Tag: South Africa

Scientology Daily Digest: Monday, December 9, 2013

David Miscavige and his advisors experiencing the disconnect between their view of how a psychiatric exam feels versus how most of us feel when we talk to a psychiatrist. Fetch... the COMFY CHAIR! And if that doesn't work, the CUSHIONS!
David Miscavige and his advisors experiencing the disconnect between their view of how a psychiatric exam feels versus how most of us feel when we talk to a psychiatrist. Fetch… the COMFY CHAIR! And if that doesn’t work, the CUSHIONS!

Two major news items today. First, both sides filed their trial schedule in the Laura DiCrescenzo case.  Of course, Laura’s side has a fairly straightforward schedule, but the cult has a byzantine process involving multiple mini-trials, with two weeks spent in the first such just arguing about First Amendment issues.  And of course, while Miscavige’s fingerprints are mostly absent from this document, he still managed to get into the text a demand that Laura be forced to undergo a psychiatric exam as part of the case.  It’s straight out of Monty Python.

The second major news item is the SP declaration of long-time staff member Ryan Hogarth from the South African branch of the cult, causing the African Scientology blog to speculate that the entire South African community could easily secede from the cult as the Haifa, Israel mission did.

Tony Ortega’s Blog

Tony published the two vastly different proposed trial schedules from plaintiffs and defendants in the Laura DiCrescenzo case.  Laura’s attorneys propose a straight six week trial, while the cult proposes an avalanche of hearings, mini-trials, duplicative effort and other showboating that could easily approach four months in the courtroom, raising a pretty significant cost barrier to Laura.

My take: Usually, when you look through the cult’s legal filings, you don’t have to be a lawyer to spot the craziness that Miscavige has injected into the filing — inflammatory language, etc.  A relatively quick skim of the defendants’ filing shows a relative lack of crazy, which is worth thinking about.  Is Miscavige on vacation after the stress of the IAS event?  Is he distracted? Or is it just a relatively simple filing and not worth his putting his unique “imprimatur” on it?  About the only thing going on here that has any crazy is the proposal that Laura be ordered to undergo a psych evaluation, which to anyone who doesn’t believe in the cult, is kind of a joke.  Apparently, Miscavige is so isolated in his little bubble that he has no idea what an actual psych eval is like.  

Most telling is the proposal for a ten-day hearing on First Amendment issues. Recall that Judge Sohigian was completely upheld on the issue of “priest/penitent confession” laws in the first First Amendment issue raised by the cult.  As one of Tony’s legal team points out, the cult is essentially trying to argue that the “Church” can do whatever it wants to religious workers when it tries to claim that the Court can’t get in the middle of a religious dispute.  Of course, the logical extension of this is the belief that churches can sanction murder, rape, arson, fraud and all sorts of other violations when they come from sincerely held religious beliefs.  But there are plenty of crooked pastors (Jim Bakker, and many many more) who have done jail time for their crimes.

Selected comments: 

Mike Rinder’s Blog

  • Mike’s post today reflected the South African Scientology blog post of how Ryan Hogarth, decades-long Scientologist and former Scientology South Africa President, got declared as the goon squad from Headquarters continues to bang heads together, apparently randomly. Mike observes that Ryan Hogarth was the first local staff person to be allowed to introduce His Imperial Amazingness at an event, instead of using the game show host-like tones of Jeff Pomerantz in a pre-recorded blurb, so great is Hogarth’s credibility among the locals.  Hogarth is a third-generation Scientologist (first one I’ve heard of) who was on staff, mostly in South Africa, for 25 years.  He headed DSA (the local equivalent of OSA) for much of that time, and served for a time as President, which he equates to a figurehead. There’s some great details on the fiasco of acquiring and renovating the Ideal Org building, and more on life in the cult in a far-flung outpost.  The post from Ryan Hogarth himself is relatively long but useful to read, as it details how the Internet brought him to his senses, when he discovered Marty Rathbun’s then-new blog. 
  • Mike’s post yesterday covers the craziness of Super Power marketing, giving yet another example from source documents of how the disconnect between the hype and the reality will accelerate the meltdown of the cult, with more people blowing.

Forum Sites (WWP, ESMB, OCMB)

General Press

  • RadarOnline is picking up the Tom Cruise slave labor story all over again via the declarations of Jon Brousseau, Marc Headley and others that were filed last week in the Mosey Rathbun case.  While Tony reported Brousseau’s story in mid-2012, I’d suspect we’ll see other sites picking up and re-broadcasting the RadarOnline story over the next couple days.

 

Scientology Daily Digest: Saturday, November 9, 2013

Today, some follow-up details on the South Africa nightmare showed up; I continue to think this could be significant as the cult appears to be retreating and retrenching from some geographies to focus on the US operation.  I’m hungrily devouring everything I can to attempt to figure out whether this scenario of the cult declaring a sizable number of big donors will have ripple effects potentially including the entire org declaring itself independent of the “mother church.”

Tony’s article today focuses on a filing in the Garcia suit which can be used to cast aspersions on the credibility of the “diversity jurisdiction” memo which is still at issue in the case.

The message boards have a fair amount of clever creativity worth checking out.   While some might accuse me of bias, I must say that Supermodel #1’s comments on yesterday’s Scientology Daily Digest are worth noting.  She’s tolerant of my interest in the cult but has not had much interest in the spotlight.  I invited her to put in a small comment on my first blog post to help “christen” the blog, much as an elegant woman christens a lumbering smoke-belching ship before launch.  I may have created a monster, however, as reading her rather witty repartee will show.

Supermodel #1 Cover Shoot from early in her career. I’m not saying if I’m the male model in the background.

Incidentally, now that she’s surfaced publicly, some might wonder if Supermodel #1 is a sock puppet of mine.  She has met Tony on a couple of occasions, and has also met a number of other prominent members of our community; all can vouch for her, and since I was lurking nearby, proving that we have both been seen in the same place at the same time.  She’s even found a potential self-portrait, shown here, that she feels captures her true essence.

Tony Ortega’s Blog

Tony’s story today analyzed the filing by Ted Babbitt, the plaintiff’s attorneys in the Garcia’s Super Power donation fraud case .  Scientology was required to submit a five page (restriction to avoid them droning on for hundreds of pages) summary of the arbitration procedure, so that the judge could determine whether the arbitration procedure is fair. That’s needed in order to determine whether the court could intervene, given that the donor agreement requires a “Church” arbitration panel (which the Garcias contend inherently stacks the decks against anyone seeking redress).

The response to the arbitration outline filed by the cult is withering and direct, accusing the cult of “fraud” and “fiction” in the description of arbitration.  The underlying legal filings are provided, as is a declaration of Mike Rinder, who points out that he spent 20 years in charge of managing legal affairs for the cult, and who says that he never knew of an actual arbitration proceeding to take place.

My take:  I think that the Garcia’s attorney may have been rocked back on their heels by the diversity jurisdiction issue, which appears to leave the Court little room for discretion in determining whether it has to dismiss the case or whether it can continue.  To a non-lawyer like me, it feels like this filing is far more confident in tone than the plaintiff’s opposition to the diversity jurisdiction issue. It is unusual for a motion like this to use such extraordinarily strong terms as “fraud” and “fiction.” In other cases I have looked at, attorneys tend to use a reasonable amount of restraint, even in the overview sections where one is expected to use passionate rhetoric to attempt to sway the judge before beginning the legal reasoning process. It is a surprising to see such strong words, one of which has a clear implication that a criminal act upon is being committed upon the court.

I think it is no coincidence that this response was filed very quickly, so that it influences the judge’s perception of the diversity jurisdiction argument and implies that it is likely fraudulent and fictional as well. Since I am not a lawyer, I don’t know how to assess how the judge reacts to this motion, either on its own merits, or in conjunction with the diversity jurisdiction issue. But I do note the more confident tone in this filing. 

Key comments: 

  • “Anonymous” gives a nice analytical writeup on how Scientology “ethics” are supposed to work, particularly showing how it traps you into doing the will of the supreme leader, even if that turns out to be unethical in other ways.
  • Good perspective from Skip Press about the playbook generally used for the CommEv scam. Fortunately, a number of people who have been through CommEv’s speak up about their experience, which is right in line with the theory Skip proposes.
  • TruthIWant points out that he underwent a CommEv procedure, and how it represented an opportunity to bully him into submission, rather than to try to figure out what happened as the paper documents suggest it is intended to do.  Not that we’re surprised it turned out that way, but firsthand accounts are always valuable.
  • Madora Pennington talks about her own CommEv, and gives a sense of how much monkey business was involved in auditing, especially in getting the person in the chair to report just how wonderful every auditing session was. Madora says memorably, “you aren’t allowed not to get better from auditing no matter what!”
  • Speaking of CommEv’s, “Room 101” had one, too.  It did not end well.
  • In a related example of how “Scientology ethics” seem to be rather highly flexible, Tory Christman shared an experience she knew about where to Scientologists were cheated out of a lot of commission money by a WISE company. Apparently, the cult step in and reverse the arbitration award because the CEO of the company was a major donor. The cult changed policies that Hubbard put in place the day before they “heard” the complaint to protect the money of the larger donor. Money quote: “it was the first time I realized you could PAY to have ‘tech’ removed.”
  • Lurkness located an interview that Mark Bunker did of Greg and Debra Barnes, talking about their CommEv’s and expulsion from the cult.
  • Sunny Sands somehow managed to find out that various Flag restaurants have been put on cash only basis with their liquor suppliers by order of the state alcohol regulator.  In life, you apparently can stiff just about anybody but the tax man and the booze peddler. One potential explanation for this is that the cult doesn’t regularly sell liquor at its restaurants, but is dusting off its liquor licenses to accommodate the booze-swilling IAS guests.  Too bad they didn’t bother to read the fine print before trying to get (illegal) extended payment terms from their vendors.  Hope Miscavige doesn’t read this blog and find out about it, or there are going to be some sorry campers in the RPF.
  • NoseInABk picks up on a cute poll that TMZ is doing about Tom Cruise’s involvement with Suri. Apparently, 96% think Cruise should not have the right to get Suri involved in the cult, though interestingly the readership is far more divided on whether “Abandoned” is a defamatory term.
  • MonkeyKnickers writes an open letter to the cult, providing some heartfelt advice to management on how to improve the cult’s image. One of her better efforts, one that proves that messing with the pregnant lady carrying twins is generally less than smart. 
  • TheCommodeDoor finds a nifty quote in a nifty paper by Stephen A. Kent of the University of Alberta on whether Scientology is a religion.  
  • Chuck Beatty, who designed the routing forms for refunds in the 1980s with the express intent of driving people seeking refunds over the edge, gives some background on what he did. 

Mike Rinder’s Blog

  • Mike posted an article mulling over the extent to which Tom Cruise is subject to the disconnection policies that other Scientologists must live by.  It’s a well-written piece that doesn’t cover a lot of new ground in the discussion, but is a clear and cogent summary of what most of us already understand, and is worth reading on that basis.  http://www.mikerindersblog.org/tom-cruise-and-disconnection/
  • Mike’s second article relays a story on BackInComm, the South African blog of the wave of ex-Scientologists recently declared by the head office.  Mike references the story of Ernest & Gaye Corbett, decades long Scientologists and, according to Mike, the highest-profile members of the cult in SA.  More useful details to try to back into what Miscavige thinks he is doing. http://backincomm.wordpress.com/2013/11/09/here-is-their-story-ernest-gaye-corbett/#more-132

WWP, ESMB, OCMB

Aeger Primo helps out in a big way today, again. A serious article to lead off followed by some lulz.

  • WWP picked up a broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on the harassment campaign against Marty Rathbun, to be aired Sunday (tomorrow) at 10pm ET.
  • ESMB has some snark and info about the casting call ad for actors “needed” to make the upcoming Co$ events at Flag (Clearwater, FL) look “good.”  Apparently, management thinks the average Scientologist is just not attractive enough to populate a brochure. Either that or that, or if they used 15 culties for the brochure photos, at a rate of one blowing a month, they’d have to re-shoot the brochure in just over a year.  Now you know why Winston was so overwhelmed at work in his job at the Ministry of Truth: erasing unpersons is a lot of work.  
  • Some pretty good humor and shoops about Tom Cruise’s comment in the Bauer Media deposition about how “My work as an actor is as hard as fighting in Afghanistan.” Some nice imagining how our troops would feel about the comparison.  Both ESMB and WWP are weighing in. 
  • OCMB captures Angry Gay Pope talking about his recent adventure, including the “citizen’s arrest.”
  • OCMB ponders what slant the cult might take on a new “tag line” for its ads.

General Media

  • Ex-Scientologist Skip Press writes a column on celebrity news site The Morton Report that profiles Jon Atack, the Hubbard biographer who has been sharing pieces of his revised version of “A Piece of Blue Sky” on Tony’s site every week.  Apparently, Atack helped Skip escape the cult.
  • The BackInComm blog for South African Scientologists and ex’s ran an article today advocating that all Scientologists worldwide stop giving money to the “Church.”  Well written advice.  More importantly, it’s worth reading to feel the gauntlet being flung down. We’ll see what Miscavige does next.  I am sure that being one of the recent Sea Org imports sent to town to fix things up will not be a pleasant lot in life (though I’m not feeling sorry for them at all).

 

 

 

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.
  • Miscavige's Web Traffic Generation ConsultantJohnny 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 6, 2013

Editor’s Note: More hassles today; the longer article I had hoped to get out today will appear tomorrow.

Thanks to “AegerPrimo” for our first tour through ESMB and WWP threads.

As I’ve said before, this is a work in progress; I welcome suggestions on how to make it better. And if you’re willing to help out by taking on compiling parts of this (particularly ESMB, WWP and other forum sites) on a regular basis (perhaps signing up for one day a week), please be ready to jump in.

Tony Ortega’s Blog

Today’s post covered three topics:

  • Various Michigan Narconon facilities under the banner of Per Wickstrom, in a development that should surprise exactly nobody familiar with the hijinks at Narconon Georgia, may be involved in insurance fraud, from a patient whose insurance was billed $200,000 without his knowledge.
  • Angry Gay Pope got arrested for protesting at Pac Base and is charged with stalking of a Sea Org member who had a now-expired restraining order against AGP.  Apparently, AGP will be spending the night as a guest of the authorities, until an arraignment to fight the $150,000 bail and felony charge, which sounds like it may well be over-charging, given that Tony reports the LAPD decided not to charge him with a crime after viewing his camera footage of the event.
  • A picture from the Million Mask March in London last night shows comedian Russell Brand standing next to well-known ex Samantha Domingo.  No word on who got whose autograph.

Key comments for the day:

  • Former Narconon Arrowhead President Lucas Cattona commented that insurance fraud could blow the whole Narconon thing up; I and several others had previously thought so, but it’s nice that an insider confirms it.
  • “Once_Born” suggested that a massive wave of lawsuits from Narconon could be impossible for the cult to handle.  I expanded on this to say that Miscavige can’t scale — the Anon 2008 protest was a “scale” attack, with perhaps 10,000 protestors appearing outside a substantial percentage of cult facilities; Miscavige remains traumatized by that.  “Anonymous” observes correctly that this was the cult’s strategy against the IRS that drove the 1993 exemption agreement: so many lawsuits in different jurisdictions that the IRS could eat up their entire litigation budget fighting them all. The thread is visible by clicking here and scrolling up.
  • Luke Catton also points out that the cult is trying to re-brand some of these facilities to escape from under the Narconon cloud, but he believes it’s not likely to succeed.
  • Also, Catton’s financial data on Narconon contribution to the cult jives nicely with estimates we’d been carring in our spreadsheet but not yet published; nice to have validation from an expert without having to slice up all those boring IRS Form 990s.
  • Still_On_Your_Side poetically compares David Miscavige to Norma Desmond, the aging diva from Sunset Boulevard.
  • OTVIIIisGrrr8! explains how everyone has some serious M/Us when it comes to the idea that Narconon would engage in something as distasteful-sounding as insurance fraud.

Mike Rinder’s Blog

  • Mike’s first post highlighted the crazy coming from David Wilson, a Kool-Aid drinking whale who sent out a “regging” letter with some extremely bad reimagining of a bit of dialog from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.  To make it even worse, the “Clear California” logo from the top of the document features the figure of a knight who looks more than a little like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, not the sort of knight you want on a life-or-death quest for glory.
  • Mike’s second post relays a story about the management of the Johannesburg Ideal Org getting replaced after being recalled to Clearwater.  Click through to the underlying articles on a blog for SA-based Indie Scientologists.  The article says that a number of people with decades in the cult have recently been declared, and a new management team from the Sea Org has been sent in; more declarations are expected.  I would estimate based on a quick cut of the numbers that there are perhaps 400 Scientologists in SA, so this may be an example of implosions to come in other countries, and perhaps even in US cities.  Suddenly, the formerly sleepy cult scene in SA seems a lot more interesting, and the recently-launched backincomm blog appears to be a great source for what’s going with those still in the cult down there.

Marty Rathbun’s Blog

  • Radio silence now of seven days.  There has only been one other period in the last four months where Marty has been off the radar for this long.

ESMB & WWP

  • “Suspicious Scientology Deaths….MURDER?” is the name of a a TruTV segment published today that looks into the deaths of Lisa McPherson, Susan Meister, Flo Barnett (DM’s mother-in-law) and Quentin Hubbard. It also references Kyle Brennan and several other deaths at cult-related entities.  This ESMB thread has extensive commentary including several lengthy posts by Arnie Lerma.
  • There will be a 5-day “Flag Down” conference in Clearwater, FL, in May 2014. Activists are requesting funds to host a conference to expose abuses of the Co$. Scheduled speakers include; John Duignan, Nancy Many, Victoria Britton, Hana Eltringham Whitfield, Mark Plummer, Patty Moher, John McGhee, Jamie de Wolf, John Sweeney, Arnie Lerma, Karen Pressley. This thread is running at ESMB and WWP.
  • WWP highlights (perhaps “lowlights” would be a better word) an interesting thread that showed one of the hazards of the “clay demo” part of Study Tech. NSFW unless you are one of the pigs who work on the trading desk in Global Capitalism HQ.
  • Some discussion on ESMB on whether Marty is completely dissociating himself from Scientology as a result of his “slavery” article a week ago.
  • Apparently, the city of Clearwater just approved construction of a new aquarium on a site next to Flag, which the cult opposes.  Guess there will be a whole new range of freaky alien life forms from the world’s oceans on display in downtown Clearwater.

“Scientology” on Google News

  • The Tampa Bay Times is back with an update on the plans for the big events in Clearwater. Sounds like the city is toughening up on the cult. According to the TBT, “City Manager Bill Horne said the city won’t begin reviewing the new IAS permit request until the church complies with conditions the city is placing on arrangements for another celebration: the grand opening of Scientology’s new Flag Building and related events, scheduled to begin Nov. 15.”