21st century child abuse

Well, profuse apologies but I’m still too bogged down with real life to get back to serious blogging.

But I couldn’t go without noting the kerfuffle this week when Tynwald approved the merger of the Isle of Man Adoption Society (still better known locally as the Manx Churches Adoption Welfare Society) with the Isle of Man Children’s Centre, thus also amalgamating the island’s fostering and adoption services (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/53740/bishop-s-concern-at-closure-of-iom-adoption-society and http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/bishop-doubts-over-charity-merger-1-5517942 ).

As reports say, it only squeaked through after the Bishop (who is honorary president of IOMAS/MCAWS) complained the Society’s directors had not consulted him and so the Tynwald vote was the first he’d heard of it. In turn, our Minister of Social Neglect was keen to point out that MCAWS management themselves had requested the handover of functions in order to close the society.

The immediate problem with this version of events is that, by law, the directors must formally announce the proposed closure meeting by public notice, and simultaneously give written notice to all concerned parties at least 21 days beforehand, so that the Bishop should have known of the meeting and resolution to close. Any ordinary member of the public who worries about such matters would have known, as it appeared in the local press in the public notices – where corporate crooks bury the other evidence of international scams being closed down if anyone can be bothered to look.

There is also the control of MCAWS by the Anglican Synod. In theory, any interested person of good character could offer their services as a director: in practice (and I have this from past attendees of such meetings) a private Synod meeting chooses suitable candidates. ‘Volunteers’ are ‘coincidentally’ proposed and seconded at the AGM and an election follows, conveniently never with more candidates for office than posts. How, then, could a MCAWS board exist unless very much under the thumb of the Bishop?

Another issue is the reasons for the closure.

Insiders suggest the government discreetly told MCAWS it would no longer fund separate adoption and fostering charities. This seems likely as the Minister for Social Neglect (another religious zealot, of course, though in his case a devotee of Rome’s new link to 1980’s Argentinean fascism) clearly demonstrates he believes there are ‘deserving’ and ‘feckless’ poor, and is gradually depriving all such sinners (be they old, disabled or simply too badly educated for employment) of the public support expected in a civilized society.

Then there is the matter of a Catholic adoption agency in Leeds, whose continued refusal to allow gay couples to adopt has been vetoed by the courts at every level of appeal. Following our Civil Partnership Act, MCAWS (one suspects with gritted teeth and rictus grins) have duly made it known that applications from straight or gay couples, divorcees or single people would all be considered without prejudice. Again, I’ve been discreetly told that gays and other such delinquents might have to have their applications considered by the island’s  moral guardians of religious rightness, but in practice would never be successful.

Sadly, though, this may not be quite the victory for common sense it appears.

Partly because from the 1980’s (when Manx government childcare was noticeably ‘dumbed down’ by cheap evangelical alternatives to trained professionals) through to recent years (with seminars being led by new age charismatics with no academic or professional pedigree) childcare on the island is itself something of a foster home for wacky ideas. 

Partly because the Children’s Centre is yet another ghetto for the ‘ladies who lunch’. You probably know the score here. Committees are formed by bored rich women whose husbands spend their days diverting foreign aid from the poor towards the offshore accounts of developing world dictators in return for control of natural resources by Western corporations. Funds get raised at glittering social soirees, and, inevitably, are spent with more regard for the latest fad than solid academic research.

Hardworking parents of lesser means find it ironic that while these legends in their own lunchtimes harangue the rest of us about raising children, their own offspring - deprived of parental attention - become the best customers of drug dealers or the first in line to hand their bank accounts to the venal leaders of dead-eyed cults. I say this having personally helped several Manx ’trustafarians’ (in the absence of parental support – or even interest) to escape such fates.

So, the failure to help troubled kids find loving families passes from religious flat-earthers to the kind of vacuous trophy wives who take horoscopes and new age twaddle seriously.

And this is progress?

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.

Crime, damn lies and logistics

A recent advert for the Centre Manager’s job at David Gray House, the island’s bail hostel which is run for government by the Sally Army, not only contradicts lies told by past and present Ministers for Home Affairs but gives away other secrets.
The main lie spouted by the DHA is that, though run by a religious group, DGH services are equally available to those of all or no religious affiliations, and that attending daily acts of worship does not get you a better probation report.
All this came out a few years back when Muslim men were detained in the old Victoria Road jail because, as they would not or could not attend a daily act of Christian worship they were told was compulsory, DGH wouldn’t take them. When the Minister of Home Affairs was challenged over this he had to ask his staff if it was true.
It cannot be established if he was then misled by either the duty probation officer who told the men’s lawyer or the DGH manager (both Broadway Batshit klingons who were, as it happens, quietly trying to set up a rival operation at the time), or if the minister just decided to be ‘economical with the truth’ to his critics.
What is known is that the DGH management then got brown underpants and attendance for residents at the daily worship stopped being compulsory, though as the court reports continued to be given by folk who thought it should be those who did not attend were inevitably marked as ‘uncooperative’ with the program. One other affect was that future adverts for DGH staff stopped short of demanding applicants were Salvationists or at least Christians, and merely asked that they be prepared to work within the ‘Christian ethos’ of the project.
If that ‘Christian ethos’ phrase sounds familiar, that would be because it is a fudge term introduced by a notorious CARE workshop held at Stepford Central (Tynwald Mills) for Christian employers who only want to employ bigots and brown-nosers but are worried they might end up in court. Several known attendees hold key ‘gate-keeping’ positions in Government departments and two are now government ministers, which rather explodes the myth that government don’t go along with this flat-earth nonsense.
So it is interesting that the mid-March advert for a new DGH Centre Manager says “You will need to be a committed and practising Christian who can work with the chaplain to promote the spiritual ethos of the centre.”
As well as being illegal – even in the Isle of Man – that lets several cats out of the bag. By the way, DGH does not actually have a ‘chaplain’ - or any kind of trained/licenced minister of religion - on tap. But explaining why also allows me to explode another myth – that the Salvation Army is an independent Manx charity.
The advert helpfully directs applicants to the Northwest Divisional Headquarters of the Salvation Army, which actually manages the centre and receives the income from the Manx government, although both parties to this shady arrangement would rather you did not know that. All this last came up in the 1980s, when some old biddies left houses to the Manx Salvation Army to be used for housing vulnerable people. Against the wishes of local Salvationists, Northwest DHQ decided to cash in on the property boom, flogged them and banked the proceeds off-island.
At the same time, the local SA also had a £100K legacy, given on the understanding that they would turn their old hall into the island’s first purpose built youth centre - to be managed by a committee of influential Christians as the donor did not trust the government to do it. Problem was, the committee of influential (non-Salvationist) Christians they set up thought there was more loot in flogging the building to a brewery for a nightclub, which flatly goes against the core teetotal culture of Salvationists. They did this by placing ownership of the building into the hands of a Jersey trust, set up by the bank which brokered the deal –or to be more precise by an individual now employed by government to oversee the murky ‘Third Sector’ deals between government and churches which are gradually handing over social services to religious charities.
Because of the rows this sparked between local Salvationists, their English HQ and the bogus management committee which allows the Manx Salvation Army to be passed off as a ‘Manx charity’ some of the £100K legacy and some of the house sale money (but none of the much bigger pay-off from the sale of the old hall) was re-invested locally in the purchase of a local boarding house which became David Gray House. Up until about 2003 the DGH manager was a Salvation Army officer (i.e. a church minister) directly appointed by Northwest DHQ – a separate appointment to the minister who runs the Douglas Salvation Army worship centre. Then, due to cut-backs, Northwest DHQ dropped that arrangement and appointed a single officer with social work qualifications to (on paper) run both projects. In practice he ran the church and oversaw a DGH manager with minimal qualifications or experience in order that the DGH income continued to flow to Liverpool, thus thwarting a bid by a rival local evangelical sect to muscle in on the opportunity. He was also ‘invited’ to chair the QUANGO which set up both Manx homelessness ‘charities’, which, despite the personal fair mindedness of that officer and one or two others, resulted in the current less than satisfactory situation for any government attempt to (on paper) deal with core homelessness and rehabilitation problems.
The core problems, I would have to suggest, are not crime, poverty and social deprivation, but evangelical avarice, government disinterest, and the tendency towards flat-out porkie-telling of both guilty parties.

Nursery crimes

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

When nether regions collide

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

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

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

For stranger danger, think local

I was mildly amused and intrigued by the front page story in this week’s Examiner about a ‘religious sect’ planning to set up a Manx base , now on the website at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Religious-sect-wants-to-set.6521807.jp .
I don’t doubt the basic story (though judging from the ‘ex–team’ website at http://exteammembers.blogspot.com/ the former cultists seem a few apostles short of an apotheosis themselves), but I’m amused and intrigued for several reasons.
For one thing, I don’t see why yet another oddball cult here makes such a difference. The place is such a haven for them already. For example, one equally odd one has been fleecing rich new agers for years from a rural venue not 5 miles away from the Crossags. It has large adverts in Johnston Press’s various publications every week, and an input into various flakey ‘alternative health’ and ‘spiritual’ groups with whom it trades punters, ‘life coaches’, leads on access to government advisory committees, public funds and facilities….and so on.
For another, what’s this about 'the Team' only beginning to set up an island base? At least two associates have been peddling their talents around evangelical churches and Christian youth and ‘outreach’ groups for over a decade. I warned Christians Together in Mann’s youth subcommittee about them in 1998, and far more recently (judging from their schools work) a heritage group was not only using other bampots from other dodgy evangelical sects but had taken on board a suggestion first made back then by the Team’s ‘undercover squad’ for tourist development at one of the island’s best known historical venues. Then again, as that venue in turn has a long and ignoble connection with an evangelical chancer/ property developer who counted Billy Graham and Richard Nixon amongst his friends what‘s a few more freaks at the historical freak show anyway?
I’m intrigued because (as I frankly don’t believe either the Bishop’s advisors or any major church group are genuinely concerned) it would be nice to know what the real motive was for feeding IOM Newspapers the story, and indeed who fed it to them.
When the area around the Crossags has so many bampots, conspiracy theorists and hidden agendas why pick on this one?
For example, there have been previous behind the scenes campaigns to stop development around the Crossags. These include a plan to build holiday accomodation in the late 1980’s blocked by local Rotarians, who had a prominent member and schoolteacher point out the ‘danger’ to schoolkids from increased traffic on the road to the Crossags.
Except schoolkids don’t use that road. In fact the only danger on it is from flying golfballs on the adjoining golf course – whose membership revolves around such Rotarians and where it’s a source of huge frustration that the selling off of public land and cutting off of public rights of way cannot extend to the road because it is the main footpath to Albert Tower.
Also amusingly, one silent party behind the proposed development was closely connected to the Anglican management, and the elaborate plan involved a trust which would run the Crossags as a faith-based charity as part of a growing ‘empire’ also involving other Christian children’s charities close to government.
Because again, Nigel Chaplin has been trying for years to set up some sort of lifetime possession trust arrangement for the Crossags which would have allowed him to retain a home for his aged mum and live out his days, with the facility then preferably passing to the sort of church-based groups who use it most. Problem is, the ‘interest’ church groups have in kids is not their healthy development and preparation for a socially useful adulthood, but in grooming them as tithe-payers when they start earning.
They would love to gain control of a nice little facility where kids can run riot in the fresh air and camp safely for weekends (and where Nigel has helped them arrange such things –with the groups concerned often never paying back the full costs of amenities they run up). They just, somehow, seem to view it as Nigel’s ‘Christian duty’ to hand over his heritage so that they can run it – tax free – at a nice little profit.
The backroom intrigues and battles between such imbeciles would make amusing reading should they ever be revealed. I suspect they never will be. Shame, as even Teutonic twerps allegedly running cults might then prove less bizarre or amusing than the homegrown variety.

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?