Manger danger

There are days when you worry about the state of the Manx NHS. And then there are other days when you really worry about it - especially when it caves in to pitchfork-waving simpletons stirred up by priests.
Which isn't to say that all clergy contact with the health service is negative. For example, when the bishop spouts guff like this (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/68929/bishop-bemoans-political-correctness ) I know at once that he doesn’t talk to his own hospital chaplain, who probably put the display up in the empty chapel as usual because he actually knows and respects the beliefs of hospital staff. In my dealings with the last generation of hospital chaplains on a committee, I also knew them as three tolerant, kindly lads with definite party lines but prepared to understand and work with others to the common good.
But the island's hospitals have always been a little, well.... rustic compared to UK equivalents, and it did take years of effort just to get things relatively scientific. Even five years ago I knew of a superstitious senior hospital official who never took a major decision without consulting her priest. Thankfully, he was slightly more worldly than she was, and I gather talked her out of a few schemes straight out of Lourdes.
Sadly, those wise old heads are now retired, and their replacements are either under orders from area management to concentrate on rich invalids or just from Christianity's lunatic fringe anyway. In addition to one replacement (the one who stirred up the nativity scandal) being a sectarian fright, representatives of the island's freak sects (formerly kept at bay by hospital staff) now freely roam the corridors looking for victims.
All of which makes this (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/68928/it-s-humbug-health-chiefs-dispel-nativity-decoration-rumour ) somewhat inevitable.
What next? Homoeopathy, “services of spiritual healing” .....leeches ....... exorcisms?
Laugh if you like, but two of the above are already on tap at the island's semi-privatised hospice (a centre of spiritual excrement, sadly, ever since its unfortunate conception), so not quite the plot for a black comedy starring, say, Mark Gatiss that it ought to be.

Alcohol Concern Concern

A couple of weeks ago I noticed this (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/67320/island-to-assess-anti-alcohol-pill ) and noted it as of possible interest, but thought no more of it on the day.
Then I saw Chris Snowdon picking up on another typically seriously misleading alarm story from a notorious bunch of prod-noses and ripping it to bits. In following the story around other libertarian websites other things became clear, and it came right back to the implication of the Manx original.
In brief....Alcohol Concern are a typical UK sock puppet (government-underwritten “independent pressure group”, usually on quasi-moral issues, used by government departments to create the chimera of public acceptance for cost-cutting policies which that department had always intended pushing through anyway). Fairly regularly they produce “reports” and “surveys” which are used, unchecked, by understaffed media organisations and create social or moral panics. Others who check them, and expose their inaccuracy and dishonesty, tend to produce analyses which are too detailed for tabloid news, and even when the media is forced to print retractions or corrections these are usually confined to minor news pages, and so long after the panic has been sparked that the public have swallowed the myth.
In this case, Alcohol Concern produced a “survey” which appeared to show 9.6 million alcohol-related hospital admissions annually, thus tapping into public concern about overworked hospitals (actually the fault of government policies) without creating public pressure for the government to sort out the mess they created.
Snowdon began by comparing the figures to those of the Office of National Statistics. These, along with the Census, are the gold standard for any serious social research. He noticed firstly that the “survey” figures were not just a little larger, but larger by a factor of 10 or more, and secondly that tucked away in the small print was an admission that they were based on computer model estimates.
To quote a useful section of his response directly:
“You would only bother coming up with estimates from a computer model if the real figures were not available. But here's the thing. The ONS has detailed hospital admission data for exactly the same areas that Alcohol Concern make guesstimates for. And what a difference there is between the ONS's figures and Alcohol Concern's estimates.
In Barnsley in 2012/13, for example, the ONS says there were 900 alcohol-related hospital admissions (600 were partly attributed to alcohol, 300 were wholly attributed to alcohol). Alcohol Concern says there were 46,992.
The difference between 900 and 46,992 is non-trivial to put it mildly.
To take another example from my neck of the woods, Alcohol Concern reckons there were 128,922 alcohol-related hospital admissions in West Sussex in 2012/13. The ONS says there were 14,210.
Alcohol Concern reckons there were 52,092 admissions in Brighton and Hove. The ONS says there were 4,640.
Alcohol Concern says there were 48,745 alcohol-related hospital admissions in Westminster. The ONS says there were 3,360.”
One respondent to Snowdon's original post thinks he sees how, short of making the whole thing up, the figures might have been manipulated.
“The simple truth is that the 9.6 million figure is the combination of Hospital Admissions and A&E Attendances and Outpatient Attendances. It's the equivalent of adding apples, paper clips and spiders together and claiming that the total is a measure of fruit!
In your West Sussex example, Chris, they actually counted 14,159 hospital admissions in the total of 128,922, so not far off the ONS figure (and as likely to be accurate as ONS). This number was dwarfed, though, by 73,672 A&E attendances and 42,090 outpatient attendances!
Having worked with NHS statistics for my whole working life, I can assure you - and Alcohol Concern - that no-one in the NHS would ever dare to add inpatient and outpatient (A&E is outpatient too) statistics together. Once would be a terrible mistake, to repeat it would be a sacking offence. To place such stated numbers in the public domain - e.g. on a “nifty” interactive web-site - is tantamount to fraud; plain and simple.”
But on following the story around other websites which bothered to probe, I found something even more interesting. The pertinent details are these:
From the Alcohol Concern website (http://www.alcoholconcern.org.uk/media-centre/news/total-nhs-alcohol-related-admissions-in-england-nears-10-million ) :
"The Alcohol Harm Map, produced by Alcohol Concern in partnership with the pharmaceutical company Lundbeck Ltd. The purpose of the map is to reveal the real harm and cost of alcohol at a local level, so that local authorities and local health providers can ensure that alcohol prevention and treatment services are available to those with drinking problems..."
From Lundbeck's website http://www.lundbeck.com/uk/our-products/our-products , one of their UK products is called Selincro (generic name nalmefene).
And from the website of NICE http://www.nice.org.uk/advice/esnm29 , the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (the government agency which recommends which products should be used by the NHS):
"NICE has been asked to appraise nalmefene for reducing alcohol consumption in people with alcohol dependence in a single technology appraisal. The expected date of publication of the appraisal is November 2014."
The UK government turning a blind eye to a moral panic started by one highly questionable quasi-governmental agency in order to expedite the (no doubt over-priced) sale of a dubious pharmaceutical product which a more rigorous quasi-governmental agency cannot be bullied into licencing fast enough?
Well, well.

Refake, remodel

Maybe this just demonstrates the herd mentality of the marketing industry, but it has been quite a week for Manx ‘rebrands’. Now (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/52592/iom-alcohol-advisory-services-changes-name) it seems the piss-artists previously known as the Alcohol Advisory Service have joined in.

Oh Joy. A bogus charity that fails miserably (and at public expense) to address three moral panics whipped up by worry-wart godbotherers has also failed to re-invent itself as a happening private facility for market-led pseudo-therapies that are not needed and do not work.

Except, of course, that this is not private enterprise. In fact it will leech more off the public purse than a council estate of third generation junkies (if such an entity ever existed outside of the twisted imagination of Daily Mail readers).

Well, that’s progress for you.

Let's call time on the Puritans

I may as well start the year as I mean to go on.  

So, may I invite you all to raise your glasses and help unashamed hedonists to poke fun at puritans this month?

According to the original blurb from a worthy campaign’s founder:

‘Drinkuary is a quiet counter argument to Alcohol Concern’s “Dry January”. Alcohol Concern want you to not have a drink for the whole month and raise money for them whilst you do so, I don’t care one way or another if you drink or not. I do care that tax funded charities and health organisations feel compelled to tell us how to live our lives. Quite frankly I’m fed up with it, alcohol is heading down the same slippery slope that tobacco has already been forced down with health warnings in every advert and on every label. Yet still these Killjoys and Puritans can’t just let us make up our own minds, nope they have to spend more of our money lecturing us on how we’re drinking too much and having too much fun and should stop it immediately.’

Read more at http://www.drinkuary.org/.  Then, if you feel sociable, motivated and energetic enough, join in. They even have cool beer mats. Oh, and also take a look at the Cocktails in Care Homes project, which sounds just like my kind of social work.

Alternatively, you can do as I intend to do every day this year. Which is to carry on my life in a responsible, self-dependant way, paying no notice whatsoever to dull-witted wowsers and parasites on the public purse.

Unless, of course, there is a chance to mock their antics or do something which will wind them up until they explode…or just stop begging and go away.

Happy New Year, and Cheers!!

Of freaks who come out at night

A while back I was laughing at the clueless ‘street pastor’ scheme, whereby those few special constables the Manx police force can persuade to patrol Douglas’s deadly dull streets as the pubs chuck out now at least have brightly clad evangelical ‘care in the community’ cases to talk to.

As I said at the time, this bonkers phenomenon seems to be taking off in quiet towns with no history of late night disturbances – which seemed odd. The only common traits seemed to be grandstanding small town politicians along with close links between redneck police forces and the most mentally challenged brands of the godbothering racket. In short, a recipe for more faith-based lunacy and another drain on the rates.

It was no surprise that such nonsense would eventually reach the island – given the number of what P. J. O’Rourke calls ‘moral buttinskis’ blundering around government buildings looking for a handout – but if geriatric spinsters want to make up for wasted lives by watching daft adolescents spew down their tasteless T-shirts around Friday midnight, let them. Got to be more fun than flower arranging or whatever else they spent their previous six or seven decades doing.

Now a friend ‘across the water’ (he's another close observer of faith-based lunacy) has more evidence of this fad. It started when he noticed a Guardian article (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/aug/21/street-pastors-beaches-young-people) uncritically parrot an obvious press release (see in more detail at http://www.christianpost.com/news/uk-ministry-patrols-beach-town-assists-drunk-youth-80381/ ). So far, so unsurprising. Private Eye, amongst others, has noted that even the press bible of the bleeding heart liberal is carrying rather a lot of one-sided twaddle from rank amateurs at present – possibly linked to the same falling sales and staff layoffs the entire print press industry is seeing.

Then he looked further and saw much more on the same line, such as http://www.leightonbuzzardonline.co.uk/community/boost-for-street-pastors-1-4176829 , or http://www.thisisscunthorpe.co.uk/Gran-87-Messingham-believed-oldest-street-pastor/story-16726376-detail/story.html , or http://www.newswales.co.uk/index.cfm?section=Community&F=1&id=24896 and

http://www.bromsgroveadvertiser.co.uk/news/9861831.Street_pastors_prepare_to_step_out_in_Bromsgrove/ .

Note at once – eerily similar claims and stories, which give away the source of all such stories as a common one, which is certainly not any of the dreary bible-bashers currently causing small town drunks to redecorate high street pavements with even more of the alcohol and spirits industry’s produce even faster.

The stunning thing about these phenomena is that the movement has spread around the UK without one police force doing background checks which should immediately interest any half-awake Fraud Squad. 

The 'charity' behind it is the Ascension Trust, which has actually been registered twice. First in 1994, when it managed to run until 2010 without once filing accounts or even basic information to the England & Wales Charity Commission. In turn,  behind that was an odd evangelical from Ghana who I seem to remember was the subject of numerous complaints and suspicions - never investigated because of his friendship with police officers who tried to introduce the Guardian Angels (also closely linked with evangelicals - Seventh Day Adventists in that case) to London. 

In 2008 the Ascension Trust re-registered but still didn't file any accounts until 2010 (i.e. the last possible moment before the Charity Commission could have instigated strike-off). The source of £682,20K of the £776.20K declared income is described only vaguely as ‘charitable activities’, and the 'charity' doesn't do any fundraising. In short, since 1994 the charity has never made any satisfactory explanation as to how it raises funds or what it does with the loot, and has been allowed to get away with this on the dubious grounds that it is a religious group 'helping' busy police with good works.

If you check the latest examples, you'll see that the new groups tend to start in quiet towns with no record of late night violence and general drunken disorder, and the volunteers tend to be elderly white churchgoers of limited education and - well, let's just say they tend to have had quiet lives!  This is significant, as is the way that new groups spring up in areas where godbotherers have more than a little influence on local police through police liaison committees and so on, and also places where professional police officers are being pulled off the street in favour of either special constables or those community wardens/police support officers (i.e. volunteers and part-timers with little or no training and no powers of arrest).

 Police, councils and indeed the organisers of the new groups have all bought into the myth that the charity started in inner-city, multi-racial London giving practical help to police and calming potentially violent situations - a myth which seems ever less likely, especially given that the first version of the trust was so carelessly recorded by officialdom. As the new groups spring up, the original myth is being buried and only the claimed exploits of the new volunteers are recorded by journos who don't find time to look further, and the press cuttings in turn are the evidence offered for the next group along the line to start. Perhaps there's also some sort of franchise deal where the groups are expected to make a contribution to the Ascension Trust from whatever 'expenses' or 'charitable donations' local authorities make to their 'patrols'.

Steady little earner for the trustees, I’m sure, but probably only par for the course. Evangelical scamsters everywhere feed on not so much actual social unrest as the lazy tabloid mythologising, then use it to pimp their dubious schemes to cash-strapped local authorities. Public money is thrown down the drain, but no actual lives are altered for the better. All window-dressing, but do we blame the venal bible-bashers and their pyramid schemes, incompetent local authorities, lying local politicians, or lazy local press? Or all of the above?

And should we worry enough to stop it, or should we just have a quiet chuckle at yet another crazy addition to the curious subculture that passes for modern nightlife?

(hat tip to John Hunt)

Bogus charity bingo night goes ballistic

Last November ( see http://clingingtoarock.blogspot.com/2011/11/another-day-another-parasitic-quango.html ) I prophesied that a Manx bogus charity was running out of government funds and would launch a new moral panic to stay in business. To recap, I said that Isle of Man Alcohol Advisory Service had “struggled for a year or two now to justify further direct government funding, or to use their relationship with government to demand ‘charitable donations’ from local retailers in return for not further infantalising the whole process of buying alcohol.” I then outlined how they would join forces with a similar British government puppet charity to talk up the ‘dangers’ of gambling until someone threw enough money at them.
Not only have I been proved right, but a report today (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/study_to_provide_insight_into_gambling_1_4133011 )suggests that (1) they’ll split the loot with their Brit ally and (2) in the process open up a process of back door taxation of Manx businesses to subsidise a Brit government ‘third sector’ initiative.
Funnily enough, this means the Brits get to tackle an entirely imaginary ‘social problem’ without having to spend a penny or employ a single public sector ‘professional’ or ‘expert’. Sadly, that doesn’t mean the problem of the imaginary social problem will go away too.
This all began when in 2007 GamCare received 80% of a £3.5 million budget set aside on government mandate by the UK gambling industry to ‘promote responsible gambling’. They were hoping to bump that up to £5.34 million in 2010 and 2011, but the latest accounts they’ve submitted to the Charity Commission suggest that the gambling industry told them where to get off, also that the ‘charity’ still gets no other income apart from their gambling industry hush money.
And on today's 'news', I should also say that the pseudo-survey is a classic marketing scam, and now a bog standard tool for the moral panic industry.
As I’ve explained elsewhere, the trick is to decide what answers you need, then set the questions and participant parameters so that you can get no others. It is ridiculously easy, as the full results and methodology will not be in the public domain, old fashioned rigorously neutral academics able or willing to find the time to take such nonsense apart are thin on the ground, and even cynical lay people tend to take such surveys at face value if they’re for a ‘good cause’ or concern a matter which decades of biased reporting lead us to falsely believe is a ’social problem’.
A classic example is the infamous regular ESPAD 'surveys' of ‘’under-age drinking’ which, here and elsewhere, have kept an entire bogus therapy industry in funds for over a decade now. But even right wing amateurs like the Mothers Union are getting in on the scam (I mentioned their scare tactics over ‘parenting’ some while back, and now it seems they have David Cameron’s ear, so keeping tweedy geriatrics with one foot in ga-ga-land off the backs of decent parents is going to be an increasing problem in the coming year).
If only such imaginary problems and the proponents of their equally imaginary solutions could go away or be forgotten as quickly as bad dreams.
Sadly, I would not bet on that any time soon. Not considering the amount of public money wasted dreaming them up, along with ever more pointless employment opportunities for the bogus therapists involved.

...and who guards the moral vanguard? (Pot, kettle, black)

There’s an interesting example on Taking Liberties (see http://taking-liberties.squarespace.com/blog/2012/1/6/the-hypocrisy-of-ash-stephen-williams-and-peter-hain.html ) of what happens when an English MP asks for details of how a dubious ‘health charity’ is funded and what influence it might have on the Department of Health and other relevant government bodies.
To be specific, Tory MP Karl McCartney wrote to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health asking for details of how ‘public health charity’ Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) is funded. McCartney also wanted details about the number of people associated with ASH who have placements with the Department of Health and other areas of government.
Whatever your views on smoking, this sounds like a reasonable question from an MP wanting to check just how ‘independent’ is the advice used by government to make policies (which could well include the decision to further openly or discreetly underwrite ‘public health charities’). So it seems odd that the Chairman of the APPG’s response was to demand, via a rather one-sided press report of the affair, that government “tighten up the regulation of lobbying" because McCartney once “accepted hospitality totalling more than £1,300 from Japan Tobacco International (JTI), which produces Benson and Hedges and Silk Cut".
All McCartney actually did was to accept some tickets from JTI to the Chelsea Flower Show - and incidentally to scrupulously declare he had in the Register of Members Interests, from which source he appears to have been grassed up to tame hacks by someone we can assume was not quite ‘neutral’ in such matters.
Manx politicians really aren’t bright enough to operate at such a level of duplicity, but this nonsense, when mixed with the prominent reporting of the latest ‘drink driving campaign’ (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=42507 for example) did remind me of similar silliness in the Isle of Man.
The obvious question to me is: ‘If a month of dedicated police work, stopping over 800 vehicles, produces just nine prosecutions, while on average at least one motorist a month is found guilty of drink driving anyway without dedicating specific resources, then isn’t this an annual PR stunt, and a waste of time and public money?’
If you ask any police source not threatened by budget cuts that question, or check any regional or national police annual statistics, the answer is ‘Yes’, because the only evidence of more drink driving over Christmas is arrests made only as a result of dedicating all police resources and much police overtime to seeking those arrests.
There is, on the other hand, no evidence that people drink and drive more over the holiday period. It is a folk myth, fed by press too lazy to look for real news, which in turn causes the police to mount campaigns (which they know are pointless) simply to avoid criticism from, say, the kind of tabloid reading politico who is too disconnected from reality to kick off about real world issues rather than fairy stories.
But also touching on that local story – the funniest thing is that the biggest alcohol-related waste of Manx police time and resources that I know of was actually CAUSED by characters who, elsewhere, dominate local (urban myth and junk science led) government consultations over alcohol.
To be specific, a charity and an enterprising retail manager put on a fair trade wine-tasting evening for local bigwigs. No problem with that – it was intended to introduce senior government figures to the idea that ‘fair trade’ was not only a decent (and achievable) moral goal for the island, but that the produce is pretty good too.
Unfortunately, those senior government figures sampled rather too much of the ‘product’, and this was also an era when ministers (of either government or the cloth) were too posh to take a bus home and carry a paper bag in case they got queasy. The upshot was that the entire police night shift for that end of the island had to be deployed ferrying our ‘tired and emotional’ moral leaders and decision makers home.
These folk - let us remember - are the ones who think doctors, teachers and the police should spend their time nagging the public into total abstinence to 'save money', rather than actually ensure such public employees do what we pay them to do.
And even worse - they also subsidise (from our taxes) an entire subculture of lemon-sucking, morally degenerate, flat out bare-faced lying career prohibitionists who could be more usefully employed (if any supermarket would ever take them) stacking shelves and contributing to public funds rather than being a total drain on them.

Another day, another parasitic QUANGO

And as if to reinforce the message from the item below on the drug & alcohol dependency racket, a new scam to ‘protect’ gamblers was announced yesterday at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/socialcare/thelaunchofgamca.xml.
No surprise to see the Isle of Man Alcohol Advisory Service is behind it. They have struggled for a year or two now to justify further direct government funding, or to use their relationship with government to demand ‘charitable donations’ from local retailers in return for not further infantalising the whole process of buying alcohol. Those who have had compulsory interaction with such ‘advisers’ tell me the service quality, by any professional standard, is so laughable that anyone who thought they had a problem and could afford treatment would be better off throwing money at a passing drunk than employing these bozos. They live off government money because nobody else is dumb enough to give it to them.
Even before checking further into this racket, I could predict that the set-up would be similar to that which has given several prodnoses a steady income from other ‘vices’. The trick is, start a moral panic, lobby for a government advisory body, get invited to be on it and then use it to get (1) a regular payoff from the industry in return for your silence and (2) the perpetuation of the advisory body by offering the odd feelgood, but practically pointless, ‘policy’.
Take, for example, the ridiculous one whereby the employees of supermarkets (many teenage or if older desperate for regular employment) dare not sell alcohol to anyone under 25 (even though they are merely required to challenge anyone who looks under 25 and legally are actually obliged to sell to any sober person of 18 or more who requests alcohol rather than demanding it with menaces). I know of cases where management has sacked employees who sold to 18-25 year-olds in order to scare the rest and impress government watchdogs. Those former employees (even though they have done nothing illegal or immoral) then cannot get other work for months.
Sure enough, when I check out Gamcare (or to give their full and misleading name, the National Association for Gambling Care, Educational Resources and Training) on the England and Wales Charity Register and elsewhere, the scam follows that practiced by various UK alcohol and substance ‘advisory’ charitable bodies.
For example, in 2007 GamCare received 80% of a £3.5 million budget set aside on government mandate by the UK gambling industry to promote responsible gambling. Neither the UK government nor the gambling industry are open about what happened after that, but back in 2008 it was expected £4.76 million in funding would be demanded for 2009, with that number jumping to £5.34 million in 2010 and 2011.
Sure enough, the last accounts submitted by Gamcare reveal that £2.7 million was coughed up, that the ‘charity’ got no other income apart from their gambling industry hush money and that it did not expect to tap anyone else for the cash for the foreseeable future.
In return for what?
Well, companies who carry the GamCare logo at their establishments or on their websites ‘voluntarily comply with a set of guidelines towards the promotion of responsible gaming’, according to the official line. And that’s about it really.
Yes, there’s a website, a gambling helpline, a chance for one–to-one advice (though not necessarily from anyone required to be trained to any obvious standard that I can spot)..blah, blah, blah…bit like the new IOM set-up for this racket, and the established ones for others, in fact.
And like the IOM racket(s), only one trustee for Gamcare has any obvious professional and relevant background. The other names look like the kind of privileged layabouts you see in any average New Years Honours list for…..well, probably for being privileged and getting out of bed long enough to wander into a few government advisory bodies and pick up an OBE in return, to be honest.
Actually, that would be better than the Manx industry standard, which is for an increasingly smaller and smaller, more self-selecting gang of unskilled busybodies to elect themselves onto ever more ‘advisory bodies’ and so avoid having to actually seek employment or pay their own way for yet another year or two.
It strikes me that, compared to that, the average smack dealer is a responsible member of the community. Probably pays more taxes and provides a more useful public service too.

List of 2,000 child health problems

This (see http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_158602.html) must be a worry to any responsible parent.
2,000 ill informed bigots on the island, and once the last edition of News of the World hits the dustbin tomorrow nothing left to distract them.
The first local witterings of this appeared in the press a month or so ago. From conversations with workmates it quickly became apparent that the campaign was driven, not by concerned parents, but a loose network of welfare dependants messing about on Facebook at 3 AM while the plant food wears off.
Now, as a principled libertarian, it is simply not my concern if these dullards get off their faces every night. And anyone who has worked with such wasters probably prefers it if they stay on benefits and away from work environments, where their inability to concentrate while operating machinery or office equipment could take an innocent life - or at the very least inconvenience it while the clerical error is corrected.
Ordinary, self-disciplined people in a small community do not need to check with the police if a potential father (or a temporary sex partner and potential passport to more years on benefits) might be a sex offender. Because they would know him from schooldays, work or leisure interests, or at least have talked to the man long enough to know something of his history.
In fact, anyone who has even tried to bring a genuine sex offender (or even a parent who needs some support) to the attention of the relevant Manx authority knows how child abuse is covered up when the offender disguises it as 'church work' (and almost every Manx sex offender I know of has), while parenting problems which reflect on the failure of social services to do anything except keep two 'executive' parasites in their £100K+ jobs will simply be ignored.
To be blunt, most local parenting problems are not rooted in the wilful neglect of individual parents, but in the failure of public services, the superstition and bigotry of the ‘third sector’ which is being talked up as a stand-in, or just the callousness of many local employers towards parents working to provide what their child needs most.
The other night we were joking that perhaps we need to petition to know who has petitioned to introduce Sarah’s Law. With these loons presenting their petition, I suppose at least we can now note the signatories, and their desperate political sponsors, then keep such sad and silly folk well away from our nearest and dearest.

Imminent election, first race card played

You can tell there is an election coming when our dimmest politicians, having gone through the other horse-frighteners in the pack, play the race card.
So see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/education/places_at_nurseries_1_3276571 to spot an MHK who is desperate.
Knowing Malarkey’s history, you can see why. He piggybacked on the new Liberal Vannin party network to get into the Keys. Once in there, he immediately jumped ship. The whole point of Liberal Vannin was to stay on the back benches and hold government to account. Peter Karran, the party’s leader, has done this for years by (a)not signing up as the ‘political member’ in any government departments, where his sole role would have been to plant Tynwald questions which make ministers look good on knee-jerk topics, and (b) not getting sidetracked into pointless ‘committees’ which, like the government departments themselves, simply rubberstamp policies pre-decided by career civil servants with little or no knowledge of the public sector area they run down or hand over to even less qualified private and ‘third sector’ companies and faith based charities.
I saw exactly where Malarkey was going when I saw him huddled with semi-pro temperance nazis at a conference they held at Nobles to try and validate folk myths about ‘rising’ drink statistics. That, in turn, got them government grants for another two years, and Malarkey a seat on the Chief Minister’s Task Farce on Drugs and Alcohol. He is well qualified for that, having not only no professional or academic knowledge of the subject matter – which puts him on a par with his fellow committee members – but also a total reluctance to ask questions about the source or validity of the folk myths passed off as ‘academic research’ or ‘expert opinion’ which keep them all in a job.
By now, there is no excuse for such pig-ignorance. Check http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.com/2011/04/more-binge-drinking-fiction.html for a recent example of the prolific debunking of myths peddled to excuse government interference into everyday life and keep self-appointed alcohol ‘experts’ in business. Or you could look at http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.com/2011/04/another-day-another-lie.html to defuse a new myth which will soon be expounded to the financial advantage of not one but two classes of parasite on the Manx public sector host.
So why is Malarkey now playing the race card? I suggest because a couple of years ago the BNP paid a well publicized visit to the island to leaflet his constituents. Any politician of principle would take on the racists, but in my time on the island I have yet to see one candidate in any of the constituencies where I have lived who has not groveled to racist scum on an election manifesto. And until one does, is there any point in voting?
But the funniest thing about his question is that newcomers to the island are more, not less, likely to use private nurseries. For one thing because places in education department schemes go first to families registered by social services as ‘problem families’ (i.e. the work-shy or those rendered unemployable by past education and social policies) and not kids with working parents, for another because we have a public sector culture where professing bigotry or general ignorance, rather than education or social commitment, remains a valid career choice.
Both our civil service and our politicians are living proof of that.

Big Mother is watching you - or the battle between 'nudgers' and 'nannies'

For a while now I’ve been looking for a way to introduce the subject of ‘nudging’ to this blog.
The term ‘nudging’ was popularised by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Wealth, Health, and Happiness. It refers to the political use of behaviourist techniques, rather than outright bans and law changes, to get the general public to stop doing stuff politicians, civil servants and other busybodies have decided we should not do.
In the UK Cameron established BIT (the Behavioural Insight Team) to formalise the nudging of what ex-Etonians obviously see as the fat and feckless masses into slimmer, duller lives. This replaced an old Brown/Blair approach which wanted to achieve the same aims, but by outright bullying from prim and proper nanny figures.
To get a useful introduction into this quiet further intrusion into our lives and freedoms, and the current behind-the-scenes battle between ‘nudgers’ and ‘nannies’ take a look at http://reason.com/archives/2011/03/30/nudgers-vs-nannies by Brendan O’Neill. It’s from an American site – hence the odd spellings – but if you want to know more on the topic from a UK perspective, it’s one that crops up regularly on Spiked, so check out the link to the right of the page.
Over here, it might be a while before the Manx great and gormless can lose their ignoble tradition of nannying the rest of us to death. But even a brief look at this article reveals the pseudo-therapeutic methodology increasingly being adopted by Manx civil servants, ‘government advisors’ and other unelected, publically unaccountable busybodies – often superstitious, semi-literate or plain stupid, by the way.
Take a look, then check out Spiked for more. The similarities between the UK examples and some of the ‘health conscious’ psychobabble being spouted in recent months by Manx government departments may alarm you. Maybe it will also help you spot the signs when these anti-democratic village idiots try to slip more past us in the future.
(hat tip to Dick Puddlecote for the link)

Attack of the blue-rinse conspiracy theorists

Watch out everyone. Gay communist satanists are coming for our kids, and the worldwide conspiracy of Jewish freemason advertisers are organising it all.
Oh yawn!
Yes, there’s more sensationalist twaddle from the Deluded Herd on the IOM Newspapers website (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Mothers-Union-speaks-out-against.6535250.jp ). This time it’s the Mothers Union on about the ‘commercialisation of childhood’.
Oh crikey, what a shock, and how on the ball. Moral crusaders have wittered in an ill-informed way about this ever since reading failed PR guru Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders in the 1950’s – and probably well before if we could be bothered to look.
What next in this return to Victorian Valium? Perhaps a Manx Rechabite Lodge revival, or the return of the League of Decency?
This report is equally clueless; in fact it should probably itself be reported to the ASA as misleading and offensive advertising. If you can be bothered to trawl through a bag of over-emotional excrement for yourself you can find it at http://muenterprises.org/byebuychildhoodmu/impact-report/ . What you won’t find (you’ll notice at once) is convincing evidence, sources, or even a clue as to how the information was gathered, who from, what methodology used to ensure fairness or accuracy…. and so on and so on.
In short, a complete fabrication, based in part on paranoid conspiracy theory and in part on some zombie worshipping dimwit’s cunning plan to scare us back to church. As ever, it’s a snapshot of just how far out of touch these herberts are, and how desperate they are to spread any sort of wild rumour that might panic us into paying attention to them.
The funniest thing for those who like to watch the local antics of the ‘DH’ is that these blue-rinse bozos are actually the radical wing of the clown show. I kid thee not.
In the early years of the 21st century even the MU had to operate like the Militant Tendency – secretive gatherings of Tory matrons sworn to bring about change to the Diocese from inside. It wasn’t until Graeme ‘the invisible bishop’ Knowles arrived that they could even get a senior cleric to officially attend their shindigs.
How sad is that?

Offshore sauce with that?

There’s a piece on Spiked by Rob Lyons about what you might call the reblanding of tomato ketchup that, in turn, led me to an interesting idea.
Lyons (see http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/earticle/8898/ ) notes how governmental pressure has led Heinz to ‘voluntarily’ reduce the salt content in all versions of the famous sauce, rather than just offer a reduced salt/sugar alternative. It’s only the latest ‘voluntary’ move by the retail industry, and as Lyons sums up nicely:
“Still, there’s something entirely appropriate about the way that our political leaders are trying to save us from ourselves. Because the food we’re being forced to eat is, like them, increasingly bland.”
Tucked away in the piece is a hilarious quote from another Spiked piece, where Mark Sparrow says:
“What was once the nation’s favourite biscuit has morphed into a rather pathetic, pale imitation of itself. The Digestive that sustained, nourished and comforted a generation through two world wars and played its part in keeping the home fires burning is no more. The callous tick of a ballpoint pen of some joyless Whitehall functionary has managed to finish off the biscuit that even Hitler failed to crush.”
Sparrow was fulminating furiously on the wrecking of another comfort food staple by the health and safety Gestapo, and you can read the original at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/6095/ .
The bit that really struck home for me was where Sparrow says:
"Actually, the truth is that these voluntary guidelines are anything but voluntary. The government’s standard practice in these situations is to introduce guidelines and then back it up with an ugly threat of legislation if the food/tobacco/alcohol (delete as appropriate) industry does not kowtow. It’s government by stealth, intimidation, coercion and bullying and does away with the need for all that tedious legislation and accountability."
Now, where have we seen that recently over here. Well at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/dha/alcoholcodeofpra.xml for a start.
By the way, an interesting joke here. A couple of years ago the key participants in this also organised a Fair Trade wine testing to which some of the island’s senior clergy and government ministers were invited, and which is rumoured to have ended with the police van giving night cover for the south of the island being commandeered to take guests home.
But what really got my attention was Sparrow’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that:
"Perhaps the answer to all this nonsense is to take the production of all tasty and traditional foodstuffs that may offend the tofu brigade to an offshore location."
Because funnily enough, Mick Jagger has fired up a Manx debate with something on the same lines this week. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/celebritynews/7743788/Sir-Mick-Jagger-Rolling-Stone-calls-for-marijuana-to-be-legalised-on-Isle-of-Man.html for an example, and http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Jagger-calls-for-Isle-of.6308102.jp for a local reaction which contradicts attempts by our drug and alcohol ‘therapy’ racketeers to give ‘Manx opinion’ in right wing rags (numerous attempts, for example, by someone who forgot to say she’s the Manx employee of a notorious pro-life cult – how sad, how pointless, try getting a job).
Maybe there’s something in this offshore comfort food lark. Centuries back we had ‘the running trade’ (smuggling), because UK drinkers didn’t want to pay outrageous taxes on European spirits, then the TT developed because the UK wouldn’t allow racing on public roads, as they had in Europe. Then we had offshore finance because, let’s face it, nobody likes paying more tax than they really have to.
All are, to fundamentalist morality, ‘bad things’, and to the rest of us just getting on and making the most of it without puritanical prats interfering.
Or think of it in business terms. There’s a recession, and in recessions people turn to things that remind them of childhood. Now, comfort foods are at one end of the scale, while at the other is religious fundamentalism, abandoning public services in favour of charities run by joyless preachers, and other stuff too horrible to think about.
Maybe a few Manx factories making and exporting ‘proper’ biscuits, cakes, full strength baked beans and other pleasures to the world (in response to miserable legislators in other countries who’ve, effectively, banned them) would be a steady earner. If nothing else, it couldn’t get Obama and other hypocrites on our back the way they are over ‘offshore finance’.
Which, of course, the politicians who criticise us loudest never, ever use to discreetly fund their expensive election campaigns or the ‘educational trusts’ which fund their retirement.

Five questions for Easter TV

As those desperately flicking through the TV channels for wholesome holiday programming will have noticed, the Beeb is inflicting more than the usual holy madness on us this Easter.
One lowlight will be an ‘investigation’ of Christian ‘persecution’ in the UK by Nicky Campbell tomorrow night.
This is all kicked off by the recent extraordinary, and I would opine dishonest, whinings of George Carey, the last Archbishop of Canterbury to be directly appointed by a Prime Minister against Anglican wishes back in the days when Anglicans had some moral backbone, because Thatcher didn’t want an earnest herbert in a dick-shaped hat going on about poverty, injustice, striking miners and all that.
The Anglicans must have got the message, as ever since they’ve voluntarily appointed numpties who would so rather hang on to undemocratic privilege and public cash that Blair and Broon never need to slap them down. Sure, they make token grumbles about Iraq or Afghanistan, but have they ever refused MOD cash paid to Anglican chaplains or stopped the Church Commissioners investing in the arms trade?
Yeah, whatever…anyways….
It seems even the decent end of the Christian community are tired of Gormless George and his whines, judging from an item on Ekklesia by Jonathan Bartley entitled Five questions for assessing Nicky Campbell’s documentary on ‘persecution’ of UK Christians.
Bartley is the reasonable Christian who sometimes guests on Big Questions, Campbell’s Sunday morning BBC One religious discussion programme. They need one sometimes, as otherwise it would be a complete freak show, the televisual equivalent of seeing chimps tug their todgers at the zoo (or, for Manx readers, a normal morning in the House of Keys or Legislative Council).
After asking Campbell what’s planned, Bartley doubted the programme will be balanced, and worries in particular that the approach will be historical, while it should, as he puts it so eloquently: “address the context of post-Christendom – which is neither secularisation, nor post-Christian - but which is crucial to understanding what is going on.”
He mentions Ekklesia’s own work on the topic, which sounds much more worthy of serious analysis (even by godless heathen) and suggests five questions for viewers to consider while watching.
These are:

"1. Will the claims of ‘persecution’ be properly scrutinised? There has been so much misinformation about what local councils, hospitals, schools and other bodies have been doing/saying. The claims make great headlines, but upon further scrutiny – including talking to the bodies involved - the claims often have little substance. There are certainly disagreements, but they are often of a different nature to the way they are being presented. Will the documentary interview the public bodies involved and get the story from their perspective? (It is sometimes the case that the people involved in the bodies are themselves Christians).
2. Will there be a proper account of why some Christians feel marginalised? Specifically, will the context of post-Christendom be taken into account? The churches have had centuries of special privilege, with Christianity being a dominant narrative. Religion is relocating and finding a new place in society. This is making many Christians feel unsettled and making others fearful. This is being fuelled by many of the reports in the press and media.
3. Will the documentary scrutinise the work of pressure groups like the Lawyer’s Christian Fellowship, Christian Concern for our Nation and the Christian Institute, who have been feeding the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph with stories, sometimes with dire consequences? Will there be examination of their ideology and what is driving their efforts, which we have suggested involves a radicalisation as a response to post-Christendom? Will the links to what is going on in the US also be made?
4. Will the documentary look at mediation efforts to sort out the disputes? What has often been happening is that positions quickly become entrenched and there is little chance of amicable resolution following misunderstandings or mistakes. This is often because pressure groups get involved and raise the stakes, giving stories to the media. I know for a fact that the documentary makers spoke to a top QC who is not just an evangelical Christian, but one of the most experienced commercial mediators in the country.
5. Will the documentary primarily frame the debates as a simplistic conflict of rights, or accept that the situation is far more complex? Will it bring in different Christian perspectives which do not see this primarily as about one person trumping another? "

Are Christians Being Persecuted? is on BBC One at 10.50pm on Easter Sunday, and Bartley’s Ekklesia piece is at http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/11670 for those who want to see the argument in full.

Lies, more lies and Manx drug legislation

As from today, so-called ‘legal highs’ become ‘illegal highs’ on the Isle of Man.
OK, we knew that was coming from articles likehttp://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Health-minister-to-outlaw-legal.5927819.jp in what passes for a Manx press.
But interestingly, and following the new practice of various ‘Freedom to Fester’ partners, the DHA chose to release the official news today on Manxnet first at http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=9630 . The press release is misleading from beginning to end, but then local reporting has also been a wee bit.....minimal?
Thing is, Manx hacks were invited to a ‘confidential’ briefing in the Chief Minister’s bunker a few weeks back. It is interesting to see how all have since happily trotted out the party line. Even Radio Cowshed’s resident dissident, Stuart Peters, from whom I’d expect at least a token sixties flashback. No queries, no supplementary research, not even words from medical experts to explain the alleged need for a further infringement of personal liberty.
The first two we can put down to the government playing games with the media over their tightened PR budget, and the threat of reduced income from government notices in the case of Johnston Press - AKA IOM Newspapers (who only set up shop here to get that income) or direct government subsidy in the case of Radio Cowshed.
The lack of medical comment is easy to explain too. The Isle of Man Drug & Alcohol Strategy Team contains no chemist, no medical expert, no psychologist or psychiatrist, or indeed anyone who could, in the real world, be regarded as an authority on the subjects under discussion. When they want ‘evidence’, they just download it from the UK’s Home Office.
Which is where they have a particular problem, because, as the UK press were reporting happily last month, most of the academics Gordon Brown relies on to excuse tougher drug policies and placate Daily Mail readers do not think the laws need to be tougher, do not think the current drug classification system is correct, and do not even think some of the substances previously illegal should be so.
Oh, let the cat out of the bag there with that word ‘previous’ did I? Well, see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/latest-national-news/39Legal-highs39-ban-comes-into.5933741.jp elsewhere on the IOM Newspapers website under ‘national news’ (as in UK national).
Oops, did some lazy sod at the DHA or one of our ever busy Manx newshounds forget to tell you? The entire Manx program was lifted from the UK Home Office, who ‘coincidentally’ introduce exactly the same measures today, having (unlike the IOM) at least done something that passes for research and consultation.
I say ‘passes’ because it wasn’t a proper exercise either. But for one typical example of expert parties who entered into the spirit of the thing, tried to look at the thing properly and make a submission to that process, look at the Transform briefing at http://www.tdpf.org.uk/Policy_General_Piperazines.htm.
The difference in quality is, I politely suggest, staggering. Which makes the entire Manx travesty even more of a nonsense.

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.

Real Journalism shock

I haven’t recently checked out Spiked, the ‘libertarian Marxist’ website which was, if nothing else, a place to find contrarian and argumentative pieces which challenge kneejerk liberal assumptions.
Spiked articles can genuinely question or merely irritate by turns, as you’d expect from folk from a now defunct Trotskyite group.
Still, a Nathalie Rothschild item usefully sums up a Guardian story I should have noticed earlier, as it finally explodes the traffiking myth being stirred up by evangelicals in order that they can preach and pass the begging bowl some more.
She tells us that:
“The Guardian got hold of an internal police analysis of the six-month campaign, Operation Pentameter Two. It showed that after extensive intelligence-gathering and raids on 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours across Britain, only 96 people were arrested for trafficking, and out of these only 15 men and women were convicted. For 10 of them, police found no evidence of their having coerced prostitutes. In the end, only five men were found to be genuine traffickers – that is, they had imported women and forced them into prostitution – but they had been detected before the Pentameter investigation started.”
Actually, it gets worse. Even amongst those arrested elsewhere were a couple whose arrest was more due to police needing a nice dramatic shot of a door being battered down for a TV documentary than months of patient work uncovering some criminal ‘Mr Big’.
Not, in short, helpful for future appeals by a TV vicar and his faithful accomplices with a propensity for stoking up moral panics then starting ‘charities’ to deal with them.
The entire piece is worth a read (see http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/earticle/7625/ ), but be sure to go on to two original Guardian pieces by Nick Davies at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails and http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated.
I say this because Davies is the journalist who gave us Flat Earth News. This important book exposed ‘churnalism’ and other practices by which even the ‘quality press’ has stopped chasing real news or employing real investigative reporters, while regionals (especially those owned by large corporations, not old fashioned local activist/publishers) just cut and paste national stories (in turn bought from a handful of agencies).
This explains, for example, how one agency, friendly to groups like Christian Concern for Our Nation and the Christian Legal Centre, is able to place story after story in the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail about ‘sincere Christians’ being 'persecuted' for their hate (sorry ‘faith’), and why those stories then make it to the top of other news organisation story lists.
In short, some real and useful journalism for a change.
Read and remember next time such moral panics ‘coincidentally’ hit the headlines elsewhere.

Beggars belief

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