DHA dummy blows smoke in our eyes - again

Energy FM, the only Manx radio station staffed by anyone young enough to understand the issues, reports today on plans to ban Mephodrone over here. Sometimes known as ‘plant food’, it’s an iffy legal ecstasy synthesis flogged by mail-order firms via adverts in the kind of mags still read by semi-retired hedonists and alternative types.
I see at http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_79687.html that: “In the House of Keys today, Adrian Earnshaw revealed that 22 people here have been referred to drug services because of Mephedrone.”
This is misleading – not on the part of Energy staff, who have higher standards and simply report what state sponsored layabouts say in the Keys, but by the DHA, who don’t.
It’s misleading because as Earnshaw and his nasty little cohorts know, people don’t get referred to ‘drug services’ because they have problems, but because the police or other powerful busybodies found them with miniscule amounts of substances which would be legal or semi-legal in more civilised countries. In order to avoid prison sentences they must then ‘voluntarily’ submit to being monitored by the state and bored stupid by fundamentalist retards who get public money by passing themselves off as ‘substance abuse counsellors’.
And Energy also have a story (see http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_79752.html ) on a 20 year old who faces jail for £300 worth of bush.
Now, bear in mind that Manx prices are double the UK and that police routinely put a nought on the ‘street value’ of drugs. Then the waste of court, police and the 20 year old’s time becomes more apparent.
He could go to jail for having a Tesco-bagful of what would be a Class C drug in the UK, but isn’t on the Isle of Man because the Chief Minister has no expert drugs & alcohol advice. There, like around 80% of the jail inmates – many yet to actually face a court because they’re not prepared to pray every day (so can’t get bail) – this young man will waste taxpayer money, be prevented from doing a decent day’s work instead of staring at the walls and being lectured on his morals by certifiable cretins, and have difficulty finding another job when he leaves.
I have no particular interest in these substances, be they legal or not, but I’m ashamed to live on an island where the government is so ignorant, and special interests so corrupt and powerful, that we’re going bankrupt and sentencing a generation to poverty and unemployment.
And all because a few godbotherers looking for public handouts can’t bear for others to organise their own lives and pleasures. Even when those lives and pleasures do not bother anyone else.

Witless Christmas crackers

Ah well, Bilious Henderson’s attempts at cheap publicity over the
lack of nativity plays in Manx schools (see the update on Christmas matters ) sank miserably.
How sad. Now he’ll have to go back to stealing BNP myths about immigrants.
If the deluded herd really want to put the Crass back into Christmas over here they also need to use better hacks. For a start, don’t use a witless waffler who lifts her argument straight from the Christian Institute.
You can see what I mean at
http://www.iomtoday.co.im/columns/Not-amused-by-Ann-Summers39.5869489.jp. The only cheap shot missing from the C.I. original is their dig at Maria Eagle’s personal life.
And that a journalist – even a house-trained numpty like this one – thinks the loss of blasphemy laws have sent the UK to the dogs?
What can they be teaching them on NCTJ courses these days? Gary Otton will laugh his socks off to hear that Johnston Press’s policy of only employing dour know-nowt Calvinists on their Scots papers has now spread to their other titles.
(Sighs deeply) Now, take this down in your worst shorthand (if they teach you that either!)…
People have rights. Ideas do not, and in order that the world moves on it is also vital that they are rigorously challenged.
People can have their reputation defamed, even though in practice it is only rich individuals who can complain about it. Fairy stories cannot, and were made for little children, who (unlike religionists) learn to enjoy the myth without taking it literally.
But then, you can see how desperate the Examiner is by their ‘Christmas cancelled’ effort at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Christmas-cancelled-in-bid-to.5868955.jp . Note in particular that the Port St Mary Living Hell con-artists are getting a bung from the Commissioners and the attempts of the Elim to get one too.
As for the fate of the Festival of Light? Anybody who names a community event after Mary Whitehouse’s gang of chuckleheads deserves to fail, if you ask me.
Oh, and to return to the original story. If my daughter asked her mum: 'What's a Horny Christmas, mummy' I suspect she’d get the same answer as when she asked ‘what’s an orgasm?’
That answer being: ‘Ask your dad’.

Disaster alert

Can I just give notice that the deluded herd’s attempts to hijack Christmas are under way.
While I’m at it, also take note that St. John’s, a public health hazard at the best of times, will be an absolute disaster area on Christmas Eve. But then, they should have put ropes and red flags around the place years ago.
You can find the first warning at http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=9459.
Frankly, these godbothering throwbacks have a bit of a cheek.
For instance, what’s this about “our re-enactment of the Christmas story, which we have started with the support of local businesses and churches to bring the community together at Christmas.”
Since when was the church a force for good in the Manx community – especially at St. John’s?
But perhaps if a postcode with little more than a handful of houses and a shopping/conference centre run by fundamentalists (and heavily underwritten with government grants) has more known BNP members in those houses than the rest of the West of the island combined, and seems to be pocketing more business development dosh than Peel, the West’s only urban conurbation, then it’s reasonable to assume it’s Christian business as usual. That is to say racist, sexist, homophobic and parasitic.
St John’s gets away with a lot because it’s where the annual Tynwald Day Ceremony is held. For the benefit of off-island readers, I should explain that this is little more than a freak show for American tourists, and until the day the Chief Minister bangs nails up his nose and ritually disembowels the Governor as part of the Tynwald Ceremony even that’s not going to be a crowd-puller. The rest of the year the national place of historical and cultural interest it most closely resembles is Culloden, i.e cold, wet and utterly desolate.
To be honest, if the Christians are so keen to claim this damp, miserable field as their own, they’re welcome to go there and get pneumonia. If the Manx had any real national pride they could have marked the Christian millennium by concreting it over and building something more inspiring there.
Like a crematorium.

Manx myths - buy one, get one free

Barry over at the Freethinker blog has a hilarious story today (see http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/11/26/did-jesus-ever-visit-britain/).
A Dr Gordon Strachan, who lectures on the history of architecture at Edinburgh University, is reviving the old ‘Jesus came to Britain’ legends. In fact he’s not only recently written a book about it (which explains the publicity), but the book’s inspired a recently released film entitled And Did Those Feet? (which explains the other publicity). Oh, and when Dr Strachan isn’t lecturing he’s ministering for the Church of Scotland (which explains a lot of things).
I dread to think what’s going to happen if Manx Heritage or the Tourist Department get inspired by this twaddle.
You see, in the late 1980’s there was brief talk of jumping on the ‘research’ of another barmy academic with an even loopier theory. In that case the academic was American, and the ‘theory’ centred on the idea that the Isle of Man was the Avalon of Arthurian myth, and that King Arthur might be buried here.
Thankfully I’ve long forgotten the small detail, but what I do know is that the Tourist Board (as it then was) bought it lock, stock and barrel and even ran an exercise on how the legend could be flogged, with the help of the academic, to the more gullible of her countrymen.
Two things put a stop to that nonsense. One was agitated pleading to politicians behind closed doors by an honourable local historian to the effect that, rather than bring tourists rushing here, it would send a signal to the world that the Manx were either totally dishonest or certifiably mad. The other was the Lockerbie bombing, following which Americans and their money stayed home for a while.
The thing that worries me is that honourable Manx academics may now be extinct and neither honour nor common sense have been seen in the Tourist Department within living memory. In fact, judging from the spread of Freedom to Fester fever, telling fairy tales while going about with our eyes closed and singing ‘La La La’ to drown out the last voices of dissent is the new traditional (and government underwritten) Manx way of life.
We should not be surprised at this. As the Anglo-Indian academics Bhikhu Parekh and Homi K. Bhabha pointed out at the time of the Satanic Verses saga, the liberal mistake is to take fundamentalists at their word and believe fundamentalism is steeped in tradition, when in fact it is a current and pragmatic reaction to the modern world by folk no longer fit to run it. To be blunt, bullshit merchants who know there is a sucker born every minute, and that all such BS merchants need do for a regular income is embroider some myth, however ludicrous, the suckers would like to believe.

Compulsory reading

Gary Otton, my favourite secularist muckraker, has just posted his latest piece at http://www.scottishmediamonitor.com/features2.cfm?ID=42 , and shaft me sideways he’s on form!
Scottish Media Monitor first appeared in January 1996 in Gay Scotland, sparked by sickeningly inadequate Scottish press coverage of the violent murder of 35-year-old Michael Doran in Queens Park, Glasgow in the summer of 1995. Since then Gary has held the ‘proper’ Scots media and politicians to account with passion and humour.
Sexual Fascism, his subsequent book on Scotland’s Section 28, is compulsory reading for anyone who wants to know how a combination of slack, bigoted reporting and Christian fundies held back the development of a small Celtic nation for way too long. If this island is ever to crawl out of the primeval Christian swamp it’s been in for as long as I can remember you’d better hope a few copies of it start circulating here.
This month Gary’s target is Christian business (or as churches laughingly term it, charity), which in Scotland is becoming depressingly usual. He points the finger, for example at a fundie church which has managed to avoid £10, 000 in business rates in the last three years, and the educational hijacking pulled off between Stagecoach (the bus company owned by Scotland’s best known Christian Neanderthal) and Oasis (still substantially controlled by a TV vicar so far up New Labour’s backside even Rentokil couldn’t shift him). It will surprise nobody to know this means a group of schools underwritten by public money where homophobia and other evils run rampant.
I always recommend Gary’s work to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. But in particular it’s a million watt flashing DANGER sign for the situation developing here, courtesy of the Sally Ann, Broadway Bumpkins and (let’s never forget) Port St Mary’s very own Living Hell Church. You can see them daily, crawling into government broom cupboards, picking the public pocket and setting up one bogus ‘charity’ after another.
Recession won’t stop them either. If anything, parasites who prey on misery will use the current situation as an excuse to further their sinister agenda. Read Gary’s work and similarities between the scams of their Scottish chums and those currently being fermented here will be alarmingly obvious.

Let them eat lard

You’ve got to admire some folks for their optimism.
According to Energy FM (see http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_78260.html) a plant with appetite-suppressing qualities was recently seized by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, with Customs and Excise and the Police.
Apparently the African Hoodia plant is an endangered species, but interest is rising in the diet racket because it suppresses hunger.
But once I’d got my breath back from laughing at the idea of three Manx government agencies having to gang up to arrest a weed, I was off again.
OK, this tat is just the kind of garbage that catches on amongst the rich dimwits who prop up the local ‘alternative therapy’ industry, but it’s still a limited market.
Because you can forget the rinkety-tory myths dreamt up by Manx Heritage, this is an island where lard, and lard-arses, rule supreme and the nearest thing the Manx have to a national dish is chips with cheese and gravy.

Atheist Blogroll

I'm proud to say this humble blog has been added to The Atheist Blogroll.
The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. Any fellow heathens with a blog who want to join in should visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.
Now, sad confession here.
Normally, when you join up, there's an all-singing, all-dancing list of over a thousand of us scrolling away on the sidebar. Me - I followed the instructions to install and it all went Pete Tong on me.
Never mind, follow the link on the sidebar and you'll get to some blurb about the Atheist Blogroll, and scrolling away there is the complete list.
And very heartwarming it is too, seeing all those thousand plus links and knowing that everyone of them leads to another dissident. Some big and professional sites, others tiny little drops in the blogosphere like this, but all of us pushing back the dead weight of religiosity.