Do E Mek E Larrff, Nelson?

As someone who during the 1980's (and even the late 1990's) got grief for constantly pointing out that our finance sector was originally built on helping apartheid era South Africa avoid economic sanctions I had to raise an ironic eyebrow at

http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/60035/island-s-south-african-community-pay-tribute-to-mandela .

So would that be the same Terry Toohey who (prior to being offered a job here by a former punter) ran publicity at Sun City, the notorious 'Seff Effrican' whites-only venue no international entertainer worth watching wanted to play?

And in the late 1980's didn't the Manx government, having just created a tourist policy based on subtly attracting ageing Brit racists to 'Look forward to going back' , then come up with a new resident policy intended to entice thick and wealthy 'white flighters' fleeing countries about to experience democracy?

What sniggering noise?

Me?

Happy holiday

I’ve just wasted an entire afternoon of my precious holidays, in which all I learnt was that my daughter can pull side-splittingly funny faces at the drop of a hat.

The serious intent was to get an ‘informal’ photo of me in my workaday suit. This at the behest of some marketing consultants who decided that, in order to emphasise we work for a ‘people company’, my fellow employees and I should provide mug shots for the corporate website. Naturally, we had to arrange these in our own time, with our own resources, because the ‘creatives’ who thought the whole imbecilic scheme up had other worries - getting dressed in the morning without professional help, for example.

In addition, said ‘creatives’ also provided a shopping list of ‘wants’, from format to maximum file size, resolution, etc. etc., from which I suspect they also can’t use a camera and definitely can’t use Photoshop, which might also explain why they haven’t arranged to take the piccies themselves. Alternatively, it might just be that being such clueless numpties they never thought of it.

As I don’t own a digital camera, I decided the safest bet was to ask the nearest acquaintance with the most expensive digital camera apparatus. Bish, Bash, Bosh. Done in about two minutes, e-mail to my office, change back into a human being and head off for an ice-cream with the light of my life – or so I thought.

 It quickly became obvious that the reason those with more money than sense buy expensive designer techno toys for art ‘projects’ is that they cannot use the cheap and cheerful stuff with which amateurs (who know and love what they do) create art that brightens up your life if they give you it (rather than wondering how quickly you can bung it in a dustbin without upsetting the creator).

A few minutes in and I was already a nervous wreck, which was when I had the bright idea of asking my girl to pull faces behind the photographer, so I’d smile to order instead of steaming at the ears. It worked a treat, shot after wasted shot after shot as we fell about laughing until we had one to provide the required impression of a suited chimp on Prozac the management and their pet airheads ordered.

At which point it was time to fire up the equally expensive computer gizmos on which the mug shot would be processed and e-mailed to me. It then became obvious that we could have produced it with a pinhole camera, developed it and sent it by pony faster than just finding the right file type and folder to save the first shot to computer –never mind the tricky stuff.

To cut a long story short, the results took hours and are not useable, so tomorrow we try again. This time at my wife’s lower-tec workplace, where they may have no branding team but have offered to snap me with any cheap camera handy, transfer it to a computer and e-mail it to me all within a tea-break.

The drag is I have to don the straitjacket again and waste more time when my daughter and I should just be enjoying our respective holidays from duller places. The brighter side is a whole new audience gets to see her amazing and spontaneous face-pulling, as do my wife and I.

And if, by chance, she ever runs out of new and startling faces, I can always get the required smile imagining an entire marketing team falling under a bus instead.

The Right is wrong, but sometimes so are the good guys

This (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/overseas-aid-pays-dividends-1-5371644 ) had the usual halfwits grumbling for their usual reasons.

The irony is that anyone with even a basic grounding in developing world affairs should have spotted the real joke. As no-one has, maybe I should point it out.

The SCFMC started as a speculative money spinner between the Isle of Man Business School and the Said Business School in Oxford, neither of whom are noted as philanthropists, caring ‘world citizens’ or ( to be blunt about it) honest and open in their affairs. Neither come anywhere near the standards of transparency and plain dealing expected of the international business community.

For off-island readers, the Isle of Man Business School project was intended to be the island’s ‘university’ – at least for a finance sector that was finding it hard to recruit suitably educated locals and a government which wanted to avoid the cost of a UK or US university education for anyone driven enough to get it, come back and put their skills to work here. As might be expected of a project ‘suggested’ to government by a property speculator who once boasted of friendships with Richard Nixon and Billy Graham, it went wrong from day one. Much to the amusement of locals, the wheels really fell off when it emerged that the academics didn’t understand elementary book-keeping and the whole thing was losing money hand over fist.

For the general benefit of anyone who doesn’t follow skulduggery in the international arms trade, the Said Business School owes much to the benevolence of Saudi-Syrian business magnate Wafic Said. His £23 million contribution came at about the time that the UK government decided it was not in the country’s interests to investigate allegations of large-scale bribery when the UK defence industry did so nicely out of arms sales to the Saudis. Take, for example, the Al Yamamah affair (in which, incidentally, a former Isle of Man lieutenant governor played quite a hand).

The investigations Blair decided against had been pretty much carried out already by Campaign Against the Arms Trade in the UK (despite a shoestring budget and denial of much likely material on ‘national security’ grounds ). Since then, the US government has also looked into it, and being firstly privy to most of the likely evidence and secondly not about to take ‘No’ for an answer from some piss-ant poor relation, it got the stuff CAAT could not and trashed off the UK arms trade and their Whitehall chums like some ailing banana republic.

Oh, another funny thing. Having originally checked out the Wafic Said stuff years ago, I just rechecked a couple of things and noticed how heavily his Wikipedia entry has been re-edited.

Oddly enough, Bell-Pottinger (which brokered talks between the Saudis and Downing Street when the bribery investigation was mooted) offers a service to contemporary clients which monitors Wikipedia, Google and similar internet services to stop awkward stuff appearing about tyrants and major league scumbags in general.

Even odder, the Global Poverty Project uses Bell Pottinger too. Nobody in my circle of good guy anti-sleaze hounds (e.g. CAAT, Transparency International, Corporate Watch, Oxford Research Group… ) knows why.  Hopefully it is just that the GPP is as astonishingly naïve as some supporters – folk whose hearts are definitely in the right place but whose research comes from La-La Land.

Brand Zero

For the last few months I have been a reluctant local observer to a pointless ‘rebranding’ exercise. In the last few days the noise from empty heads stopped and the ‘product’ was launched at a glitzy private reception.

It would be too cruel to identify it. Suffice to say it flopped within 10 minutes but the self-obsessed marketers were too dumb to notice the sniggering of their guests, many of whom were present by compulsion rather than choice.  Seriously (or should that be “not so seriously”?), I was laughing so hard I had to sneak out after less than half an hour of the most ill-advised antics since 1980’s rock stars (allegedly) served coke on the shaven heads of dwarfs.

As I said to some real creative friends elsewhere that night, “Now I know what David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel did when Spinal Tap broke up.” Yes, it was that bad, and at least one screw-up was eerily similar to the ‘Stonehenge’ cock-up in that classic send-up of naff arty types with delusions of adequacy.

Many months back, I had visions of what we might be in for when I accidentally discovered that the chumps trousering a six figure consultancy fee were led by someone who insisted on being called Binky, who appeared to have graduated from Cheltenham Ladies College circa 1970, dropped some bad acid and lived off the commissions of fellow rich inbreeds ever since.

It never ceases to amaze me how expensively educated people can have nothing but belly-fluff where most people keep their brain cells. I was around folk like Bill Drummond and Tony Wilson when they were starting out. I enjoyed myself, and I have a real soft spot for eccentrics and mavericks. But that was 30 years ago, and they were working on a shoestring and investing all they had.

Dipshit corporate ‘characters’ who risk only the family lives of real people are another matter. And anyway, while the business world talks vapidly of ‘edginess’ or ‘thinking outside the box’ the council estate all-or-nothing visionaries I loved, laughed and learnt with were simply not constrained by a box which only exists as a sort of collective hallucination.

Another thing you notice on these occasions is that, sadly, most of the brightest, most interesting people on the island are working for peanuts in the hospitality industry. More accurately, serving peanuts to clueless wasters who were lucky enough to be born here, or to be the offspring of economic refugees from emergent democracies.

It was like that back in 1983, when I first arrived here. These days the nationalities have changed but the pay has not, and the working conditions have got worse.

I hope those bright and beautiful wage slaves go on to better things, because they deserve it. But like me, at least for now they can laugh at naff products spawned by the stunted imagination of those employing them for less-than-minimum wages.

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.

Lies are never a match for elegant truths

According to a press release put out by what is passed off as the Manx Health and Social Services (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/health/yourhealthyourwa.xml):

“Self Management is an integral part of daily life and is all about individuals taking responsibility for their own health and wellbeing, with support from the people involved in their care and in conjunction with care received from health and social care professionals.”

Well…no, actually it is not.
What it is really about is government not providing services to the weak and vulnerable which used to be seen as a minimum in a civilised society. It is about two-faced lying hypocrites (some of whom are on £100K+ salaries, so will never need worry about health service cutbacks) taking away from those on the breadline the difference between getting by and dying slowly and painfully, then trying to pass off that closure of basic public services as a carefully considered independent decision not to use them by poor sods who never even had a chance to give an opinion - never mind decline.
This has to rank as the nastiest, most cynical piece of marketing ever done at public expense in recent years on the Isle of Man by thieves whose salaries are actually paid by the people they steal most from.
The sickest joke is that the Manx government (and certainly the NHS) does not let responsible adults take decisions over their lives anyway. It simply does not think they are capable.
Take the nanny-statist ‘public health’ twaddle spouted about cigarettes, alcohol and any pharmaceutical product those close to government cannot get an easy kickback from.
Take the laughable attempts at drug and alcohol ‘education’ from self-perpetuating quasi-governmental agencies who know less about the topic than the average teenager.
Having already proscribed alcohol to the extent it is harder for a respectable adult to buy it than, say, crack cocaine or heroin, take the attempts we will no doubt see in the near future to ensure cigarette smokers can only obtain their simple pleasures in the sordid sort of ways blokes used to buy fairly innocuous girlie mags back in the 1960s.
Take the far more serious attempt to close down debate over assisted suicide, such that intelligent people who have simply decided (like the elderly relative at a lively party) that enough is enough, thank you very much, and now they’d like to be on their way just cannot make a dignified exit.
Is this all really because of concerns over ‘public health’, and the drain on the taxpayers, or worries that the old and disabled will feel under pressure to pop their clogs from pushy relatives and neighbours?
Or is it just because it wouldn’t generate enough income for the godbothering, incapable chums of the legislators.
You know, all those faith-led ‘advisory agencies’ and ‘therapists’. All those places where the terminally ill are ‘helped’ to extend their death as long as possible, while purveyors of pointless ‘alternative therapies’ try and flog lotions and candles from Tesco at Harrods prices, and priests hover around the soon-to-be-bereaved in the hope Great Aunt Maude will remember their ‘kindness’ in her will before she turns her toes up.
To all of them, may I quote a letter by David Hockney, published recently in the Guardian in response to some tiresome Aussie who has caused further inconvenience to the public in that once free-spirited, live-and-let-live country. Change the context from tobacco to almost any other free choice made by intelligent adults (and endangered by the antics of superstitious prohibitionists) and it is still just as powerful and elegant an argument against toytown barbarism from one of the last of an endangered species – a civilised adult who knows his own mind.

"Why doesn't Mr Chapman debate with a good and satisfied customer of the tobacco companies (Plain packs will make smoking history, 25 January)? Someone who has seen what will replace it as a smoothing, calming contemplative helper. Someone whose friends died of alcohol consumption, not tobacco. Someone who has smoked for nearly as long as he has lived. Someone who knows about the fanatical attitude of haters of tobacco. Someone who is not so naive about advertising and packaging.

Someone who has almost outlived a fanatical anti-smoking father. Someone who is fed up to the teeth with people who think they really know what health is. Someone who is not afraid of the cowardly, crooked politicians who stifle the debate about pleasure in the now. Someone who knows that time is elastic. Someone who knows how easy it is to lie with statistics. Someone who is not a professional agitator, who knows there is no such thing as a professional smoker but knows there are hundreds of dreary, professional, highly paid anti-smokers.

Someone who thinks laughter is good for you as it drains fear from the body. Someone who has something better to do than to try and control the quiet lives of others. Someone who knows we are all a bit different and is fed up with the growing regimentation of people. Someone who knows that smokers can live perfectly average-length lives but heavy drinkers rarely. Someone who is shocked by the growing conformity among people, and what that might mean for a reasonable free society. Someone who prefers the centre of Bohemia to Australian suburbia. Someone who knows we have to die.

David Hockney
Bridlington,
East Yorkshire"

(hat tip to Chris Snowdon at Velvet Glove, Iron Fist for the David Hockney letter)

I'll tell you what you want, what you really, really want

Poor old Hugh Davidson. If the last real advertising campaign you worked on was probably the Playtex Cross Your Heart bra, how do you hold your head up in later years?
His 'official' profession wrote off such monochrome stuff in the 1980’s. As the publishing world, even then, was awash with pulped ‘memoirs’ from advertising’s golden era, he gamely reinvented his as ‘marketing manuals’ to try to cash in on the business guru/self-help boom of that hideous, shoulder-padded era. In turn his grateful publishers (I always suspect just to stop him hanging out in reception and scaring off newer clients) arranged a largely honorary ‘professorship’ at a ‘business college’ no truly ambitious teenage Sugar clone went near - being far too busy and successful knocking out dodgy videos from a barrow if we are to believe the hype.
When the wheels fell off vanity publishing and pedagogy, other geriatric marketing gurus were reduced to flogging their dubious talents to third rate offshore tax havens. It didn’t work out for any of them, because when the governments of such backwaters did their sums they found the rate at which custom was ebbing away was exceeded only by the ludicrous sums such chumps demanded for the alzheimer-induced ravings they passed off as ‘consultancy’.
Not to mention the tightening up of regulatory regimes, the OECD, etc., etc., which had the effect of getting the serious offshore world to engage with the real business community and the rest to go to the wall.
Except in the Isle of Man of course, where, as the finance sector and a few Treasury bods just got on with business, Uncle Hugh was talking to the swivel-eyed loons who run the rest of government. Entranced, like so many six year olds with learning difficulties, by his shiny baubles and fancy words, they sanctioned ‘Freedom to Fester’ – surely the daftest concept since…..well, the Cross Your Heart bra (which only MLCs are old enough to remember -and media trainspotters like me mad enough to trawl through old videos for in search of stone age advertising methodology).
Now the Alzheimers Army are at it again. See http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_159572.html for details of a ‘political poll’ which, reading between the lines, cannot even be flogged to the cash-strapped Fools on the Hill, hence Hugh’s kind funding.
To save you some trouble, I will explain something simple.
In genuine academic research involving public consultation, the academics choose an interesting question to answer, then find a way to structure the enquiry such that (a) the public get to say what they really think, know and do without helpful ‘prompts’ from interested parties (b) a reasonable cross-section of the public get to be involved and (c) ways to make sure unexpected findings, rather than preferred ones, are kept in (and all attempts by lobby groups and other interested parties to skew the evidence in their favour can be kept out) are sought rigorously.
As a result, however strongly they suspect certain findings will follow, the academics can never be sure what they will get, and whatever they do get will be fully written up along with the methods of getting them so that other academics can check for unintended bias or plain wrongheadness.
By comparison, a’marketing survey’ works the other way round. First the surveyors ascertain what the client wants the result to be. Then they plan the survey so that there can be no other.
The questions are loaded so that only the preferred answers will be given by a significant majority, with a few random ‘wrong’ ones from a predetermined minority of deviants. The sampling survey is rigorously chosen to ensure only suitable participants are included – this can include pre-surveying applicants, choosing only a certain geographic or economic demographic, a preferred ‘psychographic’ (e.g. conservative, suspicious, low in self-esteem) etc. etc. Added to this (and having enough friends at college who did this for pin-money I know for certain) the surveyors get bored, lie, make up answers and fictitious participants, while the public get even more bored and (as genuine researchers know) also have a tendency to try and guess the ‘right’ answer. Result – a ‘survey’ whose findings should not be trusted as far as anyone can throw them.
The only interesting question might be why, apart from boredom or egotism, anyone wants this survey enough to put up their own money to facilitate it? We may get the answer when the results are in and their sponsor tells what we want next.

Blog Strike

Today I will cease writing this blog. I will not blog another word until at least 1st January 2012.
My inspiration is a piece of ‘performance art’ (for want of a better term) called the Art Strike, which a similarly named, similarly aged prankster called Stewart Home carried out from 1990 to 1993. Google it if you’ve never heard of it.
Like my sometime associate Home I regard anything I do for fun, rather than to pay the mortgage or for my family, as an experiment, and almost everything else as an utter bore and a complete waste of time. I started the print column because I was invited to and so will continue that until I’m disinvited, but I started the blog as an experiment, so when it is not interesting to blog, not interesting to observe the reaction, then there is no reason to continue. Or maybe I’ll just observe what happens when I don’t blog, because that may also be interesting.
One reason for the Manx content has been that I never understood why nobody else was doing it when so much nonsense goes on here and, for strictly economic reasons, the local press will not talk about it. But I also never understood why, once I’d proved it could be done, nobody else joined in.
And I never understood why the level of analysis or research by commentators on local websites…......well, frankly, why there isn’t any! If I’m terribly honest, I also despair of many 'atheist' websites and organisations too, for the same reasons.
Does nobody ask the most basic questions of news stories?
Where this or that assertion, statistic or ‘fact’ comes from?
Or who?
It ought to be patently obvious to anyone who has even briefly encountered ‘media studies’ that at least 80% of the local, UK or international press is written by PR companies, government spin-meisters and pressure groups, so why do they not ask where the story came from?
Or why they planted the story?
Or why the Manx government spends millions on PR projects which they tell us are meant to improve the international image of the island, but which even the thickest, most academically illiterate marketing assistant in the naffest local company or government department should know from their sub-GCSE marketing course notes is actually a piss-poor attempt to make locals ‘think positive’?
Oh, so many questions, so little time. So, I’m off, to read books, study and try other projects I’ve had tucked away if I find the time, or just (as every disgraced Tory politician says) to spend more time with my family.
No, I’m not bored, or angry, or disheartened. No, I’m not available for anyone else’s projects which they can’t be bothered to see through themselves.
I’m just not here for the next 365 days.
If that’s a bother, it took me about 20 minutes to set this blog up from scratch with no IT experience. I did it for the same reason I churned out punk fanzines when I was 18 and have contributed to all manner of odd, obscure publications ever since.
Nobody talked about anything that related to the world I live in. So if that’s true for you, stop whining and do it yourself.
Go on punk, make my day.
See you in 2012.

11,510 self-pitying losers, and still rising

Christian self-pity has plumbed new depths in the UK with the launch of Not Ashamed, a campaign run by CCFON (Christian Concern For Our Nation) and CLC (Christian Legal Centre) the UK’s two leading merchants of theo-fascist codswallop, underwritten by even battier Yanks. If I tell you, for example, that one of CCFON’s ‘partners’ is Oral Roberts University, a private US college run by fundies where graduates accept endtimer and creationist twaddle that shouldn’t even fool a UK 10 year old, you have some idea what manner of foolishness we’re dealing with.
It was the Reverend Doctor Peter Hearty, who runs Platitude of The Day (see Fave Sites & Fellow Travellers list) who spotted the link at http://www.notashamed.org.uk/about.php.Take a peek, and try not to die laughing.
11,510 whining bigots as of the time of writing this, and the campaign doesn’t even launch officially until December 1st. It makes a belief in transubstantiation look almost rational by comparison.
All the usual suspects are lined up. If you ever wanted to know “where do clapped out professional bible-bashers go, when even the nitwits who employ them decide they’re totally senile and/or crackers”, you now have an answer.
I only know of one open Manx link to the CCFON, though knowing the depths to which Manx fundie asinity can plunge I don’t doubt other twonks will be quietly affiliated. Friends and Heroes, the biblically bolloxed cartoon made (or at least reproduced) here in Ramsey got the one and only ‘award’ it will ever see from a CCFON front group, which acts as a sort of marketing agency for Christian/family values media morons.
Frankly, the fairy tale view of Christian 'persecution' fabricated by Not Ashamed , and the bonkers characters involved, would probably be too far fetched for even kiddie cartoons. Though I probably shouldn't propose it in case some numpty fundie tries anyway.

Plane stupidity

Sometimes the combination of lies, deception and pig-ignorance that passes for Manx government activity is so blatant you wonder why people fall for it.
Take an article which you will be reading in the Manx press next week, though if you can’t wait you can read most of what it will say now at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/cso/initiativeishelp.xml .
It will begin by trying to tell you that:

“The Small Countries Financial Management Centre is set to welcome representatives from 29 different nations on Sunday (July 11, 2010) for the start of its second annual international capacity-building programme.
The Centre, located at the Isle of Man International Business School, aims to build on the success of the inaugural event in 2009 which helped small countries from around the world to respond to the global economic downturn. The Small Countries Financial Management Programme is a major initiative developed through a partnership between the Isle of Man Government, the World Bank, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Small States Network for Economic Development, and the University of Oxford.”

…and so it potters on, and on, and on… with ‘comments’ from one muppet at the World Bank, another halfwit from the misleadingly entitled Isle of Man International Business School, and so on ad sodding nauseum.
Oh, I can’t even be bothered to rip this tosh apart bit by bit!
So I’ll just cut to the chase.
The Oxford University Said Business School is so named because the main benefactor is Wafic Said. Just Google ‘Al Yamamah’, remember a time not long ago when the UK’s Labour Government blocked all attempts to investigate just how British Aerospace gained so many lucrative Saudi arms contracts, and then wonder if, say, a dead slug with a history of hebephrenic schizophrenia could do a worse job of ‘advising’ the Manx government on improving our international image than any of the overpaid consultants currently failing to do so.

Where have all the loonies gone?

Walking down Strand Street, our capital’s main shopping area, yesterday I couldn’t help thinking something was missing.
Small town adolescents in no brand hoodies desperately trying to look menacing – check.
Chainsmoking wideloads in jogging pants being pulled by asthmatic Staffies – check.
Drunks arguing with their reflections in cheap bar windows – check.
Pensioners still looking for proper local shops that vanished before the 1990 ’redevelopment’ – check.
The rich – not there, but nobody with money shops locally anyway so that wasn’t it either.
No, couldn’t put my finger on it until I got home and found http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=43968 on the Radio Cowshed website.
Of course – swivel-eyed lunatics quoting the Bible and crossing themselves while walking past the Ann Summers window display –THAT’S what was missing!
Well, now we know where they were. We might even feel grateful to an apprentice of Uganda’s second best known son (after Idi Amin) for keeping his fellow Sentamunatics off the streets for at least an afternoon.
Curious, of course, that he chose St. John’s Church, next to the Tynwald Field, and not the Cathedral. Apart from being used once a year as part of the Tynwald Ceremony it remains empty - another national mausoleum maintained at public expense. Also, interestingly, it is not a clergy appointment under the control of the Bishop or Manx Diocese. In fact, a moderate vicar who used to run it as part of a trio of sleepy village parishes used the fact that his was a Royal Appointment to defy both when the Diocese was in particularly right wing hands.
It might be that any Manx Christian aware of the early ill-treatment and continued anti-semitism experienced by World War Two refugees would feel uneasy at a histrionic evangelical Easter marathon being held in the Cathedral in the midst of the Anne Frank exhibition. Probably not though; few study their own history and even fewer have social consciences – otherwise they’d also have felt guilty hosting the exhibition.
Or was this a sly way of trying to place Anglicanism at the heart of Manx life? If so, are we supposed to conclude that a three hour sobfest held smack bang in the local BNP heartland and only attended by slack-jawed yokels was also indicative of Manx culture? That would be so depressing it should necessitate a national day of repentance.
Also dismiss any claims which might be made in coming days that this was a national gathering of the Christian community.
For the record, at 12 noon I was at a gathering in Douglas which only began when folk who had been at church services around the town that morning arrived, including key members of the island’s ecumenical organisations. None of them went on to St. John’s, so whatever went on wasn’t regarded by Churches Together in Mann as a vital show of strength.