers (seriously - I've lived in inner cities and known drug dealers with way higher moral standards than the average biblebasher) I agree.