Scientology Daily Digest: Thursday, November 14, 2013

Perhaps the best news today is a long comment on Tony O’s blog from former Scientologist and now leading LGBT activist, and beloved “Auntie Kate” of so many on this blog. Kate wrote her first long post here in many months, and said she’s feeling completely free of cancer. Her post is worth reading.

Tony’s blog talks leads with a great explanation of Scientology ethics and features a remarkable video from Karen de la Carriere about life at Int Base. Mike Rinder scores some pictures and over-the-top e-mails about the weekend’s events.

Tony Ortega’s Blog

Tony’s blog featured the regular weekly story from former cult marketing exec Jeff Hawkins about the Scientology “ethics” system. Jeff does a great job explaining how Hubbard took something simple, albeit something that equated “ethics” with “making money” rather than what the rest of the world understands, then added in mechanisms to control and brainwash his followers. I found this a great explanation.

Karen De La Carriere produced a video with an interview with Jeff Hawkins and many others, which captures some of the craziness of life at Int Base. Mike Rinder compares life there to being in North Korea. Also available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0kL12vtw7M#t=433

The lulz for today come from yet another piece of Super Power equipment, this time the “pain table” which appears to be a vibrating plate of spikes that one puts one’s hand onto. It’s not nearly as cool as yesterday’s endocrine system “vomit comet” flight simulator ride, and nowhere near as bizarre as the oiliness table.

My take: of particular interest in the ethics discussion is how the fundamental roots are in economics, putting you in a state to be punished if the organization doesn’t hit its goals by growing every single week. And of course, no organization can grow every single week no matter what. It just doesn’t happen. The unreasonable goals backed up by the punishment-oriented culture, which eventually acquired such powerful tools for coercion, is why we protest.

I pointed out that this system of “ethics” used to drive production actually creates massive blowback and unintended consequences, particularly to try to bend the management goals to ones that are achievable consistently, even though they may not actually do much to improve the business.

Selected comments:

MarionDee talks about losing her husband to the Lyndon LaRouche cult three decades ago, and shares how it still grates on her. She also gives examples of LaRouchie behavior that resembles how Scientologists try to control behavior.
LongNeckGoose captures Hubbard’s M.O. in coming up with things in the ethics gradients quite elegantly.
“Peter” talks about his experience both entering the cult and leaving, 30 years ago.
Kemist talks about how fundamentalist religions have some growing pains after the prophet or the people who knew him personally die out, but people adapt the faith to suit their reality once this happens. He points out that Scientology is basically a fundamentalist religion, something that I’ve also said on numerous occasions.
Once_Born replies to Kemist by talking about how new religious movements often splinter, and ponders the current decline in Christianity.
Dwayners13 looks at the Miscavige approach to improving on Hubbard’s statistical management techniques.
Derek B. reminisces about how ethics conditions were used during his time in the Sea Org. He then gives a great explanation from psychology about how people stay stuck in the cult.

Mike Rinder’s Blog

Mike’s first post reveals a Facebook post from a Kool-Aid drinker gushing about how great GAT 2 will be. Mike takes a stab at likely positioning for the release. Worth a read just for the long jargon-ridden post by the lady talking up how magic this is.
Mike’s second post has a couple photos from the stage area for the events plus the new Terrace Restaurant at the renovated Oak Cove hotel. As dedicated foodie, I will say that the décor isn’t as awful as I had expected, though I hope they’re not waiting for their Michelin stars. I’ve eaten in neighborhood Chinese restaurants in Manhattan that are more elegant.
Mike’s third post highlights the hype in some recent e-mails about the events. My favorite embodies Hubbard-like math skills: “Take that “WOW”, multiply it by infinity, and you will have about 1/1000th of a concept of what is in store for you when you get his briefing.”

The Forums (WWP, ESMB, OCMB)

Thanks again to Aeger Primo for keeping an eagle eye on things. She notes it’s a quiet day on the forums, though a couple interesting articles pop out.

AegerPrimo started a thread on ESMB to get their perspective on Scientologists and not drinking, a theme that was brought up by some of the ex’s in response to my post looking at the power of anecdotes. This could give more data points to think about as we try to understand the woman’s drinking behavior in the post from B. B. Broeker in the case study for analyzing anecdotes.

General Press

The Daily Fail is reporting that Tom Cruise’s sister Leanne De Vette, who was his publicist during the “crazy times,” will be deposed in the Bauer Media suit. This ought to be fun to see how she will use her Scientology communication skills and her Hubbard-created PR skills when under oath.

Scientology Daily Digest: Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Today was definitely busier than yesterday. The biggest news today was that Clearwater granted the permits for the events this weekend with only some minor restrictions. It sounds like they rolled over on the cult, but the permits for the IAS event over Thanksgiving weekend and the New Year’s Eve event are still pending.

Also, a subtle data point but one that’s pretty telling: apparently, the cult won’t show the video of the big events at missions. But if they’re that important, wouldn’t they want everybody and their brother to see them? Oh, and there will be no DVD’s made under any circumstances. Guess they don’t want them to end up in the wrong hands. I’m sure they will anyway, in a matter of minutes. Dave may well find out that his security is still more porous than he thinks. This shows the power of the Joking & Degrading community, which probably outnumbers current cult membership these days.

Tony Ortega’s Blog

The big feature of today’s story was how Lisa Marie Presley used language that seemed to move closer to condemning Scientology outright than the fairly elliptical language in the past. This is potentially interesting in light of the fact that her mother, Priscilla, apparently remains in the cult (though she could well be “under the radar”), as well as her ex-husband and potentially her kids from that marriage. Thus, disconnection may be a significant issue.

Tony also published a photo taken from inside the Ft.Harrison hotel across to the Super Power building, to needle DM about the increasingly porous security.

The “thetaburst” mailing list put out a bogus e-mail purporting to be from Flag announcing a date change for the event.

Finally, there’s a pic of the “endocrine states” machine, which looks like some sort of miniature version of the “Star Tours” ride at Disney World, kind of like an aircraft simulator platform.

My take: It’s interesting that Lisa Marie is moving towards openly condemning the cult, but it’s probably premature to hope that she will publicly break with them the way Leah Remini did, if for no other reason than that Leah got her entire family out at once; it’s unlikely that LMP will be able to do the same.

Regarding the Fort Harrison picture, it appears to be above the top floor of the new Super Power building, so it’s potentially shot from the top two floors of the Fort Harrison Hotel. I’ve never been there, but it appears that those two floors have significantly higher ceilings so they may be some sort of dining facility or meeting rooms. I doubt that Miscavige will be able to catch the leaker if it is shot from a public space instead of from a guest room. But I wouldn’t want to be one of the guests in a room on the 8^th floor right about now.

I’m still baffled by the intent of the Thetaburst e-mail list, and particularly by the not very clever attempt to put out a bogus press release to confuse Scientologists about the dates of the event. Even though some of the commenters claim to have “doxed” the owner of the list (two different candidates have emerged), it’s not clear why either one of them would be doing what they’re doing.

The endocrine states machine appears to be something that will give you an adrenaline rush, since adrenaline release is about the only thing that the endocrine system does that happens in a short enough period of time to be perceptible. In other words, they have a very expensive machine that will probably do no better than a hungry “reg” sneaking up behind you and saying “Boo!”

Selected comments:

New commenter CobGatYour$$ shares the sad story of a family member ill with melanoma and facing myriad other problems, still believing doggedly in the power of the cult to save her.
MissionaryKid thinks all the perceptics are a way to distort your perception just as the rest of the cult doctrine distorts your reasoning processes. He also comments on how real the experience of the video of a fighter jet simulator from long ago felt when he experienced it, suggesting that the hemispherical dome on the front of the endocrine state machine might be a projection screen for some sort of attempt to induce nausea.
AquaClara describes a great comic moment when a British author talks about how film adaptations generally work well, with one single exception.
SandiCorrena points out that Mark Wahlberg has trashed Tom Cruise publicly for the statement where he appears to say his job is as hard as being a soldier fighting in Afghanistan.
MaxSpaceman uncovers a Hubbard quote about auditing that has more “ness” words per sentence than just about any Hubbard quote I’ve seen so far. A triumph of jargonness.
Derek shares a couple vignettes of moments of natural beauty that he was lucky enough to appreciate when he was trapped in the worst parts of his Sea Org experience. This is why.
Jeff Hawkins contributes two potential poster slogans encapsulating what he has experienced as winning slogans to get culties to wake up.
SkipPress contributes his personal memories of Lisa Marie Presley at Celebrity Centre in Hollywood when he was in, as well as recollections of Dave LaCroix, one of the two candidates named as the potential operator of the Thetaburst mailing list.
OrangySky shows how the cult can generate shots of a full house with only a fraction of the seating capacity of the hall, through digital compositing of cutaway shots.
TruthIWant has a great explanation for some of the newer readers about how the cult keeps people ignorant of what’s really happening, by prohibiting TV, newspapers and internet.

Mike Rinder’s Blog

Mike’s first post today drew a number of parallels between life in Scientology and life in the crazy kingdom of North Korea. I’m a bit of a fan of all things North Korean, because the lulz quotient is about as high as that for Scientology, though the North Koreans would regard Miscavige as a bumbling amateur. Gets all the details right.
Mike’s second post lampoons cult “Facebook police,” the oddly named Jojo Zawawi, for trying to track down the bogus “thetaburst” e-mail that Tony also mentioned today. More importantly, she points out that the Missions are totally excluded from showing videos of the Biggest. Event. Ever, and that local orgs will not get to do repeat showings. Apparently, they are desperate to keep video from this event from falling into the hands of the J&D brigades (which probably outnumber active Scientologists by a fairly large margin). Mike also points out that the Volunteer Ministers planning to parachute into the Philippines to do their unique brand of disaster relief have a big quandary: go to the Philippines while the Biggest. Event. Ever is in Clearwater? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Forums (ESMB, WWP, OCMB)

Here’s a video on ESMB of Anna Paddock, who showed up to harass Mosey Rathbun at her former home. Makes you want to hurry up and join the cult.
Some ex-culties and others with interesting backgrounds discuss whether auditing expedites memory loss. There might be more to the story, but I forgot.
A recent article from the “Scientologists Getting Back in Comm” blog in South Africa discusses a particularly hellish job in their org – being the “Bookstore Officer.” On ESMB, others describe life in the bookstore.
On WWP, an emerging thread captures YouTube videos and other resources for people to understand the breadth of the disconnection policy.

General Press

The City of Clearwater appears to have rolled over completely and given the cult most of what it wanted in permits for the event this weekend. Permits for the IAS event and the New Year’s event are still pending. There are some limits, including decibel levels for sound and restrictions on lighting. Apparently, they will be permitted to keep the security fence they’re building to keep all those people who are so good at confront-and-shatter away from any source of entheta like Anons carrying clever signs.
The cult announced a “ScientologyCenter” in Karmiel, Israel, about 50km (30 miles) from the Haifa mission, which seceded from the cult and “went independent” about a year ago. Yeah, that’ll work. Interestingly, they got a spokesman from the Druze minority (the smallest religion in Israel) to speak at the opening.

Scientology Daily Digest: Friday, November 8, 2013

I think the big story today is the metaphorical bloodshed at the Scientology facility in Johannesburg. There are a couple of significant articles giving background and perspective here, which I strongly recommend reading. I think this situation is worth watching because it could be an example of a non-US organization of some size that may break away from the church, as the Haifa mission in Israel did last year.

Tony’s story giving lots of details about Tom Cruise’s lawsuit against Bauer Publications sketches in some great background, but since I do not think that Cruise is likely to prevail in that case, the story is not all that relevant to the cult.

Also, the City of Clearwater appears to be on its game in dealing with the cult’s late request for permits for the events scattered over the next several weeks. The city is offering to be flexible on some (though not all) of the items that Scientology would like done for the Flag building opening next weekend. The carrot being dangled in front of David Miscavage is that if he fails to play ball with the city right now, he will not get a permit for the IAS event, which is obviously far more significant. This seems to be a particularly smart way for the city to play its cards, because being willing to show some flexibility but to insist on other concessions from the called leads to a more desirable outcome to a lawsuit, which could carry an emergency order preventing the city from controlling the events in any way.

Tony Ortega’s Blog

Tony’s story today featured details from the defamation suit that Tom Cruise filed against Bauer Media. In addition to looking at the deposition transcripts that were released yesterday by Radar Online, Tony also provided excerpts of e-mails from various Bauer employees as they develop the story and the packaging. It does not appear that there were any particular “smoking guns” among the employee e-mails.

My take: I had a friend some years ago I was a senior editor at one of these publications (which was not owned by Bauer Media). The picture that emerges from these e-mails is very consistent with what my friend has told me about how they develop stories, including how they work with publicists for the celebrities they cover to use the implied threat of a more negative story to get the celebrity to cooperate and provide unique details that would enable them to write a more positive story. I suspect that this is been going on with gossip publications for decades.

I continue to believe that this is unlikely to result in any money changing hands. Cruz faces an uphill battle because the assertion that he did not see his daughter for nearly four months in what would have to be a difficult time immediately following his divorce was substantially true. One commentor raised the point that the whole issue seems to be around the word “abandons” used on the cover, and that this word may hold special significance for Cruise because of how his father abandoned him in childhood.

Best of the comments:

Ex-cultie Kevin Tighe (not the 1970s actor) reminisces about the daughter he lost to disconnection three years ago and challenges Cruise for implicitly supporting this.
Jeff Hawkins weighs in with a well-informed perspective on why Scientologists are always so nasty and aggressive in how they handle stuff that makes them uncomfortable. This is not apparently just for the usual “confront and shatter” circumstances, but apparently for dealing with the media as well.
Gerard Plourde gives some Genuine Lawyer(tm) perspective in response to my question yesterday about why AGP would voluntarily submit to a one-year restraining order to stay away from HGB to get the prosecution to drop a case they would have dropped already.
Ze Moo makes the very relevant observation that the word “abandons” might be the real trigger for the suit, given Cruise’s abandonment by his biological father. On reading this comment, it certainly rings true as a possibility to consider.
Johnny Tank, who posts the daily Alexa rankings for the cult, points out that scientology.org has dropped 11,366 ranking spots since he started collecting stats on October 14, just over three weeks ago. Given that the numbers seem to be propped up with Indian click farmers, that’s a bit of a plummet. Think: Wile E. Coyote off a cliff after the temporary suspension of gravity has been eliminated.
TXCowgirl points out that the cult is now starting to evade the Craigslist campaign to flag their ads by posting on Backpage.com. An amusing detail is that Backpage.com is/was owned by Village Voice Media, the parent company of Tony’s former employer. The hilarious letters to the editor by Karin Pouw, the never-seen cult media person, frequently pointed out the affiliation between the Voice and Backpage, which has lots of escort service and other questionable advertisers, to “dead agent” Tony. Not that that did any good or anything, but…
Noni Mause riffs rather elegantly on Cruise’s assertions about how Scientology is all misunderstood because it’s a “minority religion” and people are bigoted against them. A nicely elegant contrast in two short sentences.
More good lulz from TruthIwant, who found a quote from Tom’s deposition that Tony somehow missed.
Nice analysis from “Vistaril” of victim mentality in the cult that may apply to TC.
MarionDee gives a great personal anecdote about her experience doing fact-checking of celebrity gossip for two different magazines, including one from Canada. We had to check to verify that movable type printing technologies had penetrated the deep forest cover in that quaint rural region of upstate New York before we decided to recommend this comment.

Mike Rinder’s Blog

Mike’s first post is strongly recommended. It’s a detailed recollection of a 1980s pogrom called the LatAm Strategy. Hubbard was in hiding and was paranoid that orgs were going to be hijacked by the executives running them, taking them independent and denying Hubbard the money. To fix this imagined problem, the Sea Org parachuted into the Latin American cult HQ and declared a bunch of management as SP’s. The intent was to terrorize the survivors into improving stats quickly. While the stats spiked, shortly after the Sea Org left, stats sank back into the swamp, lower than before they shot all the experienced staff. Mike thinks the return of the “LatAm strategy” is what happened this week in the Johannesburg org. Only problem was that the first go-round 30 years focused on shooting staff members. Apparently, somebody at Int Base forgot this minor distinction and decided to shoot a lot of the biggest donors and most loyal supporters of the org. Rule #1 of a successful business is: “don’t piss off your most loyal customers.”

Some of the comments are fairly interesting, including perspective from a 56-year Church member in South Africa who knew Hubbard personally, who resigned because his wife was one of the 18 people declared.

Mike’s second post links to the Tampa Bay Times article detailing the restrictions the city is placing on the events (see the discussion below), and delivers a few laughs about how Miscavige is likely to play this.

ESMB, WWP and OCMB

According to Aeger Primo, the forums were relatively quiet today.

One article stands out. ESMB contributor “scooter” has a lengthy blog post about the history of Scientology in South Africa. This is a useful prelude to understanding some of the details of the current situation in South Africa.
There’s also some more discussion about insurance fraud in Michigan on Reaching for the Tipping point.
Some of the longtime critics get into the aesthetic side of cult activism in the thread on ESMB discussing Leah Remini’s performance this week on DWTS.

General Media

A number of other outlets picked up news of the “leaked” deposition in the Tom Cruise vs Bauer Publication suit, focusing on how Cruise is acknowledging that Scientology played a role in his divorce (see Tony’s post for the truth of the statement; he didn’t quite admit that). I have been accused of major “tl;dr” violations but not of flogging a dead horse… I don’t want to start now, so we move on.

The Tampa Bay Times reports new details of what the city is requiring from the cult in order to get a permit for the November 17 Flag building dedication (the former Super Power building). They have to get permits for the tents that were illegally constructed, and for the fence they built. The city won’t remove traffic signals for filming. The upshot is that the city is willing to be flexible on dates for the Flag building event for the cult, but if DM doesn’t play ball, he can forget about permits for the IAS event.

Scientology Daily Digest: November 5, 2013

Tony Ortega’s Blog

I’m not a lawyer and the subject of today’s article is sufficiently esoteric that it seems to be tripping even a couple of the lawyers who read Tony’s blog.

Today’s article focused on the response of the Garcia’s legal team to the motion to dismiss on “diversity jurisdiction” grounds that the cult filed recently in the Garcias’ suit in Federal Court in Florida alleging fraud in the Super Power donation campaign. Almost a year into the case, the cult’s legal team dropped a bombshell, asserting that the case did not belong in Federal court because several of the cult corporate entities are trusts whose trustees are California residents. The concept of diversity jurisdiction explained by Scott last week is apparently complex and arcane, and the cult appears to have created and sprung a trap that may have some chance of success either in the trial court or on appeal, because the trial court may have to do something that breaks an apparently ironclad procedural rule to keep the cult from profiting by chicanery, risking a messy appeal, or they have to dismiss the case so it is re-filed either in Florida or California. That could be a problem if re-filed in Florida since the cult has seemed to have done well with Tampa-area judges in the past, such as in attorney Ken Dandar’s being barred from suing Scientology again.

According to Scott Pilutik’s legal analysis, this was a sharp move by the cult because the Court apparent has no choice but to dismiss the case if subject matter jurisdiction is involved. In other words, good lawyering apparently may not be able to fix the issue.

The response from Ted Babbitt, the Garcias’ lawyer, appears to be alleging fraud: the cult has claimed that the directors are California based, without actually identifying them. In other words, he’s pointing out that the cult is not offering any proof to back up its case, so fraud may be involved. It sounds like he’s pointing out that the cult’s credibility after the motion to disqualify plaintiff’s counsel might be worth taking into account by the judge in looking at how to remedy this situation.

Key comments:

Jeff Hawkins talks about life hiding behind the curtains on lockdown inside buildings at Int Base when protesters were outside the fences. So much for the most “theta” beings in the Scientology universe to “confront and shatter”” suppression. And these protests were long before Anonymous cranked up the numbers by a couple orders of magnitude.
Semper Phi, who was doing training at Flag in the Anonymous 2008 protests gives her version of being on lockdown.
DamOTclese2 also reminisces from his perspective as a protestor during the same era.
Sunny Sands asked Roz Cohn to record her one-woman show about Scientology described in yesterday’s Underground Bunker article and post it; Roz e-mailed her back and said she was planning on it.
Jmh details a phishing attack attempting to steal passwords for the people working to take down cult ads on Craigslist.
Gerald Plourde raises the interesting notion that the delaying tactic of the motion on diversity jurisdiction may just be a tactic to stall the Garcia suit until Miscavige gets through the big events. I’m not sure there’s any way to determine whether this is true, but it is very interesting to think about; it will be worth noting if the cult withdraws the jurisdiction motion once the events are complete. It’ll also be interesting to see what happens if the cult starts to do some sloppy lawyering after laying what appears to be a remarkably clever trap.
Nice comment by StillOnYourSide about another theory of a potential path for Babbitt to win the diversity jurisdiction argument for the Garcias.
Grundoon did a nice bit of research on the historic neighborhood in LA where Hubbard lived for a time and where early cult facilities were located.

Mike Rinder’s Blog

Brief post only encouraging people to vote for Leah on “Dancing with the Stars” and encouraging them to e-mail Clearwater city officials to encourage them not to grant the cult an exception for the late filing of the street closure permits for the events in two weeks.

Marty Rathbun’s Blog

Marty has been on radio silence since October 30. This is an unusually long period of time for him. I did not check the comments to see if he is away or something.

“Scientology” on Google News

Scientology has purchased a historic building in Buenos Aires for a new Idle Morgue. The deal, announced Monday, was for US$1.5 million, and restoration is expected to take 12-18 months.