Freedom for all California…
One more empty building and California will be free at last!
Not a chance ANYONE actually buys this. But the rah-rah seems to impress.
No we don’t
Not a one has EVER come back
Nothing quite like “Big Blue”
It’s ugly, dirty and empty. The celebration may be memorable, but not for the right reasons.
They’re trying to sound fancy…
If you have ever been to the “PAC Canteen” you will understand the crazy of them serving “lobster tail”
Scientology Thanksgiving
Not only are they NOT providing a Thanksgiving dinner for the less fortunate like most churches, they are charging for it! This is the story of scientology told in a single sentence.
Just like Freedom for California…
They ARE creating a “new civilization” in Los Angeles.
Wonder what these words mean to them?
Pasadena Poster Child
Nick Lekas is the hot OT VIII Class IV interned FSM. But he is not in the top 6? (You can bet if they actually had 10 FSM’s that selected someone it would be the “Top 10”)
Pasadena is Going Gray for Ventura
Discount Status
Things must be getting tough
Pirates and Bums
And they are proud of it.
Wonder if they would think it was good to be known as “Criminals and DB’s”. Hubbard used Pirates and Bums once. So it is “cool.”
All Funds are Committed!!!
So there will be NO MORE FUNDRAISERS right?
Haha. Just wait until next week.
Columbus On The Ball
Well, not really. “Those other guys” refers to Michigan. Ohio State fans won’t use the name. But the Michigan game isn’t until 30 November? 13 Oct is a Sunday. Ohio State is not even playing on 12 October.
Are they really this out of touch?
Yes.
14 year staff veteran….
But new to Columbus? He completed two 5 year contracts and didn’t finish his third?
More foolishness
Here we go again — what are they going to watch live on “full HD” screens?
Like a blazing brush fire
Hope you are independently wealthy and have a wonderful nanny…
Oh yes, please…
Nothing better or more fun than an “Ethics Seminar” unless it’s having your eyes poked out with a sharp stick
Yep, Full Clearing
You can see it here.
Like freedom for California and a new civilization in LA
We are here to welcome people…
Huh?
B-o-r-i-n-g
They’re pulling these old things out again?
Desperate for stats
They keep promoting this…
Wow, a new mission?
They are actually trying to open a new Mission!
Amazing.
Stay tuned. If it does ever open it will quickly follow the Santa Monica Mission into oblivion
Thanksgiving dinner Canadian style
At least they’re not charging for it. But potluck? I wonder if anyone will bring a turkey?
And the big fun is watching scientologyTV? Aaaarrrgggghhhh
Oh dear
These reasons are funny. Come to Cambridge for the potluck dinners. The atmosphere! The famous surroundings of the Kitchener area… And best of all, we have graduation. And intensive delivery because there is nobody in the course room or HGC.
What is a SuMP “Senior Executive” doing in Sydney delivering a seminar?
And what IS a “SuMP Senior Executive”?
Wow, big time line up in Sydney
A SuMP Senior Executive and a Mace Kingsley reg…
Special Effects workshop?
Get them in for ANYTHING.
Blah blah blah
But best of all, he has some “free information” for you
More blah blah blah
The laws of Magic?
This is some “new tech” that has been discovered?
How to make your money disappear.
Dissemination of the “tech”
Though it is not actually Hubbard “tech”….
The first actual Trained OT’s EVER!
Yes, how about that. And their TARGET is 100.
Thinking Big!
Whatever this is…
What pops into your head first?
NOT scientology, that’s for sure.
Nonsense presented as genius
Gathering of the Grayhairs
Everything you need to know about the true state of scientology.
If THIS is the most beautiful ideal org in the world…
No wonder they are all empty.
This looks like a Victorian era mental institution.
The first actual Trained OT’s EVER!
Interesting..
The Tampa bay Area has a lot of OT’s VIII’s who never gp to IAS events, do a basic course once every few years and try to stay off the radar.
I think DM should take a good long look at these people and get them in for an ethics handling.
If he had a functioning CF( Which he does not) it would light them all up.
There is nothing worse than Class VIII’s who stay off the radar.
“Big Game,” my eye.
There is a Big Game: it’s Cal vs Snodfart, and may Snodfart lose.
“Pirates and Bums”, and the picture is the Jolly Roger and a NASCAR race.
SUBTLE.
“Now it is a *flat out* race to get ALL funds collected by Thursday at 2PM!!!!”
“SUBTLE” is their middle name. ; – )
Oh, the joys of dyslexia. I read the Pacifica Café ad and first saw “Coolie” staff instead of Café. How Freudian.
“No one has come back.”
Not even Tubby, unless you believe that grifter from (Oregon, was it?) who would seem to be made of the same stuff as El Con, even changing his name, IIRC.
Oh, and that 80% college grad, 54% professional demographic is exactly the group that Scientology can no longer recruit from. In their heyday they at least got quite a few people with some college, but it’s no accident that the orgs near campuses have mostly moved away; the small and failing Austin org is the only remaining example I can think of, and their location obviously does them no good. And since the crop of greedy and gullible dentists they lured in through WISE decades ago, professionals have completely soured on the early 20th century techniques Scientology is peddling, including bureaucratic industrial-style management of the sort that caused old manufacturing companies to go bust.
Failures don’t exist, only people with with bad experiences. Unawared goes aware. It’s impossibe to fail as a human being because it’s possible to laugh at the failures as a human being.
Please give yourself a chuckle and take a good look at that baby’s expression – the baby with the parents who just joined staff. The eyes – he’s looking at both of them with this expression that to me say’s, “Holy Shit. And this is what I picked to be in charge of me for the next 18 years? Oh, man!”
I was thinking the same thing!! First, so sad to see this young family joining staff. Their “you can have it all” pitch is so tragically false and it makes my heart ache every time…but then the expression on the baby’s face is priceless.
I thought the same thing. Smart baby!Lynn
It doesn’t help that its mother looks to be halfway through one of the morphs in Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun video. Is this an indicator of the delusion necessary to throw your life away on this?
Jeez, you go away for few weeks and return only to see the same tired old retreaded bullshit.
“When you think of Ireland, what pops into your head first?”
Dave Allen.
I was reading comments on Tony Ortega’s site, and fell in love with a new collective noun to describe a group of scientologists.
As one would call a group of deer a herd, or a group of birds a flock, a fitting way to describe a group of scientologists is a “Dwindle of scientologists”.
Perfect.
(I might have also accepted “a clutch of scientologists”, which is quite fitting too.)
Ok, this could get fun.
Thank you for catching and sharing the “dwindle”
The obvs one is of course, “a bubble of Scios”, but dwindle is so much more fun and fresh.
Added to the quiver.
umm… what was a group of lemmings referred to as?
I thought the Sea Org motto “Revenimus”, or “We come back” was cancelled in 2007 when Ron failed to return after his 21 year leave of absence. I guess we can actually expect him back any day now.
The Columbus ad can’t get anything right. First, for those of you outside of central Ohio, ‘that team’ is the U of M. Their colors are NOT blue and white (as used in the flyer) but blue and gold. The colors for MSU (who we beat a week or two ago) are white and green, so it doesn’t reflect them, either. Honest to gosh, folks, most of us in Columbus are smarter than your average Scientologist and these flyers/ads show it!
Reason #4 to come to Cambridge: BBQ’s on their 6 table “beautiful terrace”? Terrace views are the (perpetually) empty parking lot, a few trees and the loading docks of Dimplex–fine manufacturer of electric baseboards and fireplaces.
Regarding the Buckeye game night….
Umm.. ‘Screen’s’?? Doesn’t have an apostrophe. Hello??
Wouldn’t be $cientology if they didn’t know proper grammar. Have mercy.
Money, money, money, moooooo-ney. (There’s a tune in there somewhere.)
I see 5 flyers with a “Move Up In Status” on them.
Nick has put together a slick advertising brochure for his FSM money making venture.
Foothills had a potluck, showed off a new ceiling*, had some entertainment and then had a fundraiser for carpeting.
* I’m sure this new ceiling will soon be on everyone’s “must see” list like Niagara Falls, Mt Rushmore, the Alamo, the Grand Canyon, etc.
Not the first org where the FINALLY made some sort of normal maintenance repair, like to a leaky roof, after letting it continue for far too long due to the local org being broke, and then trumpeted it as some great achievement.
Marc, Foothills is a mission franchise in a side walk-out basement space of a commercial-industrial building. From other photos it appears that it was last renovated decades ago when dark wood was in vogue, and is just terribly in need of updating.
The mission should be paying for upkeep out of its income, but it seems that the franchises are mostly becoming money-losers that require subsidies, and now even have to beg their customers to chip in. As far as I can tell they don’t even own the unit, so anything put into it would be lost when the operation finally goes belly-up.
They’ve been on a more than year-long saga to raise money for renovations that are supposed to somehow make them “ideal” even though that seems to involve little more than the new ceiling and carpet:
https://www.mikerindersblog.org/thats-some-ideal-mission/
https://www.mikerindersblog.org/foothill-msn-fail/
https://www.mikerindersblog.org/making-an-ideal-world/
These missions are going broke because they have to pay so much money up lines which eventually lands in DM’s pocket tax free, and also because Flag has been raiding them of courses, auditing and staff. Now you can get the entire lower bridge at Flag instead of doing it at your local mission which is how LRH set it up. Flag is touted as delivering “more standard tech” than the standard tech of a Mission. It’s like saying you’re “more pregnant” than your neighbor who is also pregnant. Standard tech is standard tech no matter who delivers it and no matter where it is delivered. But Flag would have you think otherwise. And that is how Flag decimates the feeder missions and leaves them twisting in the wind.
Wow, “The Laws of Magic” seems to me to be a direct reference to the teachings of Aleister Crowley. I wonder if that’s what they’ll be teaching in that seminar? That might not be a good idea. “Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” might encourage some rebellion amongst the true believers. Eh, then again, probably not…
Ron himself was associated with some of Crowley’s associates, and dabbled before he ever came up with his con game. LRH getting mixed up in dark arts might explain a lot, actually.
Nico and Moriah, NO! Please NO! You have a new baby. Do not join staff.
25% Discount? Who the heck came up with that swindle? You gotta hand it to Miscavige, somewhere along the way his people wove in a bunch of short-con swindles into Hubbard’s long con cash cow game. Outside of the moment of award, Status is meaningless. You don’t get a title – at work no one will address you as Mr. Civilization Builder With Honors Jones.
It’s bad enough that people are giving away every spare dime for the effervescent value of something called a Status. Now they are short-selling Statuses as if they had a genuine marketplace value like gold, diamonds, or fill dirt.
I am afraid the die-hards within Scientology have already accepted the notion that a Status purchased for ever-increasing total contributions of cash has value in their lives.
“Honey, if we sell the car and move back in with your parents we’ll have the money to move up in Status!”
“Oh, yes, let’s do it! My parents will be so-o-o jealous! And their house is right on the bus line to our Org!”
What is the “Routes to Knowledge” that FSM Pat Parodi is talking about? I don’t know how they can have knowledge since all the red and green vols were removed from the courserooms. And the Briefing Course was axed. So where are they getting the knowledge in the Routes of Knowledge? What is on the course or courses.
I realized one day WHY they took away the Briefing Course. It may be because on the mountain of tapes one listens to, recordings of Ron’s live lectures given to students, there are mentions of people who have since been banished and are an embarrassment to DM or LRH: people like Mary Sue Hubbard (RIP), Quentin Hubbard (RIP), Nibs aka Ronald Hubbard (later changed to Ronald DeWolfe.) Also the first Clear was later declared, and so to edit out all the names of people who were really good guys, colleagues, lovers, family to LRH, would be too Herculean a feat. Better to just disappear the BS in it entirety to save the time of having to listen to and edit out people.
Oops, a typo. I meant to say, “better to just disappear the Briefing Course in its entirety to save the time of having to listen to and edit out people.”
Not to worry. The abbreviation “BS” (for Bullshit) works just fine –
Let me get this right. In Chicago, if you complete your next status, they will credit you 25% (towards the status after that, I presume). They keep all the money, you get a piece of paper and they color a little bit extra on the chart. That is the trickiest trick yet. In other deals you paid half your sponsorship, somebody else paid half, and you got your alumni or whatever. Now you give the full amount, get your certificate and whatever, and they pretend you get something back. Instead, they keep the money and use it to encourage you to finish your next status, and the one after that, and the one after that…..what a scam.
I’m dying to know who the LA Captains are. I thought the only one with the rank of Captain was Miscaviage.
I had to laugh at the Chicago thing where they say they have ALL the money pledged. And that now all they have to do is collect the money pledged before Thurs at 2:00. Um, I think you’be be waiting long after that Thurs at 2:00. It may come in on the 12th of Never.
I was in Vegas when they were buying and renovating the building for the New Ideal Org. And the top SO for that project kept coming and leaning on a Scn I knew, asking him for more more more money. They admitted to him that about 50% of the money pledged was not available because the makers of those checks couldn’t make good on the checks for various reasons. So they were leaning on one of the few whales to make it all go right, as in give them all your money.
The Halloween special effects seminar is on November 12 – two weeks AFTER Halloween.
What a joke. Kelly Yaegermann is creating the first actual OT group on the planet. They re getting ready for OT IX, and OT X. More subjective meandering. Get real Kelly.
George, haven’t they been claiming “first actual OT” something or other ever since the mid-1950s, periodically? Which is it that is supposed to be the “first real OT level” or whatever?
It’s sort of a metaphysical version of “the boy who cried wolf” – except there’s never going to be any there, there.
Are these posters, or hand out fliers, or something shown on scientology tv? Are they something everyone in the cult receives? If they are something everyone receives it would seem like that might just begin to put some doubts together since it’s often a rewrite of so many other wonderful breaking news items that are just recycled over and over. Bottom line of most seems to be give more money. When do people start wondering just what they did with the money they already gave? Wonder why it’s taking so long to open up one of the many buildings or why it needs renovation to open? Wonder why anyone has to ask for volunteers and where is the staff that is supposed to be there?
That Chicago “25% discount” is actually “credited” to your account meaning you’re never going to see it again in your lifetime in any case. Once money enters $cientology’s greedy clutches it never goes back.
BRING A FRIEND??? Why, do you want to see if your friend can swallow Lron’s bullshit? Or do you want to lose that friend?
A downtown LA mission? That would be hilarious to see. Will TC and JT help open it? That is the only way anyone would stop in. But after getting selfies with the clebs, they would run away. And run quickly.
Multiple friends tricked my into going to their evangelical church services/”Bible studies” in high school and college. Said friends all ended up distancing themselves from their churches because of conversations I had with them afterward. For one thing, sitting there while the pastor tells you what a Bible passage out of context supposedly means and you’re not supposed to say or think anything isn’t Bible study by any definition I was brought up with.
So if they bring the right kind of friend, that friend may end up helping them get out. Exposing outsiders to your irrational practices is likely to get them to point out the irrationalities.
The poster featuring Nico and Moriah from Kansas City was the one that stood out for me today. It reminded me of other staff members I have known with a small child to take care of.
Back in the day, there was only one short period of time where staff were actually making some decent money before the bubble burst. That was the Kingsly Wimbush de-dinging era in the early 80s. I vividly remember overhearing a conversation between the mission’s C/S and another female staff member. She commented that it was so nice to actually be able to buy paper towels. Her husband was the academy course supervisor. These two ‘tech terminals’ should have at least been able to make a living wage, but the only way that they got by was by moonlighting. When the Wimbush era crashed after a few months, there was no more cash for the luxury of paper towels. Those were the glory days of staff pay, Nico and Moriah will fare much worse. Unless they have outside support they will be very short term staff members. I hope.
The “de-dinging” era was apparently the first local implementation of hard core Sea Org style practices, including 100 to 120 hour work weeks, at the mission level, from what I’ve been able to glean from old-timers who were there as staff. The accounts I’ve seen hardly sound family-friendly, and foreshadowed what eventually happened at the local orgs as well.
But it seems that they did put on a good show for the public membership for a while, in part because staff sacrificed their own lives to cater to customers.
The move to Ventura will at least give Santa Barbara freedom from Scientology. Their new facility will be far down the highway an hours’ drive away in traffic, tucked back in an office park rather than in the center of the coastal resort town. I just checked on a map, and the new location is actually on the South side of Ventura furthest from Santa Barbara!
And I would think the “we come back” line would start to be a liability after nearly a century of it failing to ever happen. But I guess the remaining bubble dwellers aren’t ones to fact- or reality-check.
Are those “captains” in LA a sign of some new sort of status being introduced, perhaps not based on money but on activity, like work as volunteer regges and ideological enforcers? That could smack of the commissars of Soviet Russia. In Clearwater they were reported sending out teams of people to the homes of anyone who hadn’t been active for just a few months, and maybe they’re starting to do something similar in their stronghold of Southern California.
And that Foothills Mission sure seems busy trying to promote everything but Scientology – “magic” and whatnot.
It must be a piece of (carrot) cake serving restaurant meals to clams. Who’s going to complain about poor service? Or send something back because it wasn’t cooked right? Or complain about a bit of dried egg yolk on a table knife? Or even ask if the seafood is fresh or frozen? Doing so could risk a knowledge report and maybe worse.
The Cafe Patio at PAC is a crack up. There is occasionally one or two people drinking something there. Until some “SP” shows up with a camera recording. Then Security bundles all the Big Beans into the building so they don’t lose all their abilities “gained”, like breathing and walking…
News Flash! Another top band has arrived in Clearwater: Criminals & DB’s. We’re looking forward to there music.