Enough to drive you to drink

There’s more evidence of the car crash that passes for government drug and alcohol policy today on the Manx government website. Apparently we’re about to have a ‘Focus on Alcohol Awareness’.
I’d never have guessed from all the ‘coincidental’ poorly placed PR shite in the papers, honest. Just as I’d never guess that it’s the time of year when ‘Third Sector’ parasites compete for government funding in next year’s budget.
All those talks to community groups? What a coincidence.
Now I could go and explode the myth straight away by pointing you straight to a relevant webpage, but that would be no fun. So indulge me by following this trail and you’ll see something interesting.
First, go to http://www.gov.im/fsc/ViewNews.gov?page=lib/news/dha/ceo/focusonalcoholaw.xml&menuid=11570 for the standard announcement written by Daphne Caine, the DHA press officer, (which, by the way, I suspect you will read under another journalist’s byline later this week). Then follow the link to the ‘be alcohol aware IOM’ website and watch the warning as you leave the DHA page.
Got that? It’s an ‘independent’ website the Manx government take no responsibility for.
Now click on the website.
Hmm, looks like standard Freedom to Fester maintained Manx government stuff to me, with a link to the Education Department. How would our charity sector survive without them and the half million quid the Manx government shells out for their services?
Now go to the contact page at http://www.bealcoholawareiom.com/Contact.aspx and have a look at the sad collection of know-nowt amateurs they think can help you. I count three nasty cults, and I’m not even trying to look for them.
Firstly there’s the genuinely scary news that Care for the Family are sole partners to the D of E Drug & Alcohol Liason Officer for ‘Education’. In other words, the Education Department has no professional help and the homophobic fundamentalists who gave a job to a previous Education Minister’s unemployable daughter are still getting public handouts in return.
You can read more about the nasty links between the Manx education department and fundamentalists at something I posted last October (see How To Win Government Friends And Screw Up Kids , but I’ll explain again briefly.
Care for the Family started meddling over here via links with their Scottish and Northern Irish operations, which have a similar record for stealing public funds in return for truly cretinous ‘educational intitiatives’.
John O'Brien, a Care for the Family trustee, is also a trustee of CARE (‘Christian Action Research & Education'), which as I said before is:
“notorious for favouring Section 28, opposing civil partnerships, counselling registrars how to plead 'conscience grounds' for not registering civil partnerships, and generally inflicting christofascist crap on anyone with the temerity to read books.”
The daughter of the last Manx education minister got a Westminster internship with CARE just after graduating, and Care for the Family's links with the Manx education system curiously enough began at about that time. Last year a third rate bunch of bible floggers posturing as a ‘theatre company’ got a nice gig at Ballakermeen School’s new ‘community art’ space. One of their trustees, Norman Adams, is another CftF trustee.
Small world.
Leaving aside a group of retards who nobody who cared for their family would let into the house for a second, let’s also consider the ‘Treatment & Support Services’ section.
There we find two more cults with nastier methods than the Scientologists or Moonies,
Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon.
One of them only gives a London number. This is so that you won’t recognise the local contact as one of the most fundamentalist churches, notorious for numerous scams to part the vulnerable from their cash, and not averse to covering up a bit of underage sex either.
You see, while the public image of these ‘twelve step’ groups is twaddle we pick up from bone-idle tabloid writers, the reality is quite different. Their record on creating new dependencies to replace the ones they’re supposed to tackle, and exploiting money and sexual favours from ‘clients’ for example.
The thing is, in order to progress through the ‘twelve steps’ you have to volunteer personal information, much of which could get you divorced, jobless or imprisoned if it gets to the wrong person.
You think you’re ‘safe’ in an AA group? That isn’t what any number of folk who contact cult helplines say.
You think you can go to the police and get the rapist or extortionist arrested? On what evidence? The word of a self-confessed alkie against a ‘respectable’ charity worker, more than likely attached to a wealthy evangelical church? Get real!
You think alcoholism is a disease and AA is a recognised treatment based on well-established psychological methods? That isn’t what any reputable medical textbook says. If alcoholism is a medical illness, what is the World Health Organisation number?
Do yourself a favour. If you or someone you care about has problems with alcohol look up the Stanton Peele website on the sidebar. Learn to drink responsibly instead of having an irrational fear of alcohol that plays right into the hands of cults and parasites.
And stay well clear of fundamentalist nutjobs like the ones our government sponsors. They are the real health hazard.

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?

What's worse - Jesus or heroin?

There’s a story on Energy FM’s website which sums up the Manx government’s total disinterest in dealing with an underclass it created, and which is now seeking ever more desperate means to get by.
To summarise, a 28 year old smackhead carries out a string of burglaries, gets caught, and instead of help (or even a prison sentence) is fed to evangelicals so they can remove any shred of hope the poor sod had.
That’s not the way it’s reported at http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_74175.html, of course, but that’s the truth of the matter.
What depresses me more is the section which reads:
'Deemster Doyle heard how Parker’s time at David Gray House had been positive.
’He ordered Parker to spend a minimum of three months at the probation and bail hostel, and placed him under a two year supervision order.'
Why?
Read Holy Innocents and work it out for yourselves. If he’s not dead in a month he will wish he was.
Let’s balance the options, shall we?
Heroin – usually kills you within a decade, during which you’ll spend your life robbing any old tat from any insecure place to pay for more heroin from other criminal lowlife, who also get caught and jailed fairly regularly.
Inconvenient for those with vulnerable property, and some drain on the NHS.
Christianity – usually involves you paying over a large portion of any income you have for many decades to lowlife whose ‘profession’ is protected by legal privilege, and with so many government friends in on the racket they are never put out of business.
Inconvenient for everybody, as the addicts can live well over half a century, the lowlife not only pay no tax but claim massive public subsidies to keep their business premises going, and the law won’t touch them.
Relative numbers of both type of addict?
About the same, but, if I had to choose, give me the ones who only live a decade and would never be stupid enough to believe the drug gives them everlasting life.

Beggars belief

Well, the Chief Minister’s fake initiative on alcohol got another boost today, with help from one of the self-elected religious know-nowts who set it up in the first place. You can read about it at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Church-calls-for-ban-on.5723835.jp.
Beats me how nobody is exposing this twaddle for the utter, self-serving bilge and pack of lies it is, or that nobody twigs that those quoted aren’t interested in solving the problem, because there isn’t one.
Religious parasites created another moral panic to get public money. That’s the whole story. Period.
Thing is, the Chief Minister’s so-called ‘taskforce’ on drug and alcohol issues wasn’t formed by the Chief Minister and isn’t a taskforce. It contains no individuals with any practical experience or qualification to advise anyone on substance abuse. It came out of a private meeting involving two evangelical churches and several other chancers looking for easy cash and employment for their halfwitted friends. And they’ve been telling porkies ever since.
For example: 'Figures from the Alcohol Advisory Service indicate that an estimated 1,800 children live with parental substance abuse'.
Figures from the AAS indicate nothing, because they’re guesses based on hearsay and ignorance, not scientifically rigorous research done by professionals.
Or then there is: 'Last year 124 children were referred to the Alcohol Advisory Service 12-21 team as a result of their own high levels of alcohol consumption.’
No they weren’t. Their parents were given a choice between ‘voluntarily’ submitting their kids to pointless ‘counselling’ from muppets with no professional qualifications or risk the courts taking those kids away. And the ‘high levels of alcohol’ are calculated by a slapdash method which, again, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Amongst other faults it regards anyone who drinks two units of alcohol more than once in a week as having a ‘problem’.
I went into this in detail a couple of years ago. One day I even went so far as to be the only ‘ordinary member of the public’ to take a day off from work and sit with a roomful of public sector layabouts and ‘third sector’ chancers looking for another handout. The meeting was held at the lecture theatre up at Nobles and advertised as a major conference on Manx alcohol abuse.
There were two real academics speaking in the morning on surveys underwritten by the Manx government. I questioned them over lunch and, as I was the only person they spoke to that day who knew anything about proper academic social science research, they gave me their full surveys rather than the idiotised summary to analyse, which I did.
They agreed with me about the paucity of their evidence (mainly due to lack of facilities requested from the Manx government) and that, at the best estimate, Manx alcohol problems effect about a fifth of the population percentages found elsewhere in the UK, which in turn pale beside findings of most European countries. They also agreed that in those countries such drinking isn’t considered a ‘social problem’, and that ( to paraphrase our actual words) the only reason it is in the UK or US is because evangelical campaigners have made such a racket about it since Victorian times to flog bibles.
I wrote up much of what I’d found along with the references and suggestions for further reading for what, at the time, I considered a reputable website for people with an interest in free speech and social issues. Looking for it a few months back I found it had been removed, along with everything else which might spark debate or inform the general public.
Pertinent information on a Manx social issue being censored. What a surprise!
Sadly, I doubt if anyone else will challenge this bilge either. Certainly, nobody has in the last three years. I can at least say I tried to point out some of the nonsense, engage in the debate, and question the academics.
For anyone who is seriously interested I suggest two things.
First, read Stan Cohen’s book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, or just look up ‘Moral Panic’ and ‘Deviancy Amplification Spiral’ on Wikipedia if you are short of time.
Then go to http://www.gov.im/cso/drugsalcohol/welcome.xml . You can browse the crap on Drug and Alcohol Strategy for a laugh, but pay more attention to the ESPAD report. Don’t just read the heavily edited and biased summaries of Manx findings, look up the detail and cross-match it with that from other countries.
Also note that the 2007 ESPAD report is missing. It used to be there, but it had findings which didn’t fit the folk myths. You can still find it by Googling ESPAD if you want to know more.
Then piss yourself laughing every time the Manx press are short of a story again.

Pat's legacy

I had some sad news this afternoon.
Pat Kneen, widow of the Manx Death With Dignity campaigner Patrick Kneen, died recently.
I shared some history with the Kneens, as I was secretary to their campaign. Indeed I also had to campaign for charges of assisting a suicide to be dropped against Pat. They were scary days, as my job wasn’t too secure either, but sometimes things come along which have to be done, and this was one of them.
Pat really was the unlikeliest political campaigner I’ve ever met. While Patrick had a long background in the Manx Labour Party which immunised him to the lies, backstabbings, bigotry and general corruption of Manx life, Pat was a genteel retired schoolteacher who only moved here when they met and married, after both had been widowed once.
Not the kind of person you expect the police to come for mob-handed in a dawn raid. And not the kind of person who could have served a decade in jail if bigotry and corruption had triumphed, as it usually does over here.
Shortly after Patrick’s death, before the real nastiness kicked off, she told me and another friend that the hate, ignorance and dishonesty of local evangelicals towards Patrick’s polite, public-minded efforts had made her mind up.
It may have been silly things like Hospice staff refusing Patrick (who ran the islands leading cancer support group at the time) a chance to sit in their garden after an exhausting session at Nobles Hospital. Or maybe the anonymous midnight phonecalls saying, in a distinctly threatening tone, they would be ‘prayed for’.
Whatever, but she was hopping mad, and a week or two after Patrick’s funeral had made her mind up. This tiny lady was not going to let priests and politicians bury her husband’s work by sheer apathy.
What happened next was totally unexpected. The island’s international reputation sank to a new low because of it, though I’m proud to be amongst the few that showed the world we’re not all scum. You can read about all that at http://onlinejournal.org/Commentary/092405Hartill/092405hartill.html.
Still, we won, had some fun doing it, and may have invented a whole new style of campaigning in the process. On the other hand, Pat Kneen was (unsurprisingly) so drained by the whole thing she upped sticks and never came back to the island, though she never forgot my family and sent cards regularly.
She’ll be missed, but her legacy to the folk I love most is a simple but effective message.
Don't get serious. Get happy.
Laugh ignorance off the planet.

Rug-butting bastards do it again

Niusha Boghrati sent the message below to supporters of No More Executions at 11.55 AM today.

'Behnoud Shojaee was executed in the early morning of Sunday, Oct, 11th in Tehran's Evin prison, while tens of human rights defenders were protesting the verdict outside.
Behnoud Shojaee was sentenced to qesas (retribution) by Branch 74 of the Criminal Court in Tehran on 2 October 2006, after he was found guilty of killing a boy called Omid the previous year, when he was 17. Behnoud Shojaee had no legal representation at his trial. This was the sixth time his execution had been scheduled.
Executions of those under 18 at the time of their alleged offence is strictly prohibited under international law.
Iran is the only country in the world that has carried out such sentences within past year.
More than 70 minors are currently awaiting their execution. Safar Angooti, accused of a murder when he was 16 is scheduled to be hanged next week.'

Lies, damn lies and dipsticks

I was mildly amused by an article in this week’s Examiner where Liberal Vannin took exception to the use of the ‘Pathway’ system at Nobles (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Liberal-Vannin-blasts-hospital-care.5706820.jp). To be honest, after a quick giggle at yet another desperate Manx press ‘shock horror expose’ with no substance I then thought no more of it for a couple of days.
This is, after all, a political grouping which calls itself ‘liberal’ yet includes white flighters thrown out of UKIP for stirring up race hate. And this is a ‘local newspaper’ which, as part of a plan to drive the last locally owned publication out of business and get an advertising monopoly, ran uncut government press releases as an unspoken condition of getting the government advertising. Even funnier, Johnston Press staff seem to be so underpaid they’re moonlighting as PR hacks for troubled government departments.
And even funnier than that, Johnston Press management are key partners in Freedom to Flourish, which, under the pretence of running an international PR campaign for the island, actually creates the bogus community groups (known in PR speak as ‘astroturf’) whose activities fill the ‘community’ and ‘charity’ columns. Helpfully, the F to F hacks we, the public, pay around half a million for via government PR initiatives are kind enough to write all the publicity for such groups. Otherwise we might not think the island is a caring place where poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia and corruption don’t exist.
Then I happened to be at an advisory meeting, supposedly on NHS ethics, where a senior local Catholic tried to move discussion to the Pathway initiative and complain that patients have no say in end of life decisions (I know, Catholic and end of life decisions, goes together like Nick Griffin and racial tolerance, doesn’t it?).
Because of other strange comments at the meeting I was intrigued enough to wonder where Karran’s complaint came from. Just jumping on fear and folk myths, or ‘advised’ by anyone or anything specific?
I knew, for example, the Catholic speaker had been ‘advised’ by his seniors in Liverpool, where the Pathway project began. And I knew that senior UK Catholics are rabble-rousing and scare-mongering in response to the recent legal clarifications over assisted suicide.
So I looked at the story again, and noted that: “Party members explained they are not questioning the plan's use for the terminally ill in Hospice Isle of Man but for those who are 'probably' dying in Noble's Hospital.”
Hmm, that’s strange. A private health facility (though underwritten by public money) which provides end of life care you wouldn’t submit your dog to, which relies on volunteers and ‘alternative therapists’ rather than employ qualified staff and offer scientifically proven medical treatment, which, mysteriously, never has the capacity to deal with working people of slender means dying of the most awful cancers, yet always has a place for wealthy bods still capable of changing their wills….
So, while this excuse for a hospital has been using the Pathway system for years, Karran is only concerned about those who are ‘probably’ dying in Nobles ( in other words, there are rumours about Nobles but absolutely no substance)?
How curious!
Could all this have anything to do with information given to the Daily Telegraph by another consultant, who pointed out that the Liverpool Care Pathway was developed by one Professor John Ellershaw. Thing is, as well as being a consultant in palliative medicine Ellershaw also features prominently in material by Care Not Killing, a right wing coalition which includes most of the flakiest ‘pro-life’ nutjobs and churches such as the C of E. This is not counting around a million in funding to CNK from the Catholic church via front groups specifically to enable ‘spontaneous’ calls from the ‘concerned public’ to any radio show phone-in on pro-life issues.
We should also note that hospice and palliative care ‘professionals’ are the most rabid opponents to assisted suicide in any form. Well, they would be, wouldn’t they?
Patients making informed advance decisions to die at a time when things get too much? That takes valuable income away from those whose only interest is spinning out our suffering as long as possible, in order to charge to the max for snake-oil ‘therapies’ with no practical or scientifically testable effect.