A Positive Legacy Of The Last Half Century: Involuntary Internal Recoiling Now Used As A Easy Aid To Exercise

Well shake it up baby now (Shake it up bay-bay) Twist and shout (Twist and shout):

"After a few months of government-sponsored and media-promoted hysteria over guns, the mass roundup of toddlers and preteens wielding high capacity pointyfingers is hardly surprising.  

Lefties are fond of lecturing (and writing books, and plays, and movies) about the famously dark days of McCarthyism, where right wing Bircher paranoiacs supposedly were looking for a 'Red under every bed.' I suppose to a certain extent they had a point, but the sum total impact of that brief 50's reign of terror seems to be that a couple of Hollywood writers lost screenplay deals. 

Contrast that with our new age of left wing paranoia…"

Come on come on come on come on baby now (Come on bay-bay) Come on and work it on out (Work it on out) Oooooh!

HARTFORD — An attorney Friday compared the Women’s Gifting Table to Yale’s secret societies, while also taking aim at the government’s use of a grand jury to “force” people to talk during its investigation of the table.

 

Norm Pattis highlighted “sisterhood” and “empowerment” aspects of the table guidelines during the second day of a trial focusing on two leaders of the alleged pyramid scheme, as he and attorney Jonathan J. Einhorn continued pushing the “good faith” intent defense for their clients.

 

Both have said the defendants, Guilford residents Donna Bello and Jill Platt, cannot be found guilty of defrauding the IRS and gifting table members if they felt they filled out tax returns correctly and truly believed monetary exchanges between members were tax-free gifts, not investments.

“ 

It’s not a crime to be misunderstood,” said Pattis, who represents Bello, and said table rules had a “Shirley McClain sensibility.” 

Gifting table guidelines refer to a “journey” and “circulating the energy of giving and receiving.”


You know you twist your little girl (Twist little girl) You know you twist so fine (Twist so fine):

But this feel-good spot can't hide the real truth. 

The narrator dares you to think for yourself, make up your own mind, and defy critics who just don't understand. And the ad is definitely visually appealing. It has even been compared to Apple's 1997 "Think Different" campaign. However, even that can't make people forget some of Scientology's most bizarre factoids. 

1. It was founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard who believed negative emotions were caused by things called Body Thetans and devised a way to get rid of them.   

2. They believe we are ruled by a galactic, alien overlord named Xenu. 

3. They require quiet or silent births. That means the mama-to-be must not utter a word. 

4. The church insists members that live on their compounds can leave anytime they want, but "defectors" tell a different story. Those that once lived in Scientology compounds claim they had to drive cars through gates to escape and were then relentlessly pursued.  

5. After leaving the religion, director Paul Haggis said, "I was in a cult for 34 years. Everyone else could see it. I don't know why I couldn't."

Come on and twist a little closer now (Twist a little closer) And let me know that you're mine (Let me know you're mine) Oooooh!

One of the weirdest historical confluences you can imagine took place in Pasadena, California, in the 1940s. There, a darkly handsome young man and chemistry autodidact named Jack Parsons had just made a bundle of money by inventing solid rocket fuel and selling it to the military. He was part of a group of explosion-obsessed researchers at CalTech who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where recently the Martian Rovers were made. He was also a goddess-obsessed acolyte and generous financial supporter of the infamous Pagan leader, Aleister Crowley. 

Parsons used his defense contract money to convert an old mansion into a group house whose residents included other Pagans, artists, scientists, and writers. One of his boarders was a charismatic science fiction author named L. Ron Hubbard, who became Parsons' greatest frenemy, participating in rituals of sex magic with the rocket scientist, sleeping with his girlfriend, and finally absconding with all his money. Here is the true story of how Scientology and JPL were both conceived by men under the sorcerer Crowley's mystical influence.

Well shake it up baby now (Shake it up bay-bay) Twist and shout (Twist and shout),…

 

Round, Round, Get Around, Sci Get Around,...

 While I'm glad this story has legs out there, I still can't help but consider the obvious hypocrisy: 

This is NEWS - the kind that sells papers (hint, hint, hint to the papers) with absolutely NO ONE but the cult complaining about it. But any attempt to expose Mormonism in the same way sparks an army of Romney-supporting Republicans to start screaming "bigotry"?

And by OPENLY engaging in this completely unethical deception, those same Republicans think they're going to, somehow, convince me to VOTE with them?

 In your dreams, baby, in your motherfucking dreams,...

 

And For Our Next Event,...(The Ex Games)

More information is rolling in about the Tom Cruise Dating Service that Scientology was running: 

On September 2, Oscar-winning filmmaker and former Scientologist Paul Haggis wrote an e-mail to Showbiz 411 confirming the auditing took place. According to Vanity Fair, Boniadi, 32, was audited every day in October 2004 and was allegedly "told to lose her braces, her red highlights and her boyfriend" before meeting Cruise the following month in New York City. 

Though Boniadi did eventually fall in love with Cruise, 50, the actor's frequent public displays of affection and intense adoration became too much to bear, Orth's sources claim. Following a series of incidents with high-ranking Scientology officials, Boniadi's relationship with Cruise reached a turning point. She was eventually forced to leave Cruise's home, where she lived, and move into Scientology's Celebrity Centre. She was later transferred to another Scientology center in Florida. In Haggis' e-mail, he claims to have known Boniadi for three years. 

"I met her through a mutual friend when I was doing my own personal research into the allegations against Scientology, before I wrote my letter of resignation," Haggis wrote. "Naz was embarrassed by her unwitting involvement in this incident and never wanted it to come out, so I kept silent. However I was deeply disturbed by how the highest ranking members of a church could so easily justify using one of their members; how they so callously punished her and then so effectively silenced her when it was done." 

"It wasn't just the threats; they actually made her feel ashamed, when all she had been was human and trusting," Haggis, 59, added.

Maybe it's just me, but "human and trusting" is NOT how I'd describe someone who was "told to lose,..her boyfriend" and she does it. If anything, it describes the cold, callous, and calculating nature of Nazanin Boniadi and the cult she was in towards other human beings - especially those who love them and they claim to love. (Haggis quit the cult because he couldn't stomach how the "church" felt about gays - a pretty large group, I'm sure, he didn't have a relationship with and/or doesn't personally know every member of,...)

It also puts the lie to the claim of "her unwitting involvement in this incident," and if you bother to consider what the boyfriend must have went through (as no one else seems to) being tossed aside for someone as insecure as Tom I-have-no-mind-of-my-own Cruise - the "man" that "Boniadi did eventually fall in love with," despite the fact Cruise, with all his wealth and power, couldn't even procure his own women - it's both shameful and damning.

But, like I said, maybe that's just me - someone "human and trusting" who's seen this before,….

 

Cultism = Death: This Is Happening On Purpose

Ever since Jayanti Tamm, the author of the cult novel Cartwheels In A Sari, did a blog on The Huffington Post called "What Is a Cult? Recognizing And Avoiding Unhealthy Groups", I've been telling you I was going to do something on the cult phenomena, and, I guess, it's time for me to deliver.

I want to be clear that I'm not writing this because I think it'll do a thing to stem the tide of cultism (as a matter of fact, I'm convinced, it'll be no more effective than anything else that's been done). No, I'm writing this because - like a Jew during the Holocaust, leaving a note in a buried bottle for someone, anyone, in the future to find - I realize the rampant cultism we live under is probably killing me, merely because I'm aware of it, and the country - merely because it is not - so I want to have something out there that said not only that I lived, but that I knew what and who my, and my country's, killers were.

Here's how I regarded Tamm's article when it originally came out:

Read it. I'm going to blog on it at length, in my next post, because it's completely outdated information. Actually, it's even worse than that:

It's about as wrong as wrong can get.

Here's your first hint about how deceptive it is:

It's coming to us from The Huffington Post.

So, how wrong are Jayanti Tamm's observations, and how do mine differ? Her first paragraph in The Huffington Post piece started off with these words:

Who in our over-stimulated, media-saturated, hyper-connected world would ever go and knowingly join a cult? The answer is no one.

That's now an anti-cult or post-cult mantra, and probably sounds about right to most people, painting the appropriate image of someone who's been duped into doing something they never intended.

But the important phrase here is "the appropriate image", because - just as the Mystic Bourgeoisie's Chris Locke observed that "nobody wants to be seen as New Age because nobody wants to be seen as irreparably stupid" - very few will admit they willingly joined a cult, for that and other reasons.

Proving, right from the start, that Tamm's column is a bunch of deceptive and outdated mind mush is this quote from an expose' on award-winning director and recent Scientology defector, Paul Haggis:

Haggis was born in 1953, and grew up in London, Ontario, where his father, Ted, had a construction company. He decided at an early age to be a writer, but after leaving school, he drifted, hanging out with hippies and drug dealers.

He fell in love with Diane Gettas, a nurse, and they began sharing a one-bedroom apartment. One day in 1975, when he was 22, Haggis was walking to a record store when a young man pressed a book into his hands. "You have a mind," the man said. "This is the owner's manual." The book was Dianetics: The Modern Science Of Mental Health, by L Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Haggis began reading it, Dianetics had sold about 2.5m copies. Today, according to the church, that figure has reached more than 21m.

Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words "Church of Scientology". He had heard about Scientology a couple of months earlier, from a friend who had called it a cult. The thought that he might be entering a cult didn't bother him. In fact, he said, "it drew my interest. I tend to run toward things I don't understand."

So much for "no one" knowingly joining a cult.

The truth is, in our want-to-be-rebelious post-Boomer culture, people will and have joined all kinds of weird cults by the billions - and, waving their freak flag, they're proud of doing so - if not always honest about it.

The Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington was a member of the Rajneesh, a so-called "dangerous cult".



The Rajneesh practiced open sexual intercourse amongst it's members and attempted to poison an entire town in Oregon for political purposes. Huffington once described her time in the cult to The Washington Post as "like knowing there was another dimension to life and that I wanted to experience it, knowing that nothing else mattered as much. It took me over completely.”

Without ever having renounced her cultism, Huffington is now a major player in American politics.

Of course, she could describe her cult experience positively because no one has ever seriously questioned her about it in an informed manner.

For instance, compare her answer to that of the Rajneesh cult's second in command, Sheela Birnstiel AKA Ma Anand Sheela (above, center) after she was recently questioned in the Swiss town of Basel:

"I am labeled a criminal. It is stamped on my forehead. I have been punished. Leave me alone."

Sheela - a power mad cultist who committed heinous crimes in America - is now a successful Swiss businesswoman.

Arianna Huffinton, one of Sheela's devoted disciples, is now a successful American businesswoman - one now allowing Jayanti Tamm to publish wrong and misleading information about cultism on her website - the very phenomena the power mad Huffington is (still) involved in.

So Jayanti Tamm also isn't doing too badly for herself, either, thank you very much.

Meanwhile, I am now suffering the effects of the cultism people such as they have unleashed around me.

Considering I've never joined a cult, that's something which no one can say is right,...but, being only vaguely aware of what's happening, the country also isn't standing up and saying it's wrong, either - nobody's actually, actively, stopping the cultists - whatever the manner or effects of the cultism they're profiting from.

And as I've said, I don't hold out much hope they're going to stand up anytime soon, so my fate - and, yes, I think the country's - is probably set:

We will die, together, as the victims of cultism.

Next up: Surrounded - Cults (And Cultists) Hiding In Plain Sight.

Film: Going Into A Dark Place (To See The Light)

Next to Egypt, Scientology is still the news around here, including another movie about cults that's on the way:

It looks like billionaire heiress Megan Ellison (daughter of Oracle boss Larry Ellison) is in negotiations to co-finance not one, but two new Paul Thomas Anderson films! The writer/director had been working on a religious drama said to revolve around the founding of a Scientology-like religion tentatively titled The Master, but was getting nowhere finding financing (this is Hollywood after all; just look at the vitriol spewed at Paul Haggis following his denunciation of Scientology).

The film was set to star Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the founder of a spiritual movement called the Cause, with Jeremy Renner taking on the role of his young protégé. Vulture reports that Renner was forced to drop out of the project given his full schedule (offers started pouring in following his Oscar-nominated turn in The Hurt Locker), but Hoffman is still attached to the film.

Good (we're huuuge Phillip Seymour Hoffman fans!) and, with so many films about cultism on the way, that's just another exciting hint of what we can look forward to seeing in the coming years.

Today Show - Good Job (But Not Good Enough)

We're so glad to see the The Today Show (and The New Yorker) tackling the Scientology investigation by the FBI - not only because the investigation's happening and, because of award-winning film director, Paul Haggis, is getting publicity - but because, for instance, this television interview offers us an opportunity to speak intelligently on a subject we, by now, tend to goof on because (since so few seem to care who NewAge hurts) there's nothing left to do sometimes but have some fun with it. Well, for this post, fun time is over:

The most important quote is from Paul Haggis himself, stating, "I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don't know why I couldn't." We say it's the most important because, A) it's the only time the word "cult" - not "church" - is mentioned, and B) it goes to Matt Lauer's repeated questioning of how a supposedly-smart person could get caught up in a cult in the first place, a question the New Yorker's reporter can't sufficiently answer - nor Haggis. That's easy, though probably difficult for someone to admit:

These folks (actors, politicians, and the like) are creative, which is one thing, but not nearly as smart - something totally different - as they think.

Put another way, clever don't equal brilliant, folks. Remember our homeopathy guy, saying he got into it because he's an "idiot"? That's the truth. And only when one can admit it are they approaching real knowledge about themselves. Think of other NewAge cultists we're familiar with:

Madonna trying to convince politicians to put Kabbalah water in nuclear reactors. Was that smart?

Gwyneth Paltrow's repeated forays into handing out insane received wisdom on health. Does that reveal she's smart? Or that her nickname, "Goop" is a more accurate description of her mental processes than she'd like to admit?

NewAge Punch Line, Jim Carrey, falling for Andrew Wakefield's quackery, and hooking up with Jenny McCarthy to fight childhood vaccinations. Highly intelligent, right?

It's unfortunate that Matt Lauer couldn't get someone familiar with cults to be on the program, since they would be able to explain how flattering it is for these already-special members of society (who, deep down inside, probably already thought of of themselves as smart since they're famous) to think they know something others don't - a fact Haggis hints at, when he says he didn't get out of it what he thought he would, which we read as he's learned a Scientologist is not much different than the rest of us after all. No special powers, or insights, to be had there.

Just decades of convoluted garbage that Haggis learned to master, until he understood that being called an "Operating Thetan VII" is all the reward he's going to receive for entering the Seventh Circle of Hell.

Another reason these "smart" lightweights get caught up in NewAge is,...what's to stop them? We live in a NewAge cult-saturated world, where Oprah peddles this crap to the masses (now on an entire network) and few ever say she's full of it. (The insistence that we should be "non-judgmental", a NewAge tenet, is almost accepted as a law in certain parts of the country.) Instead - more flattery - we celebrate her success at it with Kennedy Center honors and dinners at the White House - with Paul McCartney, the man who brought us the fraud of the Maharishi. That's a long way from laughing at Nancy Reagan for talking to a psychic, huh? Hillary Clinton, who also was talking to a psychic in the White House, is now Secretary of State, though, for the life of us, we don't understand how or why. Maybe it has something to do with her husband - a former president - being in cahoots with NewAge cult leaders Tony Robbins and Ken Wilber. We really don't know.

We do know Barack Obama is in the White House, partially, because of Oprah and the cult of NewAge's support.

To be cont'd.