Criminal classes

If we were to take this (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/61318/manx-and-welsh-restorative-schemes-win-prisoner-rehabilitation-award ) at face value the local prison service has sharpened up its act with the help of some concerned and altruistic citizenry.
No, I thought that too.
So, no surprise then to find that Prison Works Isle of Man is based at The Alpha Centre, Broadway, Douglas, and according to the entry for number 1120 on the Manx charity register exists:
“to serve the spiritual, emotional, social and physical needs of offenders, ex-offenders, victims and the families of all three as well as those at risk of offending and other members of the Island Community as well as persons or groups off-island as are identified and approved on a case by case basis. Objectives include advancement of education, victim awareness, restorative justice, employment both paid and voluntary and resettlement and after-care.”

Oh joy of joys, another bogus charity run by Broadway Batwits (who, historically, tend to be rather better at hiding criminals than reforming them, by the way).

Personally, I would have thought that any contact with the type of intellectually-challenged religionistas who run this scheme could be classed as cruel and unusual punishment, and that if the future of any ex-cons might depend on them it would be nothing short of a national disgrace.

Surely the recidivism often attributed to the criminal class must be far exceeded by that of the average evangelical. And for the benefit of those who can't hold their noses long enough to look, I (who have) can also reveal that they fall into two clear subdivisions.

On the one hand, there are the 'rightists' (those who believe themselves so right about everything they never stop shouting long enough to listen to another view - and certainly not hard fact).

These are otherwise known as pastors or preachers. They tell everyone what to do and live off dumber people's money. Failing that, they invent reasons why the state should pay them to tell others what to do, on the pretence that such victims need their witless “help”.

On the other hand, we find self-pitying losers who refuse to take responsibility for themselves or anything else, who think everything in the world is somebody else's fault and that that is enough of an excuse to skive, live off family, charity and the state, and generally to sit about with a digit up the backside spouting the most banal racist, homophobic and sexist twaddle.

These make up the congregation, the preached to..... or as we smart-arse atheists have dubbed them, the sheeple.

No wonder, then, that serving convicts who have dropped out of any other education, work or rehabilitation scheme the prison can offer, ex-cons who have worn out the patience of anyone they used to call family or friends (too dumb to stack supermarket shelves and not even house-trained enough to clean toilets) or just failed criminals in general find religion so attractive. For them it is (lack of) business as usual.

Well, I am sure these misfits will be very happy together. And if they kept themselves to themselves (and more importantly funded themselves) it would be nobody else's business.
Problem is, they never will, though constantly poking their noses into ours; all the while having the bare-faced cheek to keep asking for our money to do it.

The Missionary Imposition

I've been watching, with some interest, the increasing placement of 'news' about local Catholic 'community work', especially amongst the Manx Filipino community.
Not a lot of people know this, but last year this island was sent the first Catholic missionary since the time of the Celtic saints. It isn't that the Vatican is concerned for the state of our souls, more that it is worried about missing a gravy train on which other churches were early passengers.
For over a century the island has been adequately served by Anglo-Irish priests, who established churches for a growing Irish community in the late 19^th century. It is only fair to note that in doing so they also met head on the racist prejudices of that time against both the Irish and Jewish community, which manifested themselves in everything from petty objections over planning permission through to denial of schooling, housing and social services. From the 1930's until the mid 1980's (when we started to see the arrival of evangelical bigots who couldn't cope with a newly equal Northern Ireland) it seemed that anti-Catholicism was a dead duck.
Since then, apart from the Paisleyites, everyone else got on fine until a newer wave of 'guest workers' from strongly Catholic Eastern European countries, particularly Poland. But while the church made a show of caring about the welfare of Polish workers, the blunt truth was that many were educated young professionals here to escape not just Polish unemployment but the rebirth of the Catholic extreme right, so the last thing they wanted was more interfering priests.
Which made the arrival of Filipino guest workers a relief to such clerics. Here seemed to be more fervent religionists, except that in rejecting the Marcos regime Filipinos also started to take an interest in other brands of Christianity, particularly US televangelism, which meant that while here they were ripe for turning by (ironically enough) Paisley's sectarian chums.
So a battle for souls commenced. Except that, of course, none of these churches is quite as concerned as they say about the minds and bodies of exploited workers and their families.
The real interest is that people who work here to support families 'back home' send back a large percentage of their hard-earned income. Money meant to feed, clothe, educate and provide the medical needs of less fortunate relatives, but which might, with a little misinformation, also be directed toward religious 'charities' which claim to do the same thing, while actually keeping the poor under the thumb of anti-democratic chancers who, from way before the time of theo-fascists like Mother Teresa, always prop up the likes of Marcos.
If you want to get an idea of the problem, try Googling 'Filipino Freethinkers' and seeing their lively and humorous take on such matters. I guarantee you will laugh, but also never again consider the antics of 'religious charities' in the Philippines and their Manx allies quite so innocent or well meaning.

No sense, no taste

We were at the Isle of Man Festival of Food and Drink yesterday. 

I have to say, it’s good to see the Manx government do something right. In this case, assemble some of the worst things about the island in one place, fence it off, and then make the public pay to go in. At £5 a pop that puts off all but the hardened masochists.

Seriously though, much of the food was, frankly, a bit naff, though as I had to drive the family home afterwards to shop for real food I never visited the beer tent. For no charge (if you really wanted to) you could find the same vendors at any local event with stalls, or for a quid or so towards fixing the church roof or providing wells to African kids find a better selection of homemade produce at any charity fayre.

Yes, seriously, I would rather pay a token amount to a church whose beliefs I don’t share than hand over yet more money to the government for them to try and interest us yet again in publicly subsidised local produce that few of us really like and many of us cannot afford. As someone who is, of necessity, on a healthy diet I also have to point out that even moderate regular amounts of most of the food on offer would, far from improving your health, kill you quicker than smoking,  most of the illegal substances government health workers tell us to avoid and any of the currently legal ones they would like to be illegal in future.

Funny old world, isn't it?

Another thing that worries me – why did Living Hell seem to get a free pass to abuse small kids under the pretence of providing a crèche? When organisations like the Children’s Centre are also getting heavy public subsidies why weren’t they there instead? 
Another case of parents who can (and must) do, non-parents who can’t (or just shouldn’t) get paid by government to preach? 

Turned off, tuneless …paid out?

Port St Mary is hardly ‘upmarket’ even by seaside town standards, but amusingly it seems even their residents have some limits.

This http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=65537 was a positive story in a week that has been otherwise a bit ‘so-so’. The Manx Indy’s take on it (not yet online) tries to hint at over–reaction - and Living Hell are, obviously, trying to drum up Christian persecution for all it’s worth - but this would be nonsense.

For the record, a Port St Mary ‘beach mission’ had run amicably enough for almost a century until Living Hell got involved. Since then relations between residents, beachgoers and born-again headbangers have gone rapidly downhill.

No, the truth is a lot simpler. They are too loud, too painful to listen to (even with tongue firmly in cheek) and their message is too bigoted, even for Southern rednecks.

Imagine an over-40s night at some Wetherspoon’s hell-hole (see http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/wetherspoons-to-open-uks-first-human-zoo-2013060470772 for example) and you might be close. The ‘music’ generally consists of repetitive drones, up to 20 minutes in length, punctuated by startling banshee wails and while the song titles vary deliberately (and the pitch accidentally) the words are few and almost interchangeable. This, close observers suggest, is possibly because their core audience commonly suffer short term memory loss, so may just think they are at a Sunday version of whatever day-care they attend the rest of the week.

It is bad enough when the howling of so many distressed souls escapes through the asylum windows each Sunday morning. But imagine that outdoors, on a beach frequented by innocent families, and we are talking serious public health hazard, not to mention the last nail in the coffin for the tourist trade. “Never mind noise abatement, call the MSPCA”, some might cry.

Incidentally, key figures in such antics were spotted with Northern allies at a farewell concert for one of the genuine Ramsey clergy recently. The sight of evangelical panhandlers en masse (as they inevitably are when free food or public money is on offer) was enough to put everyone else off their fairy cakes. It was startling to watch them hovering round the food table, sarnies in both hands and coat pockets overflowing with cake put aside for a later lonely midnight snack while watching God TV (at least that’s what they say they are watching, and if found doing otherwise it must be for ‘research purposes’ into the nature of contemporary sin).

The only question on anyone’s mind was: “if they came 30 miles each way just for a bag of free buns, which government department got the expense claim for the petrol?”

We're Do-o-o-med!

We’ve had the oddest letter this week, which had me roaring with laughter and Management almost exploding in fury.

It seems Ramsey Baptist Church are going door to door asking if anyone wants them to pray for anything. This is the intellectually challenged clown troupe who wave their hands in the air like they just don’t care every Sunday down at the local primary school because, given sight of a ten pound note, the Education Department have less self-respect than a desperate crack whore.

Well, they could always pray for a collective two figure IQ between their entire congregation, but they shouldn’t expect miracles.

Seriously though. On the one hand, a religious zealot is rapidly dismantling what is left of the welfare state and any sense of collective responsibility or neighbourliness this septic isle ever had. On the other, all kinds of evangelical monsters are crawling out of the primeval swamp, picking off the lonely, the dispossessed, and other victims of this neo-nastiness.

How sick is that?

If I thought Ramsey had local politicians I would write to them, pointing out that such opportunism is on a par with cowboy builders who try to worry you into ‘replacing’ roof tiles then scarper with your cash. But as Captain Mannering (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=65011 ) has just taken charge at Trumpton Town Hall for the fourth successive term I doubt Dad’s Army will be on this case (or any other) within the decade.

So that’s it then. As Private Frazer would say “We’re all doomed”.

Though not as doomed as the Zombie Carpenter’s charmless chums when they knock on our door and Management answers it.

Evolution-deniers on tour

Since my last post I've been digging further into the subject, and it appears that the Isle of Man is just one source of  easy cash from slow-witted folk with deep pockets. In fact the professional evolution-denier in question is on something of a UK tour of science-free backwaters, starting next weekend.

What is more disturbing is that, while the intellectually-challenged elsewhere will only host Mackay’s wacko antics once before pointing the way to the next houseful of eejits,  the Isle of Man is letting him spew his guff an incredible SEVEN times. Admittedly, four of these are being hosted by Broadway Batwits, but one of them is described as a ‘youth service’, and that has to be really worrying. Especially if you consider that some of the likely punters include public and third sector ‘professionals' who deal with vulnerable sectors of society.

See the full itinerary at http://www.amen.org.uk/cr/where/ . Note at once the absence of a date in any venue which might be even loosely described as a font of academic (or even theological) wisdom. And even swivel-eyed loons like that are not dumb enough to listen to Mackay twice.

The Isle of Man as an emerging British Isles centre for conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, and antics peculiar to three-nippled, cousin-marrying, superstitious peasants in general? What an awful vision! 

Not quite the international image our wise government pays all those PR agencies so much to create, is it?

Pay back time

Sometimes (but not often) that nonsense machine that some call the Manx media throws up some genuine good news. And so it was when I read on the Energy FM website that: “This year's Firestarter Festival has been cancelled due to poor ticket sales.”

Yes, I also had problems believing that hardcore evangelical tub-thumpers can ever admit a plain truth, but go to http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_228203.html if you want to see for yourselves.

Even better is the final sentence of a short and unhappy press release in which the organisers promise that:  “Those people who have bought tickets will receive a full refund.”

So, it seems to be official then. Manx fundamentalists are admitting that - even with many wealthy and unscrupulous friends - they cannot round up enough kids to voluntarily attend their annual weekend prayerfest. Even worse, it seems they no longer have enough friends in the social and probation services to drag some along involuntarily, then send the government the bill.

I wonder which realisation hurt most. The one that no amount of pleading from the pulpit or promises of free sweets in ‘educational support groups’ was going to harvest enough victims (sorry ‘visitors’), or the really frightening one to any evangelical - that they actually have to pay back money received for services they were never going to deliver.

Despite the brave talk, I also doubt they will ‘Do a Terminator’ and come back next year twice as big and twice as ugly.

Gone for good, I think……. and forget about ‘The Rapture’.

Totally.

Centres of Excrement

This (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/district-news/big-plans-for-site-of-albert-road-school-1-4705523 ) worries me. Not a lot – yet – because over the years a lot of idiots have put forward a lot of grandiose schemes to ‘save’ Ramsey, which all fell flat.

Sometimes, it must be admitted, after conning huge wads of public money, and sometimes after wrecking sober plans for decent change which might otherwise have been considered. But they fell, because their proposers and sponsors were idiots so it follows naturally that their schemes were idiotic too.

So is this, because if lunacy was an Olympic discipline this fundament of faith-based folly could win gold without getting out of bed. Which many of their clientele don’t do too often anyway. In fact, judging from the scenes some days around their current den of iniquity the whole CotR empire may be built on tithes from the benefits of the permanently unemployable.

Which is why I worry at least a little. Because if they cannot put up the money for this project, then who is?

Without even digging, I can think of two local developers with form for pulling shady deals using religious groups as a front. In both cases literally millions in public funds and years of effort by public servants have been wasted already. I hope neither of them is up to their old tricks, because if they are the results will be a further disaster for Ramsey.

 But it beggars belief anyway that the Manx government is so willing to give away a valuable chunk of land which is supposed to be earmarked for social housing and community facilities.

And it is a massive insult that the simple and persistent request by Ramsey people for a decent community centre could be answered by letting a ragbag collection of right wing religious lunatics not only plan it, but control it.

Apart from anything else, the best rule of thumb a sane person can have for planning forays into local cultural life is to find out where batwits go to eat or entertain themselves, then avoid it like the plague.

Do you know anyone who has had a wedding reception or ‘charitable function’ at Mount Murray? What church do they and their guests go to?

I rest my case, but would you really want the entire potential for community life in your town controlled by some jazz-handing Jesus junkie clad in beige polyester?

If this freak show gets government help it won’t even be a case of “Will the last person to leave Ramsey turn out the lights.” 

Because there won’t be any lights to turn out. I wouldn’t put it past this lot to nick the light bulbs and sell the lamposts for scrap.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

This herbert (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=45109 ) has been one of the oddest things happening over here this week.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it’s…CROSSMA-A-AN!! Oh, and possibly compulsory workwear if the Christian Institute and Christian Legal Centre ever had their way.

Having first come across the story when a visibly bemused Paul Moulton had to interview him last weekend for Manxnet TV (see http://www.manx.net/tv/mt-tv/watch/5363/cross-the-nations ) - which we can be sure had absolutely nothing to do with several Manxnet staff and a key local advertiser being involved in a bizarre evangelical cult - I was beginning to wonder if it was all hype. Sure, he got coverage in all the local media, but nobody could recall seeing him - and a saddo dragging a 12 foot cross up Manx hills is the kind of thing one tends to notice.

The lunatic fringe of Manx Christianity getting extensive media coverage for something that never actually happened would be nothing new. If you need reasons for this, consider, for example, that the ‘national radio station’ has more ‘religious broadcasting’ than news-gathering staff (though only one godbotherer gets paid to my knowledge) and the news desk only works 8-4 weekdays, and that, since openly moving control, management and production off-island, the ‘national press’ is now interviewing their own staff as nobody else can (or wants to) talk to them.

But he was finally sighted in Ramsey yesterday. To be accurate, he was spotted ‘resting’ at the unused picnic area in the middle of the main street (thanks to the infamous ‘mural’, nobody eats there for fear of throwing up and trade at adjacent sandwich shops has been decimated), though nobody saw him actually walk in or out of the town.

If you were to believe one gushing press interview, he has been happily received by locals all around the island, getting stopped by passing Mercedes drivers, asked to pray for ailing relatives and other such rot. Even if a few lonely nutters did recognize a fellow headcase and ‘inter-acted’, his reception in Ramsey was not warm. To my certain knowledge he was asked only two questions by locals.

Firstly “Isn’t it time you got a job” and secondly “Why don’t you just carry a Kalashnikov? It would still make you look insecure about your manhood, but at least Kalashnikovs haven’t been responsible for as many innocent people dying as that thing.”

If you were wondering who on earth pays for such nonsense, it may help to know that, having started the week off with Onchan’s creationist lobby, he is due to end it at one of Ramsey’s one-man-and-a-dog evangelical outlets tomorrow. There were five at my last count and they do not even talk to each other. The truth is, at the rate they fall out and form new splinter cults there could well be six or seven by the morning, so it is impossible to say where ‘Crossman’ will be preaching, or if anyone will be there to hear him. 

Evangelicals steal Christmas from the poor - again

According to a story at http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_184186.html
“Over 4000 shoe boxes filled with gifts are on their way to disadvantaged children from the Isle of Man.”
If you believe that, I have some shares in a tapioca mine you might like to buy.
On the basis that Samaritan’s Purse demand £1 from anyone daft enough to give them a box, what we do know is that the con-artist behind this scam - Franklin Graham, the repugnant offspring of televangelist Billy Graham – is at least another £4,000 richer because of Manx people with more money than sense. I also wonder if it will get to him the same way funds from other offshore havens used to.
SP, having failed to find anyone dim enough to register and front a bogus Manx or Channel Isles ‘sister charity’, used to have a strange aversion to receiving the donations in a cheque. On at least one occasion, under the guise of a visit to a regional headquarters, a volunteer was instructed to get on a plane with the hard cash in a briefcase, so that it could be added to the donations from that area rather than being traceable to an offshore source.
This, by odd coincidence, would mean the parent charity in the US had no audit trail to a place the IRS takes a particular interest in. In the drug trade (so a helpful Agent Scully lookalike from the FBI once explained to me and others on an FSC money-laundering course) this is known as ‘smurfing’. Funnily enough, in times further back, it was also the favoured method by which rogue Irish politicians delivered their skim-offs and pay-offs to Manx and Jersey banks to hide it from the Irish tax authorities.
What we also know is that those trying to prevent religious conflict in some poorer countries have just got 4,000 new problems, courtesy of the same idiots. Because we also shouldn’t believe the statement that “Children in countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Liberia and Romania will benefit from the gifts.”
SP have a habit of switching the destination after the boxes leave the donors, but never telling them. For example, a few years back, having led everyone to believe they were going to Russian ‘orphanages’ which had been handily photographed during a flying visit in a previous year, the boxes were reloaded onto an SP owned plane flying to Pakistan with one of their US media crews. Once dropped in a Pakistani disaster zone, they were filmed by SP’s PR unit and paraded in front of the world’s press. The PR unit got back on the plane and flew back to their luxury Carolina media headquarters, where the film and photos were glossily repackaged for next year’s campaign literature.
The boxes? Who knows – but by that time they were unfit for use anyway, so probably dumped on the nearest rubbish tip.
As if Franklin Graham and his despicable cohorts would care about starving Muslims anyway. This is, after all, the guy who even Southern Baptists shunned after he suggested the US Army fly Bibles into Iraq along with the initial invasion force.
This is the outfit who would only allow victims of a Southern American disaster to use tents provided to SP by a US government agency if they formally renounced Catholicism first, and whose tame US Army chaplains told astonished refugees from bombing in Iraq that they could only use the refugee centre showers after attending prayer meetings and bible classes.
Every year I’m pleasantly surprised by the continued willingness of Manx people to help the less fortunate.
But I’m disgusted by the evangelical pondlife who take advantage, and line their pockets by stealing from the world’s poorest people.

Damp squib

More evidence yesterday that the evangelical lunatic fringe is in recession.
I’ve blogged once or twice on the desperate efforts of the Scripture Union to recruit smaller and smaller kids, and how despite Education Department support they’re failing. ‘Take the Smarties and Run’ – must be the most popular game in some junior school playgrounds these days.
Now see http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=11214 , and a near relative at http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=28288&area and discover that even the most barefaced bible-blaggers this island can churn out are losing. Also, nice to see them admit what we’ve always known, that the numbers attending their annual hyped-to-hell-and-back ‘yoof fest’ are minimal.
Once the usual visitors (three or four extended families from a part of England best known to medical experts for extensive inbreeding) are detached we’re left with….....what exactly? Half a dozen preachers trying to outshout each other, any kids too young to stay home in case someone from the DHSS peeks through the window, recognises them as the same kids they’ve already counted as some other godbotherer’s and cuts the whole congregation’s benefits…....and that would be about it.
Think about this – if expecting up to 100 is their biggest year yet, what must the real figures have been in previous years? Also bear in mind, after unfortunate incidents in early years which only went unreported due to favours being called in, the organisers don’t let local media on site to look around or take photos. Thus all reports and pictures are from the organisers themselves.
For off-island readers, Firestarter is run by some dubious characters from the island’s most notorious evangelical cult, with much of the cost underwritten by even more dodgy folk. This year they’re back in their old venue – a campsite set up with grants from government and churches which was meant to cater for a fictitious Christian tourist trade.
Last year the whole freak show moved to St. Johns, heartland of the local BNP and godbothering rednecks. Not sure why – could have been part of a concerted effort by the island’s most notorious faith-biased parasites to establish the site of the Tynwald Ceremony as ‘Christian’, though more likely because there was a government grant going begging or the usual campsite actually expected them to pay all the gas and electricity bills they ran up.
Might have been because the white-flighters who hang out at the golf club bar next door complained when howling godbotherers drowned out their vacuous drunken rants. Might have just been because Ramsey’s RNLI volunteers point blank refused to pull any more dozy Christians out of the water, where they had a tendency to go paddling late at night (while blissed out after marathon prayer-fests) then get right out of their depth.
Anyway, they’re back up here. Sadly I have a previous appointment in a sunnier clime, so when the inevitable happens and the golfers and godbotherers bump into each other again I won’t be there to see which sad act comes out on top.
Oh, and you might want to take a note of the sponsors too. There’s really no excuse for this nonsense, so no respectable business would go near it.

Horrible history

The sheer cretinism of Isle of Man Department of Education staff beggars belief sometimes. In particular, their willingness to hand vulnerable kids over to fundamentalist pondlife really is a national disgrace.
Take last week, when according to the Isle of Man Courier, nine and ten year olds from local schools attended Lifepaths, a week of evangelical brainwashing at Rushen Abbey co-organised ( in theory) by the Education Department, Manx Heritage and…Scripture Union Ministries Trust.
Supposedly, the Education Department used Manx Heritage to give the kids a historical experience. Fair enough, even though Manx Heritage’s idea of history is (at best) fact-lite plastic patriotism and (more often) little more than tourist-orientated shite.
So why were SUMT there?
Well, again according to the Courier, to give “perspective on being a younger Christian in the 21st century”. In short, to brainwash kids too small and scared to fight back.
This (see http://www.connect2charity.im/charities/charity_92271.html) is the official line on SUMT. And if you check under ‘events’ you’ll be interested to find that:

“Lifepath is an education day for Year 5 pupils, they will have the opportunity to come and explore the concept of faith, prayer and the lifestyle of a Christ follower, through the life of a Cistercian Monk from the 11th Century.
300 children are coming to join SUMT across the week. With a team of 60 volunteers throughout the week each day will be packed with energy, craft activities, songs, drama, laughter, wigs and a whole lot more!”

So, pure Christofascist brainwashing and nothing to do with objective education then. And so again you have to ask, why were the Education Department letting a dangerous bunch of fundie flat-earthers with form for child-molesting loose with hundreds of local kids?
Because, make no mistake, SUMT are not just harmless sad-acts with an imaginary invisible friend.
Amongst last week's volunteers, to my certain knowledge, were people who in 1998 helped ‘persuade’ the victims of a notorious faith-biased kiddy-fiddler not to give evidence in court. Thankfully, though most caved in to the threats and so the full extent of this perv's actions were never revealed in court, one family stood their ground and he was convicted. His friends (including a protege of James Anderton) 'stood by him' as he went to jail. The brave family who stood up to the evangelical scum left the island soon after to avoid retaliations.
Also amongst last week's SUMT staff was a character who has, several times, been reported to the Dept of Education for harassing under age girls with text messages while, in theory, ‘mentoring’ teenagers at a local school.
Needless to say (at a time when the Education Minister was himself of notoriously fundamentalist views) the Department of Education took no action. Even worse, two Education Ministers later and this sad, middle aged loser is still ‘mentoring’ (i.e. pestering teenage girls whose personal contact details he obtains with the help of schoolteachers who share his sad delusions about imaginary friends).
At least SUMT’s tactics aren’t working at my daughter’s primary school, where she tells me their sad efforts to run a lunchtime Bible club are being outwitted.
In an effort to draw at least a few kids in, SUMT volunteers are reduced to offering handfuls of sweets to anyone who’ll enter the room. So, in response the kids have created a new game called ‘Take the Smarties and run’.

More government mugs on drugs

Ah well, even as the UK and Manx governments introduce a pointless ban on one ‘legal high’, the market has moved on (see, for example http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/apr/18/drug-replace-ban-mephedrone).
For the benefit of public sector drones, I think you’ll find that’s called ‘market research’. Businesses in the real world do it all the time. What’s known in marketing as ‘SWOT analysis’ (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). Basic FE college stuff for business studies kiddies, but harder than rocket science, apparently, for bumbling public sector and ‘third sector’ parasites who live off the taxes of others.
There’s a really, really simple point here which the clueless anti-drug industry is missing. Drug dealers weren’t flogging legal highs, innovative and quite legal small businesses were.
The folk behind such initiatives are well used to thinking on their feet, for example to avoid being overtaxed or burdened with long term liabilities. They spot new trends and jump on while they’re rising, they jump off well before flat-footed government employees create obstacles or the market in last year’s novelty item collapses. These are not thugs sleeping with a sawn-off beside the bed to see off competitors; they’re embryonic Richard Bransons.
Which makes it all the funnier to see our local drug czars continuing to pimp the fundie product of Christofascist ‘family values’ cults (see
http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/freedrugandalcoh.xml) under the pretence of ‘educating parents’.
Can I just make another simple observation on this?
In my entire experience of life - in numerous UK inner cities - I have never heard of a drug dealer brazen enough to claim his product offered life after death. And I have never heard of a junkie dumb enough to believe it.
Evangelical Christianity? Now THAT is a drug industry that needs some serious investigation if civil servants and small town politicians need a point to their lives. A scam run by the totally unscrupulous, patronised by the totally clueless.
And while we’re looking at ‘government mugs on drugs’, try
http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2010/04/absolute-non-surprise-of-week.html for some views from the UK libertarian community.
Even wilder is http://www.cnbc.com/id/36267220/ , where I saw something I wouldn’t believe possible. A Texan Republican talking sense about drug issues.

Foreign aid or local ignorance?

There’s an item on Manxnet’s news page today that further undermines my faith in the intelligence or integrity of Manx businesses.
Not only did the Steam Packet help one of the worst charity scams running on the island. They boasted about it at http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=9351
The item, about a building firm getting free ferry tickets to (in theory) take aid to Romanians, ends with Isle of Man Steam Packet Company Chief Executive Mark Woodward saying: “We are delighted to be able to show our support for such a worthwhile charity. This expedition will make a difference to the poor, needy and homeless in Romania.”
Congratulations, muppet, you just helped a US evangelical outfit , not the imaginary victims they invented, and you may even be party to a major fraud or attempts to destabilise another country’s economy and democratic sytem.
You see,contrary to what they’d have you believe, Hands of Hope isn’t a Manx charity. It’s run by some very dodgy US evangelists operating from London who my wife and I once had contact with. That contact, amongst a lot of other very iffy business, caused us to advise anyone against ever helping these chancers.
It began when my wife offered some simple minded local biblebashers help getting documents translated for an apparently innocent trip to Romania. The more we spoke to folk, the more things didn’t add up, and the more worried we got that something far nastier was going on.
For example, their strange insistence on buying stuff locally, instead of over there at twice the quality and a tenth of the price at building merchants Romanian friends (including a Lutheran priest) offered to introduce them to. Or their refusal to use local labour to build some very shabby huts the average Romanian farmer wouldn’t keep a pig in (passed off as ‘houses for the needy’). Or the shady US evangelicals continually avoiding revealing who they really were or worked for, and an apparent interest in getting Romanians into the UK on tourist visas.
We worked out the overpriced goods scam when they admitted they’d cut a deal with a fellow Manx evangelical (a salesman for a building supplies firm) to split his commission with him. We guessed how big that deal was when he ‘retired’ to a country with no expedition treaty.
Some of the other curious stuff? Well, we just gave up trying to track down the truth. The sudden reluctance to answer questions told us all we needed to know to walk away fast, i.e. that the project wasn’t just another bunch of unemployable Manx semi-literates blundering around a foreign country getting sniggered at until they wised up.
How do they still get away with it, and why isn’t anybody in the Manx business community or government asking better questions before dispensing overseas aid and charitable donations?
Better ask them that, and, if you do, hope the answers only reveal us as a nation governed by village idiots.

No Manx justice, just this mess

At long last someone is taking a proper look at our rotten island prison. Sadly, still not the Department of Home Affairs.
Positive Action Group brought over a speaker from the Howard League recently. Predictably he wasn’t impressed at a set-up which involved handing far too much public money over to a bunch of cowboy contractors for a jerry-built slum. He was even less impressed at a justice system which fills 40% of said overpriced slum with folk who haven’t even been to court yet – and that’s only judging from official figures!
You can read about that at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Paying-a-high-price-for.5700108.jp. And then one of the few local advocates interested in justice had his say at http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=39310.
All in all, not very impressive, and that isn’t even half the story. For example, can anyone explain why the only folk arrested to get bail are those prepared to sit through a daily prayer meeting at the island’s only bail hostel? In short, if you’re of any religious persuasion except an evangelical Christian one, or have no interest in the supernatural, bail is not available. Neither is a balanced probation report when or if you finally get to court.
And it gets worse. At some point a story will appear in the local press, probably under a byline, which suggests our youth justice system has impressed the experts.
It hasn’t, and if you want the untainted original DHA press release (written by a moonlighting Johnston Press hack if their previous stuff is any guide) you can find it at http://www.gov.im/fsc/ViewNews.gov?page=lib/news/dha/probation/workofyouthjusti.xml&menuid=11570.
Cut through the gloss and spin at the beginning and go straight to the bad news tucked away ‘incidentally’ towards the end.
What the inspectors actually said was that our youth justice system is run by a bunch of unco-ordinated amateurs and doesn’t work. In effect, what they were saying is it’s time the island actually got a youth justice system.

Bibles wreck your teeth

The young ‘un’s just come home from school with a funny story that’s made our day.
Most of the lunchtime clubs have a steady flow of kids, based on no more than teachers outlining the choices and times in the first week. Gladdens your heart – so much for today’s kids being lazy or lacking interest in learning stuff that won’t fit into the regular curriculum.
But one is failing so miserably that it has to bribe the kids with sweets. That one being the Bible Club. So, not just mind rot, tooth rot too.
Sad bunch of deluded kiddy-fiddlers. High time some teacher showed them the door for public health reasons.

No Paseran!

Well, as I said in the previous post, I’m back.
Actually, I’ve been back over a week but was re-adjusting to Kipper Republic reality and thinking through all I’ve seen and done while away in Hungary. I’ve been looking through stuff like the local free papers piled on the doormat, or the weekly NSS ‘Newsline’ (previously a small source of sanity in a deluded world) and I feel like a Martian.
For example, contributors to a National Secular Society forum reduced to suggesting that a ‘protest’ by a bunch of BNP rejects, the English Defence League, might count as a legitimate one against an alleged future threat of English ‘Islamofascism’. I can’t even be bothered writing in, just look at any of the ever reliable Richard Bartholomew’s work on such topics – e.g. http://barthsnotes.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/edl-again/ or http://barthsnotes.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/english-defence-league-interviewed-by-veteran-us-anti-gay-bigot/ and work it out for yourselves.
But even before returning from Hungary I’d decided this blog has to change direction.
What I saw there was a growing threat from fascism caused by a corrupt government which pretends the working class no longer exists. The inevitable result is that powerless people turn to the false answers of the only folk who claim to care (i.e. neo-nazis and the churches) who feed off each other’s lies and pick on the same culprits (foreigners, the undeserving poor, gays, uppity women….). What depressed me more was seeing intellectuals (even Jewish ones), while not joining the outright fascists for obvious reasons, going along with the general analysis.
Is this sounding familiar?
The thing is, I’ve long argued that religious evangelicals (Christian in the Manx case) and fascists work the same way and feed off the same targets. They see a breakdown in society (real or the result of media who’d rather jump on an easy myth or parrot a government PR handout than do the research), people who feel vulnerable or afraid, and they leech on it. They bang on council house doors and offer false hope, while those I’ve looked to recently as allies shudder at the very thought of a council house.
Saddest thing is, I grew up on those estates too and should know better. My grandparents all left school at 14, my parents at 15, not from choice but from class and religious prejudice.
My godmother – brilliant at maths but couldn’t get a scholarship at 13 ‘because a Taig would only go and waste it’ then spent her life book-keeping for middle class dullards.
Her dad – fought off Loyalist thugs in Edinburgh streets and got a Jewish kid out of Czechoslovakia in 1939 by pretending to be her uncle, then turned down the foreman’s job at the brewery where he worked (owned by her real uncle) rather than help the boss keep his workmates in line.
My paternal grandfather - who taught me you always fight fascists, but not foreigners or others of your own class, after having his life saved in World War One by a German.
My paternal grandmother - a Sally Army street preacher in the 1920’s when, as a single woman, she couldn’t even vote - never mind preach in a ‘proper’ church.
My wife’s grandfather, conscripted into the Hungarian Army in 1944 and sent to the Russian Front – only documents recently released from the Russian hospital where he died, having never fired a shot, revealed he’d been a secret Communist Party member throughout the fascist Horthy regime era.
I could go on, but you get the point. Couple of degrees and a whiff of a smug Oxford biologist’s generalities and I’m laughing at my own heritage, not nailing the bastards who keep others down.
Well not any more.
From now on I don’t confuse class with ignorance, and don’t deal in generalities concocted by those who want to hang on to power and repeated by those too lazy to ask questions.
But I will devote time to explaining how scams like Freedom to Flourish are used by the Manx government, religious interests and corporate bodies to destroy real community and replace it with astroturf (pseudo ‘grass roots’ activity) controlled by them.
And I will blog more on those who fight back against fascism (secular or religious), be it in East Europe, the Middle East or far nearer home.
Speaking of which, the International Campaign Against Honour Killings website (see sidebar) is down for maintenance, having been attacked so often.
ICHK should wear such attacks as a medal. Unlike many of us cyber-dilettantes, it seems they are having a real world effect.