Toilet training

This story (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/campaigners-urge-us-to-twin-our-toilets-1-6912826 ) breaks my heart.

I have known the One World Centre, its staff and committee since its inception (which I was actually involved in) and they are well meaning, honest and open people. When the OWC held a tenth anniversary concert celebrating the island's hidden cultural diversity a couple of weeks back I went out of my way to get family and friends to go. At that concert the toilet-twinning idea was launched, and we left seriously intending to sign up and join in.

Then we found out who the money actually goes to, so we cannot. For the record, Cord is the trading name of Christian Outreach (England & Wales registered charity number 1070684), so actually both partnership charities here are faith -based.

Tearfund demands that both volunteers and paid workers sign a mission statement binding them to a somewhat fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity as a condition of employment. A highly respected gay Christian who runs one of the UK's most prestigious faith-based campaign groups sent me a copy some years ago. He and other liberal Christians say that, in practice, the statement weeds out dissenters as it would not be possible for any honest person practising the ideals of the UN Convention on Human Rights to sign.

Cord, while on paper run by Christians who think their faith requires them to first help the dispossessed (rather than judge or convert them) is linked by a common trustee to SaltMalawi Trust (E&W charity number 1139160) which.......well, frankly, is not. If you are at all concerned at the way Western evangelicals have stoked up folk myths about witchcraft and homosexuality in order to profit from the homegrown African money church movement you might want to give that direct debit a miss.

Returning to the OWC itself - I even briefly joined the committee at one point, in a bid to meet predominantly faith-based people halfway in efforts to move past the awful “I'm all right Jack” little islander mentality which prevails here. Too many crises of conscience caused me to resign within a month or two, and at the time I felt like a minority of one within another minority which was not much larger.

I know that, in practice, the decent Christians within the OWC fight an uphill battle against the apathy and racism of many local worshippers. From conversations with others in recent months alone I also now know the real irony: this is that is there is actually a much larger group who think like me outside the tiny OWC circle of church influence.

We share the human, rather than faith-based, aspects of the OWC vision. We think it would be counter-productive to start another version (especially when the basic idea and links with government are in place) but there is no way any of us, in good conscience, can support initiatives which do not differentiate between, say, the principled stance of Christian Aid (who sign up to UNHRC standards of employment and aid distribution) and Samaritan's Purse/Operation Christmas Child (who can fly someone in Franklin Graham's Lear jet to a disaster for a photo, then back again as soon as the world press leave, and have been known to demand Catholic or Muslim refugees convert before handing over facilities SP were actually distributing as part of a US AID program).

What is the answer?

Sadly, I cannot see long term change or an increase in public support until it is made clear that the OWC are NOT primarily there to channel overseas aid from the Manx government to international aid agencies, but an attempt to engage with Manx people and affect change from the grass roots up. Given the wide public mistrust of both the Manx government and quite justifiable mistrust of aid agencies with £100K executives I cannot see how they can succeed while the public links them to attempts to increase overseas aid, and as long as they are  wrongly associated with major aid agency tubthumpers I fear the OWC are fast losing even the limited goodwill of the young and liberal.

For example, at my daughter's school she reports pupils cannot tell the difference between OWC visitors and compulsory sermons from the Scripture Union. The kids seem to regard both as “god-bothering nutters” to be slept through until the teacher can be bothered to turn up and proper lessons start.

They are, I hasten to say, wrong, because OWC staff scrupulously avoid professing any personal faith they may have in schools. The problem is, as the very few promoters of “good causes” either sanctioned or choosing to go into schools tend to be preachy, the audience no longer waits until they start talking to switch off. And if, say, they are there as part of some option intended to get kids thinking about the wider world only churchy kids tick that option box, so they never discover the difference. Self-fulfilling prophecies and all that.

Perhaps a short term compromise, and acceptable start, would be to require both partners of OWC projects and Manx government overseas aid recipients to commit to working practices that respect UNHRC standards and UK/Manx law on human rights. At present far too many can slip through the net by pleading religious belief, or are simply not scrutinised or challenged.

Churches may reasonably expect worshippers to voluntarily believe the apparently irrational or supernatural as a membership condition. They cannot expect public funds to theoretically provide goods and services to the dispossessed if a condition of that “aid” is the “right” to promote or endorse hatred. When they do that, all Manx people become a party to the ignorance, the house-burnings, the violence, the second class treatment of women, torture of children and other such crimes against humanity. That is not what foreign aid is meant to do.

The Missionary Imposition

I've been watching, with some interest, the increasing placement of 'news' about local Catholic 'community work', especially amongst the Manx Filipino community.
Not a lot of people know this, but last year this island was sent the first Catholic missionary since the time of the Celtic saints. It isn't that the Vatican is concerned for the state of our souls, more that it is worried about missing a gravy train on which other churches were early passengers.
For over a century the island has been adequately served by Anglo-Irish priests, who established churches for a growing Irish community in the late 19^th century. It is only fair to note that in doing so they also met head on the racist prejudices of that time against both the Irish and Jewish community, which manifested themselves in everything from petty objections over planning permission through to denial of schooling, housing and social services. From the 1930's until the mid 1980's (when we started to see the arrival of evangelical bigots who couldn't cope with a newly equal Northern Ireland) it seemed that anti-Catholicism was a dead duck.
Since then, apart from the Paisleyites, everyone else got on fine until a newer wave of 'guest workers' from strongly Catholic Eastern European countries, particularly Poland. But while the church made a show of caring about the welfare of Polish workers, the blunt truth was that many were educated young professionals here to escape not just Polish unemployment but the rebirth of the Catholic extreme right, so the last thing they wanted was more interfering priests.
Which made the arrival of Filipino guest workers a relief to such clerics. Here seemed to be more fervent religionists, except that in rejecting the Marcos regime Filipinos also started to take an interest in other brands of Christianity, particularly US televangelism, which meant that while here they were ripe for turning by (ironically enough) Paisley's sectarian chums.
So a battle for souls commenced. Except that, of course, none of these churches is quite as concerned as they say about the minds and bodies of exploited workers and their families.
The real interest is that people who work here to support families 'back home' send back a large percentage of their hard-earned income. Money meant to feed, clothe, educate and provide the medical needs of less fortunate relatives, but which might, with a little misinformation, also be directed toward religious 'charities' which claim to do the same thing, while actually keeping the poor under the thumb of anti-democratic chancers who, from way before the time of theo-fascists like Mother Teresa, always prop up the likes of Marcos.
If you want to get an idea of the problem, try Googling 'Filipino Freethinkers' and seeing their lively and humorous take on such matters. I guarantee you will laugh, but also never again consider the antics of 'religious charities' in the Philippines and their Manx allies quite so innocent or well meaning.

The Right is wrong, but sometimes so are the good guys

This (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/overseas-aid-pays-dividends-1-5371644 ) had the usual halfwits grumbling for their usual reasons.

The irony is that anyone with even a basic grounding in developing world affairs should have spotted the real joke. As no-one has, maybe I should point it out.

The SCFMC started as a speculative money spinner between the Isle of Man Business School and the Said Business School in Oxford, neither of whom are noted as philanthropists, caring ‘world citizens’ or ( to be blunt about it) honest and open in their affairs. Neither come anywhere near the standards of transparency and plain dealing expected of the international business community.

For off-island readers, the Isle of Man Business School project was intended to be the island’s ‘university’ – at least for a finance sector that was finding it hard to recruit suitably educated locals and a government which wanted to avoid the cost of a UK or US university education for anyone driven enough to get it, come back and put their skills to work here. As might be expected of a project ‘suggested’ to government by a property speculator who once boasted of friendships with Richard Nixon and Billy Graham, it went wrong from day one. Much to the amusement of locals, the wheels really fell off when it emerged that the academics didn’t understand elementary book-keeping and the whole thing was losing money hand over fist.

For the general benefit of anyone who doesn’t follow skulduggery in the international arms trade, the Said Business School owes much to the benevolence of Saudi-Syrian business magnate Wafic Said. His £23 million contribution came at about the time that the UK government decided it was not in the country’s interests to investigate allegations of large-scale bribery when the UK defence industry did so nicely out of arms sales to the Saudis. Take, for example, the Al Yamamah affair (in which, incidentally, a former Isle of Man lieutenant governor played quite a hand).

The investigations Blair decided against had been pretty much carried out already by Campaign Against the Arms Trade in the UK (despite a shoestring budget and denial of much likely material on ‘national security’ grounds ). Since then, the US government has also looked into it, and being firstly privy to most of the likely evidence and secondly not about to take ‘No’ for an answer from some piss-ant poor relation, it got the stuff CAAT could not and trashed off the UK arms trade and their Whitehall chums like some ailing banana republic.

Oh, another funny thing. Having originally checked out the Wafic Said stuff years ago, I just rechecked a couple of things and noticed how heavily his Wikipedia entry has been re-edited.

Oddly enough, Bell-Pottinger (which brokered talks between the Saudis and Downing Street when the bribery investigation was mooted) offers a service to contemporary clients which monitors Wikipedia, Google and similar internet services to stop awkward stuff appearing about tyrants and major league scumbags in general.

Even odder, the Global Poverty Project uses Bell Pottinger too. Nobody in my circle of good guy anti-sleaze hounds (e.g. CAAT, Transparency International, Corporate Watch, Oxford Research Group… ) knows why.  Hopefully it is just that the GPP is as astonishingly naïve as some supporters – folk whose hearts are definitely in the right place but whose research comes from La-La Land.

Should aid be used as a political tool to encourage change?

A few weeks ago I was asked if I’d lend a hand to (or at least try and interest Isle of Man Freethinkers in) the local arm of a major campaign which will kick off in 2013.

Though I and others involved have some doubts, unfortunately, by the terms of the invitation, I cannot yet say more than it is another attempt by one powerful interest group to consolidate both their stake in (and the terms of debate for) foreign aid. This is possibly before another powerful interest group can beat them to it: though actually I suspect the boat set sail months ago with that other interest group navigating it. For now, I can only say that the campaign is due to launch in the UK around 17^th January, so possibly also in the Isle of Man.

Thankfully, others seem to share my worry that what is wrong in this debate is the attempt by two fixed though opposing interests to rig it so that the general taxpaying public think we are involved, contributing and being listened to while, in actuality, we are jerked around by equally abhorrent puppet masters who think it is our job to simply shut up, pay up and, in general, leave it to the experts.

The sick joke being that neither pseudo-side in this potential pseudo-debate has yet demonstrated the ability to organise a chimps’ tea party – never mind a full blown domestic policy – in a former colony.

Think of the worst, most petty-minded Manx public body you can and their disastrous attempts to, say, fix a hole in the road or organise a bin collection. Then think of the same bunch of blow-hards, malingerers and pocket-lining plonkers being let loose on a large impoverished country.

Worrying, isn’t it?

So, before the ‘official’ local debate between the official (if somewhat calcified) parties begins, why not join an honest attempt to discuss this knotty problem?

On Sunday, 13^th January, 2.30 PM at Douglas Yacht Club, Andrew Dixon (Chairman of the Freethinkers) and Phil Craine (Chairman of the One World Centre and local Christian Aid worker) ask ‘Should aid be used as a political tool to encourage change?’

Both are personal friends, and both people I’ve worked with on ‘good causes’, so, though their views on this topic will differ astronomically, I am sure both speak with honest and humane intent. So I also have no hesitation in urging the real Manx public to get along and get the debate going - before it is taken out of our hands.

Kill this Bill, not gays

Real world problems have kept me away from the blog for a while but, as the Manx press don’t seem interested, I have to post something here about a nasty bit of legislation in Uganda, and the sheer hypocrisy of Manx evangelicals about such stuff.

This all started as the latest misleading salvo in the particularly mean-minded letters page debate about overseas aid. As I’ve said before, I’ve felt hamstrung because the major local defenders of the principle are mainstream churchgoers and a major beneficiary mainstream religious aid agencies (e.g. Christian Aid, Tearfund), while the most virulent attacks come from individuals who spout fundamentalist variants of free market views on charity - or indeed any form of compassion.

From my day job in our finance sector I am painfully aware of huge irony, in that the viciously deceptive American magazines from which such misanthropes quote freely are heavily underwritten by ‘educational foundations’ formed to channel money towards the ‘Tea Party’ tendency of Republicanism, and the biggest donors to those foundations are wealthy evangelicals eager to avoid tax. 

But when Manx supporters of a dubious religious aid agency wrongly claimed that the international community was cutting Ugandan aid because of Ugandan political corruption I saw red. So in response, I sent a letter to the Indie outlining the history of the horrendous ‘Kill the Gays’ Bill which has actually caused aid to be frozen since 2009.

In particular I linked the Bill’s sponsor, David Bahati, to the Fellowship Foundation (a US-based Christian and political organisation - better known as ‘the Family’-  which arranges an annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington), and also explained how the Bill originated in the March 2009 Ugandan tour of Abiding Truth Ministries (another US evangelical group) to promote The Pink Swastika, a very silly book co-authored by Abiding Truth’s president, Scott Lively, which presented Nazism as a ‘gay conspiracy’.

The Indie never printed it. Not sure why. Maybe they’re as bored as I am by the sad procession of knuckle-dragging throwbacks who think we should cut all aid, or the almost as pathetic attempts by some of the key recipients to retain it, but on the present terms (i.e. the public get no say in the matter, we just hand our tax money to a self-elected bunch of numpties with vested interests, who decide which of their mates get it all this year).

Or maybe the Indie just won’t risk upsetting those key advertisers who insist evangelical twaddle gets printed ad nauseum, and pull their ads when anyone points out what twaddle it is or the damage religiots actually do in the world.

Whatever.

The point is the Bill is back on.

In fact Ugandan politicians seem to have promised it as some sort of sick ‘Christmas present’ to their rich but retarded Yank bible-bashing friends.

 In fact Rebecca Kadaga, Speaker of the Ugandan parliament, actually used those words ‘(Christmas present’, that is, not ‘rich but retarded Yank bible-bashing friends’.

As I said in the unprinted letter, we in the West need to stop blaming easy targets for African poverty. Instead, it is high time we acknowledged that myths and prejudices we created, and hateful parasites whose activities we failed to prevent, are a major factor in the problem.

So you could help by signing two emergency protests to the Ugandan government. You can find them at www.allout.org/uganda  and http://www.avaaz.org/en/uganda_stop_gay_death_law/?tyOERab. But you have to sign NOW. Even the end of this week could be too late to save lives.
27/11/12 Update - if you want to send a message to five US senators who are members of the 'family' mentioned above, there's a petition at http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6535/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=12199 .

Three months later, and an answer arrives

Back in May (see http://clingingtoarock.blogspot.com/2012/05/who-is-helping-who.html ) I wondered why a professional religious bigot – a pariah, so I understand, even within Westminster Tory circles – would be visiting the Manx government’s Overseas Aid Committee. Perhaps, I idly mused, she was doing nothing more than paying a UK taxpayer funded visit to local pro-life chums. But I also wondered why, even though a government press release was issued, the usually compliant Manx media ‘forgot’ to run it at the time.

Today, at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/cso/isleofmangovernm18.xml, I found the answer. 

Just to explain a little more. While in theory the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (England & Wales registered charity number 1107341) has seven trustees, in practice Caroline Cox founded it, very much runs the show and is indeed the sole official contact.

I’d like to believe Manx money will go to a needy cause and be used wisely. Because there are certainly people in the Sudan who desperately need our help. 

Unfortunately, given that the charity’s founder hangs out with career Islamophobes and homophobes, and seems to favour the sort of ‘overseas aid’ where rich countries give poorer ones a choice between starving or letting the donor countries choose the government and control their import/export trade, I am not too confident that we will help the victims, rather than a new set of opportunists. 

Shame really, because I also have little doubt that Phil Gawne has nothing but good intentions, and bravely continues a massive uphill struggle to maintain any sort of overseas aid funding.

Hot air, (ba)lunatic debate

I have tried to follow the pseudo-debate about Overseas Aid in the nominally local press without laughing. Really, I have.

It started off when some junior league Ayn Rand groupie asked why we don’t just abandon the whole concept of overseas aid – or at least that individuals should decide for themselves what to give through charity, instead of having their taxes spent by a government committee. Fair enough question, if somewhat belligerently put, and for the next week or so the papers carried exchanges in which the government minister who chairs the Overseas Aid committee put some fair answers. As did the retired PR guru who pretty much bankrolls the One World Centre now that government are pulling out and the business sector have never put in, who…well……didn’t, to be honest.

At this point a local finance sector figure – a real dinosaur who I honestly thought by now was just urinating what few brain cells remain against a wall while leaving younger, sober minds to run his business –decided to have a pop. Predictably he took an obscure example of African ‘misspending’ dredged up from an American ‘academic publication’ produced by and for finance sector throwbacks who never got over the end of apartheid. And predictably he could not equate this to any Manx overseas aid project, because many of them favour faith-based charities and religion is almost as sacred as racism and misogyny to the sponsors of such publications.

I didn’t expect the ‘other side’ would have an answer and they didn’t. A teacher who acts as the Global Poverty Project Ambassador (in between throwing her hands in the air down at Living Hell) did point out that he hadn’t actually mentioned a Manx project before descending into the usual happy-clappy twaddle about helping the unfortunate. We were then promised a letter page full of ‘argument’ in today’s Excrement.

We also got more in last week’s Indifferent about the GPP’s attempt to get up a petition (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=47095). Incidentally, as they’ve been putting this about for months and the numbers haven’t risen I suspect the Mannifest crowd took no more interest than the rest of the island.

So, I eagerly open today’s Excrement only to find ..well…just more of the same old really. Hitler’s Grannies (Mothers Union), who’ve bagged £28K from the committee thus far to religiously brainwash developing world kids but are looking for £42K in all, more from other figures who pretty much depend on the committee for a job, but neglect to mention that they advise it…and that was about it. Ho hum!

The funniest thing is that it would take a competent journalist about two minutes to spot a huge joke. 

Out of curiosity, I looked up the Global Poverty Project, and as their main website is vague about their real origins and purpose (which immediately tells me there’s a well-funded practitioner of the grey arts hovering in the background) I looked a little further and got some answers at http://globalpovertyproject.com/pages/about_globalteam , which gives perfunctory detail on the real management – or at least the team assembled by others to put the case for the unidentified sponsors.

In particular note PriceWaterhouseCoopers, auditors to some of the nastiest companies and worryingly willing to sign off some of the oddest accounting strategies, Bell Pottinger, founded on Tim Bell’s use of direct marketing techniques to socially isolate and demoralise the miners for Margaret Thatcher and more recently PR merchants to the most sickening dictators, and The University of Western Australia’s Religion and Globalisation Initiative, which is pretty self-explanatory.

What I suspect we’re really looking at is major churches looking to control the aid industry and major business investors in the developing world who are happy for this to happen because faith-based charities (unlike, say, local political groupings or the international trade union movement) never interfere with serious business investors who, in return, cut their tax bills further with token sponsorship of religious charities and their local church partners - who give token relief after the tragedy while also propping up the anti-democratic business and political hierarchies which are keeping the locals dispossessed.

I really wish this wasn’t the case, and that some useful and productive Manx debate about the possible need, purpose, form and methodology of overseas aid was kicking off here, but it just isn’t. If it ever did, all of us should be willing to join in. 

But for now, do we even enter social and moral arguments thus far confined on one side to the type of emotional blackmail which religious groups do so well and on the other to the knee-jerk appeals to personal greed and fear of ‘big government’ by which the ‘New Right’ seek to distract us from discussing real life issues? At this point, I simply do not know.

For now, this seems one of many topics currently destined not to be fully explored until we find the courage to raise them, and of course the time and energy to explore and research far more thoroughly first. Until we do, I fear that on the Isle of Man we may be powerless spectators of pointless pseudo-debates.

I sometimes howl with laughter at the sad, simplistic techniques and agendas of those involved. My only excuse is that (1) if I stopped laughing I could get angry at the deceit and (2) that clampets like this are never that effective in the real world anyway, so no more lives are lost whichever pseudo-side pseudo-wins.

Who is helping who?

Last week when this (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/cso/overseasaidcommi4.xml) appeared on the Manx government website I was sure we would read it in the columns of a ‘Manx’ newspaper in the next few days. Curiously, it has not appeared.

It certainly had all the right ingredients, i.e. a story involving a supposedly senior Westminster politician visiting a Manx government committee which purports to help poorer nations. The fact that Cox is actually a pariah even within Westminster Tory circles, and that Manx ‘overseas aid’ is far too often money gifted uncritically to neo-colonial dabblers (or  faith-based simpletons who only interfere in other countries because they are unemployable here) would not normally bother a docile local media which likes to be spoon-fed titbits from those whose advertising keep it going.

I remember our not-so-distinguished visitor as one of the main participants in a Rupert Murdoch funded campaign to curb local educational authorities in the early 1990’s. More particularly it sought to stop the better ones ignoring Section 28 – which prevented schools educating children about homosexuality (rather than presenting it as a disease or undesirable lifestyle). More recently she became involved in the Christian Institute, which even its politest critics view as the British evangelical right’s version of the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Further afield is her involvement in something known as the ‘One Jerusalem’ project, which seeks to deny Palestinian claims on the Temple Mount in favour of the current set-up, where a handful of the world’s most flat-earth Christian cults squabble amongst themselves over a square mile or so of mystic hoo-ha while the Israelis look on with gritted teeth and Muslim interests are handily ignored. Her overseas ‘charitable activities’ are similarly suspect, tending to perpetuate crude stereotypes of people from poorer countries which resist the ‘help’ (i.e. undemocratic control) of Western governments and evangelical charities as well as excusing some pretty inhuman UK government decisions, such as one where money is being, on the one hand, cut from women’s groups which genuinely help women escaping forced marriage and, on the other, given to a religious ‘charity’ to ‘help’ (i.e. repatriate back to their abusers) women allegedly ‘trafficked’ to the UK.

‘Trafficking’is one of those emotive terms played on by both evangelical panhandlers and racist civil servants.

We think we know of ‘thousands’ of poor foreign women smuggled into the West under false pretences by criminal gangs and then forced to work in the sex trade because we’ve read stories about them, not only in the gutter press but the women’s pages of supposedly liberal and objective papers. The problem is that when academics and serious journalists look closer they find that firstly all the stories were based on just two police raids, secondly the stories were coming from evangelical groups who saw that reviving Victorian myths about the ‘white slave trade’ could generate some handy government grants running ‘support groups’ and thirdly that neither figures nor sources could be substantiated. They were - to be absolutely blunt - plucked out of thin air, made up, bogus….(insert any term you prefer here).

In addition to the panhandling godbotherers, the other party to benefit is an immigration service which finds it easier to stereotype all women from certain countries who came here to work or have been held back by culturally conservative families as victims and tarts. This avoids awkward questions concerning their future employability and allows them to be forcibly returned on the next plane, under the supervision of Anglo-Saxon missionaries, while letting both sweatshop employers and misogynistic religious leaders with a power base in minority ethnic communities off the hook.

As knowing any of this involves research I doubt that it explains why the story was not used. Perhaps it was simply elbowed out by other ‘news’ beneficent to more immediate religious interest and privilege, though it would be interesting to know why Cox really came.

I suspect that a fellow evangelical on the far right of the picture might know the full story. If so, he will not be telling it.

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

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.

Nowhere to run to, Baby

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’.

Overseas obstacles to progress

According to an announcement on the Manx government’ s website:
“The Isle of Man Overseas Aid Committee has responded to appeals from the Tearfund and Christian Aid charities to provide emergency aid to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the south east region of India affected by Cyclone Laila. “
And in particular:
”The sum of £36,000 has been donated to Tearfund to assist the emergency provision of water and sanitation facilities, and the distribution of items to more than 10,000 people in the Fizi Territory of DRC.”
Why?
I’ll ask more specific questions.
Why give taxpayers money to spook-chasing homophobes to help them prolong the power struggle between rival superstitions which is one of the two main reasons for continued conflict in the Congo?
Why give money to a ‘charity’ which specifically demands that any worker or volunteer signs a pledge to uphold ‘traditional’ Christian values, and which is known throughout the UK gay community for using that as a way of weeding out gay people?
Why support such institutional homophobia and other prejudices, enabled only by the sickening privileges governments here and either side of the Irish Sea from us insist religious groups must have, not only in their bizarre worship practices, but their business and employment practices, even when carrying out public sector work which should be equally available to all?
You can read the official line at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/cso/isleofmansupport1.xml , and I will say in passing I have slightly less problem with Christian Aid also getting £14K to distribute relief supplies after the Indian cyclone. Because I do recognise that, unlike other ‘faith based charities’, Christian Aid do not, for example, impose their immorality on the dispossessed to the extent of refusing to help poor communities who try to practice birth control.
OK, Christian Aid will never get a penny in donations from this household, for the same reason we’d never give money to a charity called ‘White Aid’. In a nutshell, a charity with a name like that perpetuates the lie that one culture is more decent than another. They can argue until they’re blue in the face that they don’t mean to and we’ll never believe them, because what other purpose could the word ‘Christian’ have in the name of the charity?
I also think their strange insistence on working with ‘local partners’ which in practice means churches, is indefensible. Because in practice, as with Tearfund, that tips the power balance in poor areas in favour of religious organisations. And churches are, by their very nature, irrational in their ideas and anti-democratic in their practice.
So, to sum up, another £50K in taxes either down the drain or handed over to ‘charities’ which perpetuate hate, injustice and obstacles to democracy both here and in poorer parts of the world. We do that, and in the 1990's we also enabled offshore arms deals which allowed major corporations to secretly fund militias in the Congo in order to gain control of cheap minerals used to bring down the price of mobile phones.
We still hide the money creamed off from aid projects by African dictators by helping them funnel it through pyramids of offshore companies around the world, but ultimately controlled here or in the Channel Isles.
And we still wonder why people over there, rather than being thankful for our 'charity', absolutely hate us?

Birthday babblings

I was offline yesterday to have one of those ‘significant annual events’. You know, the ones that make you wonder where your youth went and how much longer before senility sets in.
This year’s went well- the first when everyone finally heeded a request I made years back and stopped buying me presents. Not wishing to be ungrateful, but I have enough junk already, I’ve never worked out the correct time to allow before quietly slipping unwanted things into charity shops, and anyway, almost all of the Manx charity shops add to the sum of misery, rather than diminish it, so I even have second thoughts about donating stuff I can’t use to them.
It was also the first when I managed to persuade those who want to give to a charity in my name instead of to me to support a genuine good cause, rather than ‘buy a cow’ for one of the multinationals posing as aid agencies who make up the DEC – or worse! And if you still need evidence as to why I avoid the DEC, try, for example http://www.tearfund.org/Jobseekers/Statement+Of+Faith.htm - required signing for all Tearfund voluntary or professional workers to sort out the godbotherers from the damned – or look at the entries for, say, CAFOD or Christian Aid at http://www.fakecharities.org/.
If nothing else, the Haiti crisis caused us heathens to look critically at the whole international aid issue, and thankfully people are now wising up. International atheist opinion seems to support my tentative opinion that Red Cross and Medicin sans Frontiers are the safest bets if you’re giving.
I long ago decided to ignore ‘emergency appeals’ anyway. In a chance universe, disasters happen and the innocent victims of centuries of either earthquakes or faith-based fascism need genuine help, not sermons and further interference from the political, theological or just plain old free-market chancers who hog the TV at such times. Rather as I buy insurance for myself and the family, I though the best way to do that was pick a safe cause (in my case Medicin sans Frontiers), put away some loot every month to them, then get on with the other business of life.
The thing that finally clinched it for me and MsF was a look at their website. I noted that while the more responsible governments around the British Isles have contributed, the Manx never have.
Knowing the awful track-record of the Manx Overseas Aid Committee (donating to evangelicals who stir up East European hate and promote homophobia in Africa, ‘family planning’ schemes by other religious bigots who ensure any country where condoms are distributed or abortion is legally available stays off the US AID help-list, etc. etc.) this is a good sign. You need bigots (or at least failed 1970’s marketing gurus) for friends to even make it onto the Manx list. Thankfully, MsF seem to have none of the above, so any money you give to them gets used helping the genuinely needy, regardless of their faith (or lack of it), gender, sexuality, or class.
And MsF don’t pussyfoot around respecting ‘cultural difference’ either. For example, when beardy bampots tried telling MsF not to give medical aid to lesser creatures, such as women or young girls, they were not only ignored on the ground at the time but slated around the world afterwards as dangerous nutjobs by MsF’s press office.
They’re the real thing, which is why my best birthday present this year (always excepting my daughter’s handmade card, of course) is knowing I could help them.

More Romanian nonsense

I had an ironic groan at the latest update on the adventures of our feckless firefighters in Romania (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Manx-crew39s-model-for-Romanian.5970704.jp).
While I only groaned, my friends and relatives over there fell about laughing at the very idea that a bunch of Manx village idiots are helping anyone. I’m also as sure as ever that Port St Mary's Living Hell Church and their parent church’s plan for world domination have nothing to do with all this dumping of scrap firefighting equipment (sorry – ‘philanthropy’).
I’ve covered this issue before ( see Chief Minister, international joke and Of spooks and spookchasers) so won’t repeat myself. But do go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_University for more on Baptist pseudo-education as part of a US faith-led political destabilisation of the area.
The only thing to add is that I’ve now established that the ethnic-Hungarian nazis weren’t part of Hungary's leading fascist nutjobs, Jobbik, who have been getting chummy with the BNP. If you can believe it, they may be even nastier.
An outfit called the Szekler Legion have been swelling their bank account by hiring members out as cut price security guards, with large companies as the eventual clients via intermediaries. You can get the general idea at http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2009/05/05/fascist-group-worked-as-shell-guards/.
Our ‘foreign aid’ merchants do not have a clue what they are helping to stir up. If I thought some of the godbotherers provoking such nonsense had consciences I’d suggest they started searching them, but is it worth it? Manx evangelicals proved long ago they have about as much moral integrity as the East European fascist groups they are helping to bring back from the dead.

Overseas aid sponsors murder in Uganda

Having waited in vain to see if a major human rights story would be covered in the ‘serious press’ I guess I’ll have to draw your attention to it.
Briefly, a Bill introduced in Uganda’s parliament on October 14th means gays, and those ‘promoting homosexuality’, face life imprisonment, or in certain cases the death sentence.
A useful summary of the Bill by Amnesty International tells us:
‘The existing law, Section 140 of the Ugandan penal code, penalizes 'carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature' with imprisonment of up to 14 years. This legacy of British colonialism was introduced to punish local practices of what the colonial powers deemed to be 'unnatural sex.' The laws stand as proof that same-sex sexual practices and gender diversity are, and always have been, part of Ugandan culture. The draft bill tabled today seeks to imprison anyone convicted of 'the offense of homosexuality' for life.
Paragraph 3 of the draft bill sets out provisions on what it names as 'aggravated homosexuality,' which will incur the death penalty, contradicting the global trend toward a moratorium on the use of the death penalty.
The final section of the bill provides for Uganda to nullify any of its international or regional commitments that it deems 'contradictory to the spirit and provisions enshrined in this Act.' As both the African Commission and the UN Human Rights Committee have held, a state cannot, through its domestic law, negate its international human rights obligations.’
A group of 17 international human rights groups put out a joint statement explaining and condemning the Bill. Read it at
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?newsId=18454 and I guarantee you will be stunned at the contents. In brief, a country once praised throughout Africa for effectively tackling AIDS/HIV has turned into a hellhole where the country's political leadership, egged on by their Western chums, have turned gay-hunting into a national bloodsport.
Western evangelicals are the sole cause of that.
At their request, we cheerily put our pennies in collecting tins for cutesy charities running programmes in Uganda, under the sad delusion we are helping. No, what we are doing is subsidising Africa’s 21st century equivalent of German anti-semitism in the 1930’s. The language is the same, the tactics are the same, and the culprits are the same, i.e. Christian bigots and fraudsters with powerful political friends.
I’ve blogged about this matter before, for example at Quack Christian 'therapy' causing Ugandan bloodbath and later at Uganda and happy clappy fascism - the saga continues.
But what depresses me even more is that I didn’t even know about Amnesty’s statement until the saintly Nigerian humanist campaigner Leo Igwe posted it on a discussion forum in the hope someone would alert the UK press.
I’m not only depressed that the UK press didn’t pick it up, but that even though I’m an Amnesty member and subscribe to both their newsfeeds and those of another signatory, Human Rights Watch, neither told their UK supporters.
Do they think we weren’t interested? If so, that’s a pretty sad judgement on what passes for a human rights ‘movement’.
Come to think of it, as this state of affairs in Uganda has gone totally un-noticed by the Manx Overseas Aid Committee, who still hand public money to happy clappy fascist scum without a second thought, it’s a pretty sad judgement on a lot of people.

Of spooks and spookchasers

The Freedom to Fester PR hacks bigging up some of our bogus charities have been busy again, judging from http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_70823.html .
This time it’s an update on attempts to innocently suggest our firefighters, and not evangelical nutters linked to US ‘megachurches’, have been ‘helping’ in Romania.
I’ve raised aspects of this phenomena before (see Chief Minister, international joke and Another day, another Christian attack on Africans for more on this particular case). Sadly, things have got worse.
While Manx ‘aid’ goes to Romanian nationalist politicians and a party descended from Second World War fascists, local Hungarian human rights outfits which offered some hope have died away, to be replaced by ‘help’ from Jobbrik, the new Hungarian fascist grouping. On TV while over there I saw a ‘protest’ of ethnic Hungarian-Romanians led by paramilitaries carrying arrow cross flags. Just what that part of the world needs –mirror image fascist groupings representing two ethnic traditions fighting it out in the streets while EU grants and international aid are getting creamed off to the US via evangelical charities and ‘universities’ which offer Mickey Mouse degrees.
But reading what I’d uncovered before on Oradea’s history, an interesting question arises.
You’ll note that close to Oradea a cold war concentration camp that ‘officially’ never existed has been taken over by the US military, who are officially not there either, and super-officially haven’t used it to torture Muslims extradited illegally from EU countries.
Now we know that the US military is infested with evangelical fundies, who regard modern wars as crusades against Islam. Logically then, the Baptist churches of Oradea (which, of course, do not owe their native members to a requirement that applicants for Samaritans Purse food parcels sign up to the local Baptist church, or that potential employees of US corporations join such churches rather than homegrown ones in order to demonstrate their moral values), must have a few US military personnel praying there in between waterboarding European Muslims who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So, adherents to a strange religious cult which talks to a bloke who isn’t there, who are themselves not there (officially) in a church which ‘spontaneously’ began from a Christian denomination which was also never there until Western governments decided to ‘help rebuild’ a country with grant aid which 'only' (i.e. never) goes to redevelopment projects suggested by local people or run by local companies. Incidentally, wonder where the Muslims who aren't there either worship?
All in all, very confusing. Wouldn’t it be quicker for Tynwald to just send our charitable donation direct to to US megachurches.
That’s not to suggest that they end up there already, of course.

Another day, another Christian attack on Africans

I’ve blogged here before about the damage done to East Europe and the developing world because the island lacks a proper charity register and doesn’t want to think about Overseas Aid as anything except an extension of the execrable 'Freedom to Fester'.
It sickened me to see a further example in the press recently, when there was a proud announcement of more ‘charitable activity’ in Romania. Sadly yet again Manx people collaborated with neo-fascists, in this case actually managing to work with politicians from an organisation descended from the old Iron Guard, i.e. the Romanian arm of World War Two German nazism. I hope it was unknowing collaboration, but where there are links to US evangelicals, I’ve now given up believing any Manx faith group is entirely innocent.
Links between Manx ‘charities’ and US evangelicals is another gripe of mine, and an excellent US organisation (Political Research Associates) which tracks the US right has more on the kind of ‘family values’ Christian groups to which much Manx aid to Uganda is (again, I’m trying hard to hope they’re just deluded halfwits) 'innocently' linked.
Earlier this month a three day conference of Christian fundie bampots called the Family Life Network actually tried to get Ugandan politicians interested in hunting down and imprisoning Ugandan gays and lesbians. One of the key speakers was Scott Lively, co-founder of Watchmen on the Walls (listed as a hate group by Southern Poverty Law Centre, the leading US authority on neo-nazism and similar phenomena).
Lively is, frankly, a certifiable lunatic. In The Pink Swastika he quite seriously said “the Nazi Party was entirely controlled by militaristic male homosexuals throughout its short history.”
In short, he is barking. He is also politically well connected and, like most fundies, seems to see Africa and ‘charitable activity’ as a way to line his pockets for decades to come.
You can read more at http://www.publiceye.org/christian_right/exporting.html, and for a very different view of Christian ‘charity’ in Africa to the one you’ll see in the Examiner I highly recommend http://gayuganda.blogspot.com/2009/02/anti-gay-ex-gay-conference-in-uganda.html and the work of a Nigerian humanist I am proud to call a friend, Leo Igwe, a good example of which can be found at http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/Leo_Igwe/new_enlightenment.htm

Help the poor.....Take two

After a phonecall from a One World Centre committee member, I’ve taken the unusual (for me) decision to delete a blog item from Saturday 31st Jan (‘Help the poor, close a charity’).
If it was just another do-gooder grumbling at being told that, actually, they’re doing more harm than good and should stop I would completely ignore it, but it’s more complicated than that.
It isn’t that I changed my mind about the general topic either, it’s just that I recognise an unbalance and it should be corrected.
My opinions about the abuse of Manx charitable status and the utter incompetence and ineffectiveness of the regulatory regime remain. When you see something like this (see http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/1/25/152039/968 ) and realise Manx registered charities are part of the problem you should wince.
My absolute contempt for Manx politicians and civil servants and our sham of an overseas aid program, that also remains.
My view that we must stop automatically assuming that any action that can claim charitable status is good – not changed a bit.
The refusal of Manx or UK governments to properly look at the issue of charitable status, and to change the rules which allow any evangelical chancer to avoid tax and scrutiny by calling his scam ‘religious’ – that’s the very heart of the problem.
What I didn’t do very well is to explain that I’m not leaving the One World Centre committee due to any fault of committee members, but because I don’t see what difference they or I can make if the entire structure of Manx charities and overseas aid into which it fits is rotten to the core and being abused right, left and centre by evangelicals, ultra-right wing politicos and a government marketing scheme which, under the pretence of ‘rebranding’ the island, has the sole intent of brainwashing locals into 'thinking positive' instead of criticising things we know are wrong.
What has to be ripped out is that rotten core. Forget ‘charity challenges’ in which we choose between funding the further misery inflicted on any one East European or African community by any one group of bigots and chancers or another which is as offensive but for different reasons. For example, I’m tired of apologising to Romanian friends and relatives who have joked for a decade that they send us plumbers and doctors while we send our village idiots to stir up new sectarian conflicts, siphon off EU funds to their US puppet-masters and put dedicated public sector professionals out of work.
I should also admit that at the time of writing the post, I was still waiting for a hospital appointment, promised in December, to identify mysterious and recurring pains which need such serious painkillers some nights that I can’t travel to work the next morning. And I only got that after taking a day’s holiday in order to get an emergency appointment and finally corner my GP!
As I write I’m just back from the hospital. So, with luck, in a few days I may know the problem and if there’s a solution.
But for the future, you’ll understand why I blog less and don’t waste time on committees which lack the will or focus to tackle the root of local problems in the time my daughter is growing. I’d prefer to be with her.
In fact, as long as she regularly comes home from school full of nonsense inflicted on her against our will by the half-witted spookchasers who have open access to Manx schools these days, I need to be.

Jesus saves, Africans just die

Another planted story about ‘caring’ spookchasers (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/charity-news/Caring-Man-helps-Ugandan-children.4813295.jp) has me fuming at both the sheer audacity of these shysters and the absence of background checks before Manx overseas aid money is doled out.
The danger signs are there even before checking further. When did anyone at Broadway Baptists help another human unless there’s a kickback?
The first obvious question was ‘who the hell are Childcare Kitgum Servants’?
A fast answer to that, and to how they work, can be found at http://www.cks.org.au/projects_current.php. In brief, it’s an Australian evangelical outfit, which immediately raises the question of why they bother forming a subsidiary Manx charity.
I suspect the answer to that is the same one as the use of Manx charitable status by several US evangelical networks. Bargain basement alternative to proper Manx offshore status, with no searchable public records and a weak regulatory regime which files documents but does not check or monitor charities.
This allows money to be bounced around the world from one sister charity to another as ‘donations’. They will eventually reach the US bank account of an evangelical church, usually in tranches of under $10,000 to avoid triggering obligatory reports to the FBI and IRS, and always entering the US in another currency and then being converted into dollars to avoid new Patriot Act checks which can be made anywhere in the world if the suspicious transaction is in US dollars.
But it gets worse. Via an e-mail list I subscribe to I discovered http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/118125/?page=1, which really puts stuff in perspective. Rick Warren, the homophobic twat due to cast spells at the Obama inauguration, and a mad Ugandan pastor linked to the Bush regime’s massive sponsorship of faith-biased pseudo ‘AIDS prevention’ schemes. A disaster which makes the problem worse and allows western evangelicals to rob Africans of their overseas aid then ship the proceeds home again to build megachurches.
Then again, we should not forget the UK contribution to a scam which is sicker than graverobbing. The infamous ALPHA cult is also busy in Uganda. Their head honcho, Sandy Millar, (who famously told homophobic US Episcopalians that "your steadfastness in the face of a new and speciously sophisticated manifestation of evil has won you many admirers all over the world" ) started cuddling up to Archbishop Henry Orombi over there and was rewarded by being made a bishop of the Ugandan Church with a special mission to London.
Excuse my language, but Christ on a bike! These pondlife must be shovelling up cash by the bucketful while Africans die, and now the Isle of Man is helping them.
It really is time for vigorous public debate on both the abuse of Manx charitable status and the vacuous system by which our overseas aid budget is being hijacked.