Let's call time on the Puritans

I may as well start the year as I mean to go on.  

So, may I invite you all to raise your glasses and help unashamed hedonists to poke fun at puritans this month?

According to the original blurb from a worthy campaign’s founder:

‘Drinkuary is a quiet counter argument to Alcohol Concern’s “Dry January”. Alcohol Concern want you to not have a drink for the whole month and raise money for them whilst you do so, I don’t care one way or another if you drink or not. I do care that tax funded charities and health organisations feel compelled to tell us how to live our lives. Quite frankly I’m fed up with it, alcohol is heading down the same slippery slope that tobacco has already been forced down with health warnings in every advert and on every label. Yet still these Killjoys and Puritans can’t just let us make up our own minds, nope they have to spend more of our money lecturing us on how we’re drinking too much and having too much fun and should stop it immediately.’

Read more at http://www.drinkuary.org/.  Then, if you feel sociable, motivated and energetic enough, join in. They even have cool beer mats. Oh, and also take a look at the Cocktails in Care Homes project, which sounds just like my kind of social work.

Alternatively, you can do as I intend to do every day this year. Which is to carry on my life in a responsible, self-dependant way, paying no notice whatsoever to dull-witted wowsers and parasites on the public purse.

Unless, of course, there is a chance to mock their antics or do something which will wind them up until they explode…or just stop begging and go away.

Happy New Year, and Cheers!!

The Die-in-Hell option

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

Empty political question, textbook non-answer

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

Another day, another parasitic QUANGO

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

Spot the real social problem

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

Losers Convention

There are days I (almost) feel sorry for the Magic Invisible Friend's personal representative on Earth.
What a comedown when your 'state visit' to the UK - costing the taxpayer something approaching £100 million - kicks off with you acting as support act to Susan Boyle.
Never mind, at least all those faith leaders can get together today to commiserate the great British public's total disinterest in their faith-based pyramid schemes. And amongst them (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=47475 ) will be a gentleman whose unelected presence in our upper House of Fun was decided by his former area manager and rubber-stamped by Gordon Brown.
Oh well, I'm sure they'll have a great time telling each other how nobody loves them and nobody understands. If only we could persuade politicians and civil servants to share our lack of interest the world could move on.
Because it's funny when you think about it. If you want to voluntarily help out at a kiddie football team you need to pay for a police check which can take months (and probably won't be accurate). If you want to be Bishop of Sodor and Mann and interfere with the political process at the most senior level nobody checks you out anywhere. It isn't just that the Manx public have no vote, even the busybodies in government whose main role in life seems to be to prevent democracy (or even community) are asleep on the job.

Christian politician turns down free lunch shock

I haven’t seen this in the rest of the press yet, but Pink News has a story on the world’s only openly gay prime minister and her partner being snubbed by Christian politicos.
The snub happened while Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir was visiting the Faroes, where, Pink News tells us:
“The prime minister of the Faroe Islands, Kaj Leo Johannesen, invited all seven of the Faroe Island's party leaders to dine with Ms Sigurðardóttir and her wife, Jonina Leonsdottir. However, Jenis av Rana MP, leader of The Centre Party, a Christianity-based conservative party, declined the invitation, reportedly saying it was against his religion and that he wouldn't "dream of attending such a banquet".”
See the full thing at http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2010/09/07/faroe-islands-mp-refuses-to-dine-with-icelands-gay-prime-minister-and-her-partner/
Stupid, of course, but at least it could never happen in the Isle of Man.
No Manx politician in living memory has ever turned down a free lunch, and neither have many of our clerics - espcially when the taxpayer is footing the bill.
(hat tip Mike Tidmus)