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

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

Public health warning for Douglas on 17th April

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

List of shame

I’ve just seen something incredibly useful in a Manx newspaper. It’s a list which, amongst the odd good cause which crept in by accident, probably contains every timewasting pseudo-charity whose useless antics you will ever be asked to perpetuate on the Isle of Man.
It got into print because Manx evangelicals live in such a tiny bubble that they think their lifestyles are praiseworthy, love to boast about them and actually think we might be impressed.
The list can be found at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/isle-of-man-business/AFD-Software-write-cheques-to.5902335.jp. But the use isn’t just limited to on-island readers.
If you go to http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/index.asp then try some of the names you pick up what these charities do, what kind of income they can’t get away without declaring and who’s behind them, not the PR bumpf which gets printed uncut in the lazier press publications.
Then, if you check the trustees, you’ll find that by clicking on any name their trusteeships with other charities are given, so enabling you to see how such parasites network. The worst don’t admit most of their links, but, amusingly, the more arrogant and shameless ones do. You can also find links to their websites, which tend to be less guarded about links to sometimes quite vacuous or stomach-churning enterprises.
Go on, have a treat. Spend an hour or so following the links and get all the ammunition you’ll ever need to keep faith-based lunatics at bay when they beg in your area.

Tourism revival? Not a prayer!

The Tourist Department put out a press release to justify their 2010 TV advertising campaign today. You can see it at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/tourism/tvadvertisingcam.xml before it hits the press.
Wow, they must have spent all of half an hour working that out down at the ad agency, and all of five minutes at a departmental meeting approving it.
In the interests of decency and honesty I also feel it only right to warn off-island readers that there’s absolutely nothing natural about the family involved. They’re amongst the religious zealots who last year set up what looks worrying like becoming an annual freak show, as described at Disaster alert . Given half a chance, such zombie worshippers will also turn St. John’s, venue for our national day each July 5th, into the set from Dawn of the Living Dead the rest of the year. Not that it’s much different on July 5th, of course.
Look, I’m trying to be fair. I don’t really care who comes here as long as they bring their wallets.
If the Tourist Department really want to entice folk like the elderly godbothering masochists who stumbled round hills to find ruined Celtic chapels on a foolfest called Praying The Keills that’s up to them. I can think of better, more productive, niche markets, but you have to start somewhere, and we have enough local evangelical halfwits already to take up any empty coach places.
On the other hand, considering the increasing time our emergency services spend pulling crazed biblebashers out of the sea or off cliffs, maybe we need a new tax which, in the interests of fairness, should only be paid by superstitious visitors. Alternatively, local churches could put up a bond against the cost of the rescue helicopters if they're so keen to 'share their faith', instead of expecting taxpayers, Civil Defence and RNLI volunteers to keep their foolish friends alive.
I also loved
“The campaign aims to reflect the Island’s lifestyle and position the Isle of Man as a place where visitors are free to take part in a variety of outdoor activities. “
In plain English, you’d better be a hiker, because there’s no shops, no night life and very little public transport, so you may spend most of your time here standing around in a Force 9 gale wondering why you came.
Or there’s also
“It is again in line with the Island’s branding project as a destination where people have the ‘freedom to flourish’.”
Freedom to continue living in the Bronze Age at everyone else’s expense, more like!

Keeping Sunday Stupid

Yet again faith-based lunacy evades the sub’s spike and slips onto the news at Radio Cowshed.
Must be Sunday then.
This time it's the enthusiastic, but pointless, activities of Ramsey’s Faith in Action crew. Previously they’ve spent their weekends wandering round beaches picking up rubbish, or de-weeding the gutters of empty Parliament Street shops. Well, at least it stops the deluded going door to door encouraging the rest of us to talk to their imaginary friend in an empty barn.
And it’s not as if anyone can tell these days which Parliament Street shops are empty and which are in use, apart from the ones where shopkeepers run out every two hours to change the discs on their 4WD vehicles - which block the street and cause people to shop elsewhere, or just online.
This time FiA have repainted a church which nobody goes to, and which even a previous vicar once admitted to me is only standing because it is a ‘heritage site’ nobody can knock down, rather than a place of worship. You can see the story at http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=39706.
Jurby is a fine example of church inability to deal with social change. It’s an empty, windswept barn on a cliff, listed as a heritage site because it has some fine Celtic crosses. It may have once served a village community, but Jurby is now (to be blunt) a sink estate built from the remnants of an abandoned military airfield. Even when the airfield was going, the RAF preferred the posher, better kept, Andreas Church a few miles away.
That previous vicar tried the sensible option of a multi-denominational meet-up in Jurby School, and much as I dislike public buildings being used that way I admit it gave some comfort for elderly, disabled or carless folk who couldn’t get to the tiny Methodist chapel down the road at Sandygate, or travel to Ramsey if Catholic.
As it happens, I like Eddy, the FiA spokesman. He’s a helpful little ‘teccie who works in an opticians and solves everyone’s problems. He once even fixed an old clock for my wife and refused payment.
That said, why are FiA allowed to flout the ban on advertising signs enforced throughout the island by the Highways Division/Department of Transport?
We’re told the old joke of hanging a bedsheet wishing someone Happy 60th on the wall at a major roundabout is dangerous. Similarly, local business and charities shouldn’t advertise their wares and events on the crash barriers at tight bends coming into town.
Yet FiA, for around a year, have had their banners on the walls outside a Ramsey local authority office, one at a nasty little roundabout next to a pedestrian crossing, the other directly opposite a T junction where cars and pedestrians narrowly miss each other at the best of times.
Now this couldn’t be because the Transport Minister is a notorious fundamentalist who thinks religion is, somehow, above the law, or that the need for tiny evangelical sects to get recruits trumps the need for the general public to cross roads in relative safety.
Could it?