What Deal!!
2 weeks in a motel, then a week on the Freewinds.
And you get a webinar” that you could do from the comfort of your own home.
And two people who are going to instruct you on how to get into Power as an artist and be on the comm lines of the world.
Two people nobody has ever heard of.
How to do everything at once seminar
Wonder if this guy has ever read Problems of Work?
Does he know what he is promoting is flat out off-Source?
What?
How does graduation equate to “Stronger together”?
More “Advanced Org” wins
“OT” seems to be a thing of the past.
A scientology event?
The Buckeye Draft?
Anything to try to get some people inside the morgue…
The Chan Man will be there, so obviously it’s where all the cool kids will be.
OT VIII panel
They’re going to tell anyone who shows up that OT IX and X are coming soon and you need to get ready!
Dianetics Day BBQ
Wonder if they are going to roast weenies over a volcano?
“Exclusive briefing”
For anyone who wants to attend.
It’s all about “target attainment” — discussing a target that has not been attained in 30 years!
If this really is so important, why didn’t they take 500 SO members who sat around for two years during the pandemic and get them onto Solo NOTs?
Cruise Control
My take is slightly different — maybe, just maybe, botox and plastic surgery work…
No stories have appeared yet (that I have seen) “Tom Cruise leaving scientology?” — wait for them.
Hmmm, which is it?
Do you get OT powers from the OT levels?
The L’s?
Super Power?
OT hatting?
The Basics?
Ship Competence and Leadership Course?
All of the above?
And what EXACTLY is this “OT Power”?
Scientologists not currently in the organization on service?
This is a special graduation for them?
How are they graduating anything if they are not there?
And what is the Chicago “After Party” celebration?
More OT Powers?
Wonder if they wore those outfits to scrub the decks?
Thurston Howell III and his glamorous wife Eunice “Lovely” Howell.
Making an impact
On what?
Kiddie Corner
Fly through the air
Why are they afraid to say people handed over money? They use all these cutesy euphemisms — do they think it hides their gold-digging money-grubbing?
No need to translate
This just doesn’t work on any level
Woohoo…
But how come it’s not an “ideal” mission?
Sydney Org going bananas
Wonder how they manage to complete an OT 5? The AO’s are completing Basics and Class V orgs are now doing OT levels?
Whatever, it’s spectacular…
Something very memorable…
“Something very memorable is about to happen. Saturday May 28. Prepare.”
Can’t wait to hear what this is… Who wants to bet it is a fundraising target being announced?
What a bonanza of BS. And who would pay to spend three weeks with the stellar line up of Jim and Tamra Meskimen, Michele Stafford, Jerry Fetta(They spelled his name wrong, Taron Lexton and Erica Christanson.
Those are the best celebrities they can muster. None of their careers are growing. Just pathetic.
“Lovely”?
She’s a middle-aged, buff blonde.
With MONEY.
As such, how – dear God, HOW could she leave the house dressed like this?
How could she even entertain the concept of being photographed in this hideous get up that she obviously thinks makes her look sexy?
Sorry. I have this THING about very wealthy women who dress badly.
I take it personally. Its crazy of me, I know.
Trish – what’s her name – Duggan – she’s another one.
Women with MONEY, if they have no taste, should at least REALIZE they have no taste, and PAY someone to dress them who DOES…there’s NO shame in that…people pay decorators, people pay landscapers…if you have the money for crying out loud PAY someone to dress you…OK, I’ll stop.
“Renowned artists”.
“Renowned” means “Known or talked about by many people; famous.”
I think whoever wrote this promo has a misunderstood word.
Michelle Stafford – OK, she’s a working actor, she is known, but I wouldn’t say that many people are talking about her. She is in no way famous. She’s a small celebrity in the daytime soap genre.
Erica Christensen – A working actor. Known, but not that well known. Not famous.
Jim Meskiman – Seriously?
Tamara Meskiman – I can’t even dignify this with sarcasm.
The 3 remaining others – Never heard of any of them either professionally or personally.
And last but not least – Bayou Bennet – She and I were acquainted. Very casually acquainted. But I’d bet a great deal of money that having met her a few times, I’m alone in this, amongst many millions who have never heard her name and have no clue who she is.
Mikel Lindsaar may not just be promoting Scientology, as I’m sure he will be trying to reap the rewards personally and for CoS. He is obviously very clever in developing software however you have to have some warning lights going off due to his very close intertwined businesses and associations both linked to Scientology and the rest of the worlds non Scientology businesses.
Mikel Lindsaar is listed as ASIC director of, and President of Hubbard College of Administration Sydney Ltd, he is also the chairman of Scientology’s WISE organisation and has commercial links to SELLability to name but a few. (SELLability apparently replaced Diskeeper following legal action from ex sea org members).
This commercial link between Lindsaar and at least one of his companies and Church of Scientology is clearly evident and includes developing/ providing training software via exec.io to Scientology organisations. Whilst this in its self is certainly not illegal, one has to ask themselves at what stage does the line blur and non-Scientology business becomes a Scientology recruitment ground and a money generator of CoS.
Whilst he doesn’t hide the fact he is linked to Scientology I do believe it raises concerns for those who do not do their due diligence. I will also add there are a number of people working through Lindsaar’s companies who are long term sometimes higher ranking or former higher ranking scientologists. Another one of his newer businesses called StoreConnect of which he is listed by ASIC as director and secretary services offers e-commerce for small to medium business. Virginia Gordon, the alliance manager and growth manager for StoreConnect is also linked to other Lindsaar businesses as well as Enlight, the learning platform which may ultimately link back to Hubbard Administration. This is where Colin Davie, once described on this site as leading the pack of money grabbing cretins and an insult to vultures turns up.
A very intertwined group of people!
For some odd reason they have a lot of resources in Columbus. Also Columbus is sucking up scn’s for services from other orgs, as Cincy used to do. That is something that we see here in Atlanta, other than the org here is worse than dead.
That and TC sucks.
Atlanta Guy, since Columbus has apparently been staffed with a lot of Sea Org members since it went “ideal,” it’s not entirely surprising to hear that they’re sucking the air out of other orgs for hundreds of miles. My guess would be it’s a combination of their being under pressure to produce as one of the more recently minted “ideal” orgs, having a lot of aggressive sea org staff; and related to those two factors, having more trained staff to deliver auditing and courses at a point when most orgs are left hollowed out.
I’ve actually been wondering what they’ve been doing with the reportedly large contingents of sea org staff in Columbus and Kansas City. This would go towards explaining it.
Thanks for the bit of info.
A month or so ago, I got a call from the “Columbus Ideal Org” about doing some survey, trying to pass of me being on a mailing list as a quirk of having spoken with someone else that I don’t remember over a decade ago (aka “some time ago” because admitting it had been at least 10 years wasn’t going to happen).
I live on the west coast of the U.S. I have never lived anywhere in the Midwest.
(It was also a little bizarre that they never identified themselves as a “Church of Scientology”. They only ever said Columbus Ideal Org.)
Stronger together. Not quite! 6 feet apart and masked anyway. So much for the mighty healing power of the “tech”! “Bullbait” isn’t quite right but they did get the “bull” part right.
As I like to say:
Hay, processed through the bowels of a male bovine.
Yes, every artist and wannabe has indeed the dream to succeed and “be on the comm lines of the world.” Or, as saner folks would put it, have widespread name recognition. The offer is to “learn” from 8 people how to get your name on everyone’s lips.
But is theirs? Remarkably, only 3 of them even have a wikipedia page. This is a pathetically low hurdle to clear on the way to the promised global fame. It’s also something that is well within the “artist’s” control. You may not be able to postulate your way to an Oscar but scores of folks of negligible public interest have managed to get at least their own page. Preferably one that doesn’t mention an affiliation with a cult as popular as a turd in a punchbowl.
The question is whether blowing your self-promotion budget on a three-week trip–not counting the relentless upsales that will be sure to occur–is the answer. All for the privilege of listening to a bunch of nobodies who can’t even be bothered to show up! A trip that sounds a lot like a more expensive and fraudulent version of the infamous Fyre Festival.
“Tom Cruise, our unaging, American ubermensch!”
Are you kidding me?
UNAGING?
If people think he still looks like a twentysomething, they’re deluded.
Ralph Macchio, yeah, sure. Tom Cruise? Don’t make me laugh!
“Ubermensch”: This term is such a faux pas. Less because of the “unaging” claim, but because of its historical usage, and with its opposite “Untermensch”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch
It’s Tom Cruise, the “Big Being” vs. “all the degraded beings”:
“Dave and me, we’re big beings. We are surrounded by DB’s (degraded beings). DBs can’t help but try to destroy big beings. That’s just the way it is in this universe. You have to understand this. This is LRH, man. It’s the plight of the big being getting jumped on by all the degraded beings. You gotta be unreasonable to survive around a big being like me. You can’t be weak. You gotta be strong to protect the big being from all the degraded beings.”
https://www.datalounge.com/thread/21130215-tom-cruise-dark-side
Ya get that?
“Dave and me, we’re big beings. We are surrounded by DBs.”
Talk about hubris!
Not sure if this is the right place for this, but been catching up on the podcast, especially Listener Questions, and I have two.
1) I know the answer, I think, even as I type this, but why doesn’t Scientology just release a standard statement in response to accusations (any of them, all of them, ONE of them) that says “These accusations are indeed troubling. They go against everything we as Scientologists stand for. We will investigate and, if proven true, take appropriate action.” That doesn’t even mean they would have to DO anything, but even a first semester PR student would know to put out that kind of statement. Oh, right, I already know the answer: always attack. But really, they’d gain respect from rational people if they took that approach. Saying what they say now just makes them look like idiots.
2). What would happen if I, as someone who has never had any ties to the COS and do not know anyone in it, past or present, just wanted to proactively get myself declared? What if I wrote a letter, stopped in a center, just said, “Hey, just wanted you to know, I think you’re a destructive cult run by a psychopath and I tell everyone I know.” Better still, what would happen if we could get a thousand people to do that? A million?
Thanks for what you do, and please take care.
1) Yeah, the answer is pretty clear. LRH was not a first semester PR student, but considered himself superior academically. The written-in-stone policy and tech of Scientology from him must not be deviated from.
Reading some of his writings, his PR policies, an armchair psychologist could easily spot signs of and diagnose paranoia. That’s totally unacceptable by church dogma, both acknowledging his mental health struggles and viewing his writings as anything but pure gospel truth. Because of that, his paranoia is hard-baked into how Scientology views outsiders, criticism and handles attacks. (NOTE: Telling the truth is an attack in their twisted rabbit hole.)
2) How they responded would likely depend on how much of a direct threat they considered you. A journalist with a pretty decent audience is going to get more attention than someone with only a small friend group.
It is also a bit weird with their tangled corporate structure, and their internal need to keep anyone from knowing about bad stuff. When I was receptionist in a Class V Org (the level between Mission and Advanced Org) and we got something very negative in the mail, the only people I’d report it to were the ethics officer and, maybe, send something to a group/post in charge of legal stuff (OSA, though I think it may have had a different name).
I knew to keep my mouth shut otherwise, so no one but me and the ethics officer in that group would know and we’d pretty much act like it was an oddity. (To share that there was negative information was cause for ethics action, so we’d avoid that route.) I kind of assumed the Ethics Officer handled the folder in CF (central files, the mailing list and records) to indicate it was a dead file. (I forget if that was the name, but folders flagged like that were the bad people that we wouldn’t mail to, and that shouldn’t be looked into.)
Now, I don’t know if things have changed since, because this was before the internet was a big thing. Nowadays there seem to be enforcers who go around demanding people not have FB friend connections with “bad people”. No idea if that’s organized or haphazard.
the victims of the mind-fuck perpetrated by the criminal organisation known as the “church” of $cientology are radicalised. So radicalised that they don’t care about appearing like idiots to outsiders. Outsiders are, after all, “wogs,” not the next step in evolution: homo novis, “ubermensch.”
https://whyweprotest.fandom.com/wiki/Homo_novis
We were once told at a base briefing that there is no such thing as an “ideal mission” and this is a strategy only for the orgs and the fact that CO SMI started the whole ideal mission thing without Miscavige approval was a major flap and was now making it very hard to open new missions because the public weren’t supposed to be regged for the renovations and blah blah. It was quite a thing.
Rose, I think the primary problem with missions is that they are money-losers these days. “ideal” or not. There’s not enough interest in scientology any more to justify paying $20 per square foot in commercial rent per year on a couple of thousand square feet of space, plus of course all the other costs of running a location out of anywhere other than a spare room.
The Sunland-Tujunga scientologists haven’t been able to find anyone willing to take on that risk since the last mission in the area that rented a large and prominent space went under about a decade ago, and it’s been run out of members’ houses since. All they’re apparently doing now is opening a small outreach space, that looks to be in the ballpark of 500 square feet, while keeping main operations like the course room at the Stewarts’ house.
I haven’t seen that all new missions were supposed to be “ideal.” Did that become a blanket requirement at some point? As far as I can tell it’s been a mix, unless that was limited to a certain period.
There were a number of “ideal” and other missions opened over the last two decades, but not a lot. It seems to me that the biggest problem with it may have been that the attention lavished on their openings have made the subsequent failure of most more embarrassing, besides wasting money on renovations of properties that the CofS didn’t own and wouldn’t retain.
The benefit of doing the “Webinar” there is there’s a course super who will wake you up periodically. At home, you might otherwise sleep through it all.
OH, MY!
WHAT would that little Romi have to “sweat out” on the Purif? That’s if (BIG if) the process worked. Since it doesn’t, I wonder how much that little immature body was damaged by the whole ordeal.
And how much did her parents have to shell out for that monster frame for such a minor “bridge” step?
Child abuse to me. Plain and simple.
But that’s just me.
Not just you. 😢 Every time I see one of these featuring another innocent child, it just makes me sick.
So many good things to comment on. Loved “roasting weenies over a volcano.” and on target attainment seminar, how come after 25 years they never hit the goal of 1,000 on or through Solo Nots”? And no Clear city anywhere? That’s not target attainment.
And you’re right about when Covid hit and no one was coming in the orgs, why didn’t they audit the staff and have many staff now on OT VII? Heck all the staff could have been Cleared in the time the orgs were closed for Covid. Why not that target attainment?
Maybe they’re trying to recruit members to replace the Sea Org brought in to staff the Columbus (“Central Ohio”) org when it went “ideal,” with that “draft” event. Those Sea Org might even be needed to be moved to Chicago and Austin so those orgs can have enough staff for their delayed “ideal” upgrades.
As the CofS shrinks it seems as if we get less information about what’s going on inside, such as the apparent resort to using Sea Org to staff Columbus and Kansas City. I think I’ve also seen indications that the staff of Orlando, which went “ideal” before those, is heavily Sea Org. The situation must be increasingly desperate, especially after the disruptions of the pandemic.
This is now SOP, standard operating procedure, to bring in SO to open and Ideal Org and man the slots on the org board. Happened many years ago in Vegas, all SO brought in and very few locals were on staff. But after a few months of this, the SO leaves to go to the next grand opening and the place cave in from no one manning it.
There are so many things on which to comment. I will select just one. I bet I am not alone in knowing the lovely couple, Tamra & Jim Meskimen. Jim grew up side-by-side with Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard. Jim’s mom is beloved Academy Award-nominated actress, Marion Ross, who played “Mrs. Cunningham” in the 70s U.S. sitcom “Happy Days.” In several of Howard’s early films, you can spot Jim with a very, very small speaking role; perhaps a line or two, or in “The Paper” he has one entire scene with Marissa Tomei in a restaurant. Nothing prominent, however, EVER, despite the abundant canon of work Ron Howard has done.
Also, I should say, Jim is a well-trained, very good actor, improvisor, and voice artist. How could Jim, with all his many scientology credentials and lifelong connection to Hollywood royalty, plus genuine talent, NOT break through?
Yes, Jim and Tamra both plug away and obtain steady work as actors—or with Tamra, as an acting instructor. Together they’ve raised a beautiful daughter.
However, having known them since their days in New York, I do not recall ever seeing one of them bring a new person into an org as “FSM”—field staff member. Maybe Tamra once, possibly, back in NYC, and that person did some services and liked them, only to later depart majestically, penning and performing a sass-filled cabaret show about escaping scientology.
I am aiming to say, here, that if Jim and Tamra Meskimen all these years—three decades or more in scientology—if they were “flourishing” across their dynamics, wouldn’t they be bringing in lots of family members and their dearly treasured friends to orgs and to scientology and “the bridge to total freedom”? I mean, wouldn’t they?
It’s back to that thing we have discussed in this blog forum. Experienced scientologists generally do not bring new people in. We know too much of how tortuous and setting you on a path to bankruptcy the road is. No matter the “wins,” it simply becomes unimaginable to subject someone you care about to this group.
I used to deliver Pizza.
I eat pizza.
I made a pizza once and everyone that ate it lived and prospered.
I’ve always wondered, what goes on a Vulcan pizza for everyone to live and prosper?
Logic dictates they must be made on Vulcan using local cheese. Extremely long delivery time though as they go really mushy in the transporter.
Re: Cruise Control
This message is for freelance film and television critic Charles Bramesco and his tweet for “Top Gun 2”:
Tom Cruise works, Scientology does not.
Wow. Looks like post Covid and things are really opening up in the world of scientology!
You can go to the Ship now! Yay! You can come to Flag! Yay!
Hip Hip!
Makes me sick.
Well, you still have to spend 2 weeks in a motel before you can go to the dock in Aruba to “board” the Freewinds.
Why don’t they ever talk about feeding the poor or housing the homeless? What about hitting the streets of Chicago and helping keep young men, women and children from the clutches of gangs?
You know, doing very, very important things and things that really help people.
They don’t really care. If you look carefully you can see a scam from miles away. If not you get sucked in.
Actually … helping … people isn’t the scientology way™. If they can’t pay for it, scientology can’t help them. If they CAN pay for it, they’re not poor or homeless.
That is my point. They don’t really care about people. The ones in or the ones they want in. They obviously didn’t care about the ones who got out.
Yes, it is definitely about getting paid before lifting a finger. There’s also another part to the scheme. Even if scientology COULD “do something about it” they wouldn’t because they don’t want any of the problems to go away.
Like other fraudulent operators–political ones as well–they need to be able to point to the doom and gloom of a “dwindling spiral” and the solution that only they can provide (but won’t). If the problem were to go away, so would the doomsayer’s self-enrichment scheme. Empowering people to improve their lives is the last thing on their mind! They prefer them dependent and terrified.