Man talks sense on Isle of Man via YouTube

I cannot get over the fact that Brian Cox not only came to the Isle of Man and spoke to local sixth formers, but that he actually made the front page of a local paper during Tynwald Week.
I also cannot get over the fact that the 'scientist' (actually just a philosopher of science and mathematician) wheeled out by Manx Creationists to back up their nonsense did not even get a mention in local print, audio or electronic media.
Two-Nil to common sense.
Matty has been in contact to say that the Villa Marina conference involving Brian Cox and NASA astronauts is now on YouTube. Just go to http://www.youtube.com/user/wimanxIOM and enjoy.
Three-Nil to common sense then.

The real value of Christmas

I’m still looking out for those ‘’Christmas cancelled by PC loonies” stories, but I have to report that a much funnier new trend has been spotted too.
Can’t say I’ve ever noticed it over here, but it seems competitive parents are spending small fortunes on kids costumes for school nativity plays. What makes this hilarious is that the spending is even greater if little Tarquin or Tabitha only gets a bit part.
According to Debenhams, parents can spend as much as £150 on a costume, including £50 bridesmaid dresses being used for angels, £60 arctic fur throws costing £60 for sheep and even £25 striped Velour dressing gowns for shepherds.
A Beeb website story (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8393701.stm) quotes Ed Watson of Debenhams thus:
"The amount of money that some parents want to spend on their child's nativity play appearance would enable the baby Jesus to leave the stable and check into a five star hotel.
"It's silly and we're doing all that we can to persuade competitive parents to change their minds - it is the season of good will after all."
Looks more like evidence of what traditional Manx used to call ‘Foolish Fortnight’ (the medieval ‘Feast of Fools’) to me. Oh, and more than a hint that even upmarket Christians can be totally bonkers.
Someone should take these buffoons aside and explain, in very short words, that the whole point of a real school nativity play is it’s totally naff. Kids fidgeting, fighting and getting the words wrong, bad costumes thrown together at the last second, the donkey doing a woopsie…….
Did you really think it was supposed to be a deeply religious moment?
And you really didn’t think your kids are supposed to make people weep with the sheer beauty of it all, thrill to their delicate and meaningful interpretation of biblical myth?
No!
Did you?
Really?
How sad is that?

Out of the mouths of babes....

A short but hilarious conversation between my wife and small daughter this morning.

Daughter: “Lauren threw up three times in RE yesterday.”

Wife: “Was anyone else awake?”

Back to school

Well, a few days into the new school year at a new school for our lass and my wife has a 9 AM phone-call at work from the acting Deputy-Head.
It’s assembly time, and she’s read our note that if The Prodigy has to sit through religious guff she should be allowed to just sit quietly instead of praying or otherwise actively participating.
“I wanted to be clear. Can she actually attend the assembly?”
“Is there an alternative, such as a teacher to sit with her or other non-attenders?”
“Well, no. She’s the only one. Other parents never ask.”
“So, as you’re telling us there’s no alternative I think you’ve answered your own question. We have no problem with her learning about world religions, just don’t make her pray, and don’t embarrass her when she doesn’t. OK?”
I have to admit, while amused at the inability of the largest junior school in the North of the island to respect a child’s rights and meet their legal obligations, we’re astonished that, for once, a teacher actually read the note. Also amused that, while there is no teacher available to sit with her for 10 minutes as she happily reads a book, there’s always a posse of them to childmind the dingbats who come in and run a lunchtime Bible club.
Oh well. I suppose that’s a start. Only took three years. Christ on a bike, give them another decade and they’ll be noticing 95% of the kids aren’t even from churchgoing homes.
Actually, what’s more pathetic is that in a school of around 200 kids we’re the only parents defending our child from spook-chasing ignoramuses. But I think I know why.
The truth is, for all the carefully edited press releases each summer about a handful of kids getting a stack of ‘A’ grades, the Manx education system fails most kids. A hundred or so get away to uni every year, and most won’t come back. The rest will be lucky if there are enough unskilled or semi-skilled jobs to go around for more than a few years at a time, because the only thing they were really taught was to know their place.
And worst of all, having been made to feel like scum by teachers, politicians and educationalists in their school days, when they have their own kids and send them to school they lack the confidence to demand a better deal for the next generation, or even that schools deliver the little the law says they are entitled to.

Write off

I’ve been involved in other things for a few days so missed the row Philip Pullman has kicked off over writers needing police checks to go into schools (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/10/authors-vet-school-visits). So when, while driving home, I heard him stoke it up on the radio today (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8153251.stm) I almost crashed the car laughing.
The thing is, while I can’t speak to the situation in UK schools, I do know how badly such checks fail in Manx schools, and also have a fair idea why.
Take a child evangelist posing as an ‘author’ who’s been reading his work in some of them, for example.
Over a decade ago a clergyman (and close friend of this so-called author) was witnessed behaving inappropriately towards a young, non-English speaking girl at a charity event in a Manx school and his behaviour reported to police. An interpreter offered her services to help, but the police and the charity involved were strangely unconcerned and the girl was unable to tell her story locally. In fact, very quickly afterwards she and other potential victims of the scuzzbag were rushed off-island and home.
Nothing, so I was assured at the time, to do with the personal friendship of a senior police officer with the perpetrator of the attack, or other links between the Department of Home Affairs and the charity. They were just trying to prevent a ‘misunderstanding’ brewing up into a major incident which might hurt the island or the ‘well-meaning’ clergyman.
A year later the clerical kiddie fiddler was successfully prosecuted anyway for an unrelated offence, despite intimidation of witnesses by evangelical thugs which meant other rumoured incidents never got to court. One curious thing is that a vulnerable relative of his was amongst those ‘persuaded’ not to give testimony, and that at the time she was trying to gain employment with an evangelical outfit which, then and now, sends unwanted missionaries into Manx schools. Even more of a coincidence, that outfit was then being run locally by the guy now pimping his Jesus stories to tiny kids.
I should say the author doesn’t seem to share his fellow godbotherer’s interest in abusing kids – at least not sexually. Still, it does suggest that our kids might be in more danger from the hypocrites responsible for such checks than from decent writers who just want to awaken an interest in literature.

Child abusers or lunchtime losers?

My daughter moves up to junior school in September, and last night was that school’s open night for new parents.
All seemed fine until we noticed ‘Bible Club’ listed amongst the lunchtime clubs. Most of the others are harmless enough pursuits (penny whistle, choir, folk dancing…) run by interested teachers, so there may just be a biblebasher on the staff helping the spawn of other addicts to regress even faster. Or it could be something more worrying.
A couple of weeks back, on the page in our local free paper where an idle sub pastes uncut copy from dodgy ‘charities’ passed off as ‘community news’, the Southern Rednecks (Port St. Mary’s ‘Living Hope Church’) had their latest plan for world domination. In addition to stealing from the dispossessed in other countries and raising new Manx cathedrals to pig-ignorance, this includes more schools workers for the Scripture Union.
On the one hand, it astonishes me that an island this small can fund so much cretinism, and that local government is so incompetent it isn’t weeded out at the planning or grant application stage. On the other, teenage Manx Baptists lack the numeracy to spot the sell-by date on Tesco tins and are too illiterate to fill out a benefit form, so I suppose their not-so-wise elders need to find something resembling employment for them.
In the past the SU was just wasted wet lunchtimes in secondary schools, where the kids are generally big enough to ignore them unless (as in the recent Castle Rushen case) they get pestered at home on private mobile numbers by a middle aged man too fat and ugly to seek extra-maritals from adult women. If these sad and sorry losers are now allowed to inflict their social inadequacy on eight year olds that is another matter entirely.
If the Education Department was responsible about this they would just add some new characters to the kind of comic strips which help small kids avoid other health risks. Then again, most of the worst health risks to Manx children already work there.

Watch out, watch out, there's a cult about

I had to smile at the idea that a local school is tackling phone pests who pick on kids. Or rather, given that the Education Department has had complaints about an evangelical halfwit pestering kids with text messages there, I am amused that they’re ignoring that but paying someone from a pseudo-charity to help kids deal with a threat which, by their own admission, does not even exist in the school. Look at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/south-news/Turning-tables-on-cyber-bullies.5263487.jp and you might see what I mean.
Remember, this is the school which not only let a ‘youth pastor’ troll for victims, but where one of the staff must have passed confidential details about a girl who refused his advances. How, otherwise, did he get her confidential cell phone number and text her at home?
Amazingly, though at least one complaint (possibly several) was made by parents and guardians of pupils affected I hear he is not only still pestering but has opened a branch in a Douglas high school too. Thankfully, talk is rife amongst parents of that school’s first year intake, and even those due to start in September, about ‘some Moonie cult’ running a bible club there.
One quite decent, religiously inclined, parent summed up his dilemma to me the other day. He hasn’t forced his views on his children, but thinks it OK that adolescents ‘explore their spirituality’ at school as they explore everything else – with a bit of responsible adult guidance. Only they cannot get that.
Teachers don’t get involved in lunchtime or after-school clubs any more unless there’s a career advantage. And kids can’t even leave school premises or go home before working parents get there, because of police clampdowns led by panic stories about teenagers wandering the streets at lunch, or misguided safety nazis who think they’ll smoke crack or burn the house down. Then, smelling fresh victims and public money, in come the evangelicals to run extra-curricular ‘activities’.
Having seen these freaks in action when he collects his kids, my fellow parent, like others I’ve spoken to recently, says he is not about to lose them to a deranged cult which operates with Education Department approval, and possibly even public funding. If it means breaking the law or tangling with interfering ‘child protection agencies’ so be it. We at least expect our kids to be safe in school, and we don’t see some Education Department staff protecting them while they attend the same churches as those our kids are most in danger from.

It's music, Jim, but not as we know it

Reading an otherwise innocuous bit of Education PR about a Christmas concert at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/ticketssellingfa.xml I was startled by a familar name at the end.
James MacMillan? Not the sad religionist James Macmillan who churns out such awful muzak?
'Who?' sez you. 'Oh sod it,' sez me, 'just read http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/3116598/Composer-James-MacMillan-warns-of-liberal-elites-ignorance-fuelled-hostility-to-religion.html and we can cut to the chase'.
I do like this comment by the way
'Leading British composer'? That's almost as oxymoronic as 'Christian morality'! He's an idiot whose religious beliefs will thankfully soon be as obscure and irrelevant to the rest of us as his music.'
Wonder who said that? Oh - me.
No but seriously... the last patron of the Manx Youth Orchestra was Malcolm Arnold - and what a difference. Populist, wrote film scores and music kids could play, and liked playing. Even wrote a piece replete with foghorn chorus celebrating his local lifeboat crew specially for a local youth band. Glorious stuff.
When he wrote something for a Manx orchestra and the local fur coat and no knicker brigade were getting uppity about it I poked fun in the local paper, pointing out his best known composition was the theme tune to 'St. Trinians'. They fainted -but he roared with laughter.
What really worries me is if some bright spark also decides to commission 'Holy Jim, CBE' to knock out obscurantist drivel for Manx kids to struggle through at some point.
No prizes for guessing what kind of theme it will have with his track record. Still, at least it will never get a second performance, and no-one will go to the first unless their attendance is a job or exam requirement.

The curse of Dumbledore strikes again.

Well, I said getting the clergy to cast spells on public buildings causes problems (see Blessing or Curses on 7th November)........and I was right!
The Anglican bishop only 'blessed' the new school up here on Friday 21st November. Yet on the evening of Sunday 23rd I have it on very good authority that the holy rollers who met there that very morning got an earbashing from their 'sponsors'.
Seems Broadway Baptists, who underwrite the 'outreach project', don't think their Northern brothers and sisters are pulling their weight.
I know not if the problem is their economic or evangelical shortcomings. I DO know they have been told the plug is getting pulled if things don't improve PDQ.
The funniest thing is cynics quickly pegged this bishop as little more than John Sentamu's apprentice.
The usual 'consultation' between Manx and UK Anglicans before his appointment earlier this year was a short one. Basically the Archbishop of York not only formally chaired the meeting, but told them who they were getting - end of.
Even Downing Street didn't bother with the usual token 'approval'. Sentamu told Brown, and Brown had made it clear at the start of his premiership he was leaving the choice of new bishops entirely to Lambeth Palace, not making a token 'choice' between two formal candidates.
So that was that. Democracy Nil, Superstition Two.
Mind you, if whatever sorcery El Bish picked up from Sentamu gets hardline sectarian freaks out of our schools this fast, who cares? At this rate they'll be safe for kids within the year.

Blessing or curses?

I see from the government website at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/chiefministertoo.xml
that the new Ramsey junior school, Scoill Ree Gorree (King Orry’s School) is being officially opened on 21 November. I also see the Anglican Bishop is turning up to cast spells on it.
This sad modern Manx ‘tradition’ that every new building has to be blessed is almost as wrong as incest or folk-dancing. But it also has a habit of going badly wrong.
I once watched a previous bishop bless a first-time buyers house on a project here where, within months, so many building defects were discovered that the houses became uninhabitable and there was talk of pulling down the entire estate.
Due to a housing shortage directly caused by the government, building industry and finance sector’s relentless profiteering that wasn’t possible. There was nowhere else for the tenants and house-owners to go. Some of them are still there, two decades later, and frankly if that cleric had called down a plague of frogs instead it couldn’t have done much more damage to their health.
Then there was the fiasco of the last Anglican Bishop and the new Douglas cemetery – a disaster in design so awful that no self-respecting person would be seen dead there anyway. He got carried away, and instead of sticking to the plan happily showered everything in sight with holy piddle.
This discourtesy was noted privately at the next Catholic burial (and Manx Jews are so used to low level anti-semitism that they never remark on it anyway), but not made public until the first local Muslim burial was required.
Still, whatever the consequences of Christians pathetically trying to mark public territory like so many geriatric tomcats, I am more concerned by the evangelical cult currently infesting Auldyn School, next door to Scoill Ree Gorree, at the weekend.
It cannot be good for any school hall to have sweaty, 100% polyester-clad halfwits babbling in tongues and rolling around the floor each Sunday. Even if the place gets scrubbed afterwards – which I very much doubt – with so much idiot DNA washing around there has to be a genetic side-effect somewhere when kids sit or play sports on that floor throughout the week.

Big Daddy is watching, but even small kids are laughing

My wife came back from my daughter's school concert with a hilarious, if chilling, story about faith-based brainwashing.
It was advertised as a 'harvest concert', so should not have been a religious service. We've been getting letters home about it for a month and listening as she practiced her 'Thank you farmers' song, so thought we knew what was involved.
The Mrs knew all that was bollocks when the vicar from round the corner appeared unannounced to 'lead' it.
The 'thank you' our girl has been rehearsing turned out to be only one verse in a dirge thanking a fictitious twat on a cloud at every available opportunity. The words to this and other dirges were displayed, bouncing ball style, on a screen so the parents could join in and the kids could remember - or any 5-6 year old capable of reading them anyway.
Then came the lengthy prayers, led by old vinegar-face. Kids meekly held hands together, closed eyes and at the first 'Amen' went like mini-mujhadhin into the Lords Prayer without even being prompted. Mine didn't, of course, and turned round to Mum with her usual smirk.
My wife was furious. Bear in mind that she grew up in Ceacescu-era Romania, so lived through 20 years of totalitarian crap in which her every move was watched or choreographed, and every sign of dissent logged by teachers who she didn't even know were Securitate agents until much later. So when she says there is more blatent brainwashing going on in a small town Manx primary school than she ever experienced as a compulsory member of the Young Pioneers someone should sit up and take notice.
Finally, we are amused, and my daughter takes such crap in her stride. Since she could talk we taught her to ask questions, and that if anyone - including adults - can't or won't give a straight answer then she is free to consider them either dumb or dishonest. It seems to work, and as she's well ahead of her classmates her teachers have no complaints.
Maybe they enjoy, for once, teaching a small child who doesn't just sit there but asks question after question without a trace of fear. Maybe, like us, they are just waiting for the day when elderly politicians and civil servants who are hand in glove with a dying church also get tired of being laughed at -even by small kids.

Freaks Out Now!

There's a petition at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/infiltration/ I'd encourage anyone sick of evangelical wierdos being allowed to roam around UK schools to sign.
It was put there by a Torbay parent, Alan Urdaibay, after an outfit called the Linx Trust was given unrestricted rights to pester kids at his daughter's secondary school.
In a letter to the school, he said:
"We write with great concern regarding the presence of Nigel Taylor and Linx in the school. Nigel Taylor is not a member of staff. In our view Taylor and other members of his group are undesirables and we want them to have no contact with our daughter. None of them is to address our daughter or communicate personally with her in any way. She is not to be approached at mealtimes, in the corridors, or any other location within or without the school.
Additionally, our daughter will not participate in any aspect of the school mentoring system until such time as its integrity is not compromised by the participation of any Linx member in any way. It is our view that any mentoring system within the school should be entirely secular and the government's 2007 Children's Plan indicates it should be carried out by a member of staff. Religious groups with an agenda of their own, especially those with unacceptable attitudes towards aspects of sexuality, have no place in mentoring in a non-faith school.
Linx describes itself as being associated with the Baptists, a fringe religious group whose representation in the UK is about the same as the Scientologists. Admitting no central authority, and not technically a denomination, they are a fractious grouping holding widely differing beliefs. Linx has no published doctrine or teaching and confines published material to banalities with the occasional attack on witchcraft. What is apparent is that Linx is a fundamentalist group responsible to no-one and which, despite its claims, does not reflect mainstream Christianity. Taylor has effectively created his own religion: a fringe of a fringe, so to speak. It is the case that Torbay school is not a faith school and that nothing about its prospectus or web site suggests that it is anything other than a normal school. It should not give privileged access to any religious group, either mainstream or, in the case of Linx, an extreme minority with no identifiable teachings.
Linx has the admitted purpose of inveigling its way into Torbay schools by offering free services not directly related to religion in order to gain access to other people's children. We consider this Machiavellian 'over the heads of the parents' approach to be unethical and it should be blocked by all schools. Parents' satisfaction with the school in general should not be used as a mechanism for lulling them into accepting input preferentially from any religious group, not least a fundamentalist one. Even the establishment of such a thing as a bible study group needs to be viewed with caution. A long-established bible club held at my daughter's school has been taken over by Linx and is tolerated by the school only because it is nominally independently run by the girls. It is certainly a deceitful attempt to go over the heads of parents. While my daughter was at [this school] I asked to speak to Mr Taylor about his religious views, but was refused.
It is our view that a school should be a place of safety away from sexual predators and no less away from religious predators. The objective of any participation by a Linx member in any class or school activity, is, directly or indirectly, to serve their proselytising agenda. They are certainly being funded with this in mind.
By giving Taylor a privileged platform within the context of assemblies, the classroom, and, shockingly, even in the refectory, he hopes to achieve a moral authority from which he can groom the vulnerable to participate in his religious beliefs and practices. These ways of gaining access to children are deceitful and should be stopped."
That struck a chord with me. Baptists are being allowed to hold services each Sunday at my daughter's infant school, Auldyn, not counting the number of times she's come home saying evangelical con-artists were there begging under the pretence of helping Eastern Europeans or something equally ridiculous. Having been visiting East Europe since she was 18 months old my nipper's more likely to wet herself laughing at such pillocks than fall for their twaddle, but Manx schools put no effort into checking such chancers out.
Almost as soon as I mentioned the petition above, I had a reply from someone who knew of a 15 year old getting pestered by our very own Southern Baptist throwbacks last year. Apparently a Port St. Mary based youth pastor is allowed into Castle Rushen to 'mentor' kids. When one refused to play music at his sad little youthie he started texting her out of school hours (where'd he get the number is another interesting question!). No action has been taken, and Isle of Man College is another place where such evangelical trolling is going on.
Also, interestingly, while our Sexual Offences Act has measures to stop 'grooming' of kids under 18 by adults from numerous community groups, church organisations are quite specifically excluded. This though the worst cases in recent years of underage Manx kids being preyed on sexually by an adult involved pastors and youth workers at other evangelical church youth clubs.
My informant on the Castle Rushen case suggests it might be time concerned folk got up a petition to get these freaks out of our schools. As someone with a lower opinion of evangelicals than drug dealers (seriously - I've lived in inner cities and known drug dealers with way higher moral standards than the average biblebasher) I agree.

How To Win Government Friends And Screw Up Kids

A Department of Education press release today allows me to finally join the dots between various evangelical chancers with Manx government influence.
The press release puffs up 'The Story So Far' - Christian theatrics from The Lacey Theatre of Cardiff forced on any schoolchild who couldn't forge a sick note fast enough at the new Studio Theatre, Ballakermeen School.
Apparently it meets the National Curriculum requirements for understanding Christianity. So would studying the Holocaust with a professional history teacher.
The island owes this feast of fatuity to Bill Platt, self-styled 'youth worker' at Broadway Baptists, who apparently knew the late Robert Lacey, founder of the company.
Curious to know how much public money gets thrown at this kind of scam, I looked the Lacey Theatre up on the England & Wales Charity Register.
Suprise, suprise, one of their trustees - Norman Adams - is also a trustee of Care for the Family, whose Manx worker is involved in 'drug counselling' for the Manx Education Department and also the Chief Minister's Drug & Alcohol Strategy. This though the organisation has no formal charitable status on the island.
Having seen both CftF and Stauros (another evangelical 'drug project' operating on the island) in action I would say that their combined professional knowledge could safely fit on the back of a postage stamp and still leave room for BULLSHIT in block capitals. Yet under the latest proposals, such loons may be compulsorily foisted on not just kids but families who upset the temperance nazis. Be warned; three units and you meet your worst nightmare -a social worker with a bible!
And it gets uglier.
When Care for the Family started over here, it was via links with their Scottish and Northern Irish operations. Such sanctimonious timewasting attracts those 'charitable initiatives' whereby companies with a lousy reputation throw money at 'community projects' - often evangelical groups - in a cheap, tax-deductible attempt to look like they care. Their English and Welsh operations were even less clear, though on the face of it they were sad clowns, not serious bigots. Then the charity register threw up another suprise. One of CftF's other trustees, John O'Brien, is also a trustee of CARE ('Christian Action Research & Education'), notorious for favouring Section 28, opposing civil partnerships, counselling registrars how to plead 'conscience grounds' for not registering civil partnerships, and generally inflicting christofascist crap on anyone with the temerity to read books.
It is little known locally that the daughter of the last Manx education minister got a Westminster internship with CARE just after graduating, and Care for the Family's links with the Manx education system curiously enough began at about that time.
My attitude to an Education Department which invites dim 'religious charity workers' into Manx classrooms without background checks, allows knuckledraggingly cretinous Baptist cults to use some school premises for Sunday worship, but still finds it impractical for my child to sit out acts of prayer in one of the island's biggest, best-equipped infant schools has always been .................. somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
Knowing freaks like some of those mentioned above can not only be in the same room as my child, but get public money to try and make her as dumb as them, could make things far worse if I took them seriously.
Thankfully I will never have to, and make it quite clear that neither does she.