Truth is stranger than fiction (though the Mission Earth series might disprove this old saw – it’s hard to dream up weirder than that).
I wonder if any of the WOTF contest winners understood that within a few weeks of being paraded on stage and handed a trophy and a check, their speeches would be being touted at the weekly “graduation” of scientology orgs?
Like the people who are tricked into saying something positive about the “social betterment activities” and posing for pictures — nobody warns them in advance that they will be being used to try to bestow legitimacy on scientology and the writings of L. Ron Hubbard.
Several of the officials cited in scientology publications and shown with great fanfare in the puff piece videos presented by David Miscavige at the “international events” have been contacted and have reacted with surprise, horror or protests of trickery (or all 3). I wonder what the WOTF winners would say?
They would have an even more legitimate beef — they are not being video’d in conjunction with Hubbard’s “humanitarian” works. This is Hubbard the sci-fi writer.
And while scientology touts this with terms such as “global impact” and “profound impact” — they bristle at anyone mentioning scientology as the brainstorm of a “science fiction writer” or that it’s a “sci-fi religion.” They HATE those labels. Yet, here they are…
Found this article about Cruise/Travolta….dk if it’s new or old news or newsworthy at all…but here you go
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/m/dee59457-6e91-3f4a-ba51-63e30546c308/ss_inside-tom-cruise-and-john.html
Battlefield Earth is on Netflix. I saw it when it came out with people from the org. I thought I would try and watch it again but I couldn’t get through more than an hour. It’s almost “so bad it’s good”, but it’s apparently too bad to be so bad it’s good. I got to the part where Travolta is shooting the cows.
The Church of Spiritual Deception born from a false and unimmaculate conception.
A world without insanity in a world without Scientology!
Mike, thanks for picking up on this and bringing it to public attention. As you might have noticed, over at Tony Ortega’s Bunker a couple of people in the sci-fi writer community had dropped in when WOTF was the topic, and there’s apparently renewed controversy in their ranks over Scientology’s ties to the contests – which WOTF of course tries to downplay or virtually deny. I cross posted-this to some of their comments, in hopes of ensure that it comes to their attention and adds to the discussion among writers.
I notice at the bottom, that the trademarks belong to the L. Ron Hubbard Library – which holds the copyrights to all Hubbard’s works, Dianetics and Scientology and things claimed to be secular – a DBA of the Church of Spiritual Technology, one of the Scientology entities. So much for it not all being part of the same multi-headed hydra.
Lately there’s been a noticeable drop in WOTF attendances, partly as a result of critical voices inside SF fandom talking about needing a long spoon to sup with the Devil, but also because of wider media exposés of Scientology’s depredations. To disguise the drop in numbers, the severely-shrunken audience for the awards are now seated round the tables where they get their free banquet (probably the real reason most people go) instead of in theatre-rows. Even more of the prize-winners now seem to be complete (and probably impoverished) unknowns flown in from abroad. It’s pleasing at least some F&SF writers and illustrators now have enough of a conscience (unlike the dreadful Orson Scott Card) to forego such a brief and contrived stint in the spotlight…
https://www.flickr.com/photos/marksshoops/26569205257/in/dateposted-public/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLLGKOItSYk
Wow, that is one painful WOTF/IOTF event to watch.
No Xenu.
Both Gunhild and John Goodwin both look like they are harboring thoughts of blowing, which would be good for the Jones’ if John and Emily bolt out soon!
No Joni Labaqui, didn’t see her face in the crowd.
The audience looks horribly uncomfortable, the LRH quote part was particularly lackluster audience applause afterwards.
There were endless painful standing ovations (some partial, with many audience failing to leap to their feet).
It’s painful to see the decline, but inevitable.
I couldn’t watch on Flicker. Did you see Al Koch there?
No, didn’t see Al. When I was at ASI, the ASI staffers wouldn’t actually sit at the tables, except Norman and Maria and Hugh Wilhere and Joni Labaqui, I guess some years Fred Harris and Annie Harris, but the normal lower down ASI staffers, like Al who has always been in Treasury ASI, wouldn’t go sit in the audience. I recall in the stretch I was at ASI and attended, the events, I only interacted once at the smoozing in the smoozing spaces once, due to my liking so much one of the stories by one of the writers, I interacted to praise them on their story which I wish I could dig that story of that writer up, it was of an “OT” therapist in a future society, who worked at a prison and counselled prisoners who were murderers, quite a powerful story to me. It was like if “OT” were true, what a future “OT” therapist at a prison, who heard the confessions and counselled murderers, what that might be like from all angles.
But it’s unlikely to have all the lower down ASI staffers sit in the audience. I was more looking for Joni Labaqui who ought to be in the audience.
I’m curious what’s become of Joni.
Thank you Chuck
Way off topic but that show Ghost Adventures (have to take it for what it’s worth – lots of low talk) – will be replaying their show Secret Scientology Lab and the host interviews an ex Scientologist Jeffrey Augustine? and he talks about his wife Karen (no idea how to spell her last name) Delacario? and that she left the Sea Org because of the abuse. 6:00 on the Travel Channel. Were those two people really Scientologists?
Karen De LaCarriere. Yes. They are both on Youtube.
Thank you
What I think has scared me the most is now Scientology has a network TV channel. They are such a destructive force and now they have a way to reach so many more impressionable young and old people alike. People who don’t understand that this IS a cult and will do harm to you and your family.How many more families do they have to tear apart? How many more youth do they have to drive to suicide before someone stops them? ???????????. I pray to GOD everyday for an end to this. Bless you Mike for the work you are doing!
No young person in the US will fall for them Misty. 1) no one watches. 2) young people use the Internet to research new things.
Don’t worry Misty, not a lot of people will be watching Scientology TV.
To: MJM
From: David Miscavige COB RTC
Re: people watching Scientology TV
You are wrong! I am loved by millions and they will tune in to the Scientology Network this week to watch my reboot of ” The Brady Bunch”!
Episode one: The Bradys join the Sea Org
Tune in and see!
ML
Dave
To: David Miscavige COB RTC
From: Alcoboy
Re: your stupid reboots
You’ve got to be kidding me! Okay, let me write the synopsis!
The entire Brady family (Alice included) join the Sea Org. Mike, Carol, and Alice are posted at OSA. Carol comes across incriminating documents that prove that the IAS is a slush fund for Miscavige while the Ideal Orgs program is a real estate scam. Being truly theta, they contact the FBI who, along with the IRS, descend on Gold Base and arrest Miscavige as he is trying to make a run for it.
Meanwhile, Greg, Peter, and Bobby are digging a hole for a bush when they come upon a skeleton which turns out to be LRH. A quick interrogation discloses Miscavige as the murderer.
Mike Brady becomes the new COB RTC and immediately embarks on reforming Scientology. His first act is to disband the IAS and refund everyone their money. He then shuts down the Ideal Orgs program forcing all the orgs to relocate to storefronts in seedy neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Carol and Alice help build up the Aftermath Foundation and work to help offloaded Sea Org members to rebuild their lives. His final act is to disband the Sea Org.
Leah Remini is so touched by all this that she renames her show “Scientology- A Wonderful Aftermath ” and invites the Bradys to star in several episodes.
Miscavige, serving a life sentence in a federal prison for fraud as well as for killing LRH, bumps into Matt Feshbach who is doing time for tax evasion. Feshbach becomes so enraged at Miscavige for bilking him out of millions of dollars for the IAS that he kills him and stashes the body in a dumpster. The dumpster truck picks up the contents and dumps them, Miscavige included, into the Hudson River. Miscavige’s body floats out to the Atlantic Ocean where he literally sleeps with the fishes.
Now this is something people would tune in to the Scientology Network to watch!
No love at all
Alcoboy
Their PR techniques require secrecy, subtrifuge and dishonest communication. The secrecy was blown off years ago by this and other blogs, so their current “PR” with just subtrifuge and dishonest communications only serve to “dead agent” themselves.
I never had a clue when I was at ASI, nor did I have a clue in my whole 27 years in the Sea Org, just totally ignorant, honestly.
Today, were I put back into ASI to “run” or decide what to do, in running the contests, I’d spend a couple months watching the running of other events, and just be like the other sci fi awards events.
Hubbard’s hooks into the event, all need to go, period. And get pro MCs to do stints of running the events for 2-3 year stretches, and change out the MCs every 2-3 years, or whenever needed, shorter or longer, depending on the MC.
The money’s there, ASI’s got the bucks, to keep this thing going.
The only one to pull the stop on even doing these contests is Miscavige.
If he decides or even if he has already threatened to pull the stop on the events, and I suspect he has, since the fear in both Gunhild’s and John’s faces as they force themselves to look like MCs is visible to me. It’s painful to see people force themselves to be MCs when they really don’t relish that job. It’s so much more humane to just hire some MCs and let the MCs get away with whatever ribbing they dish out on Hubbard or whomever.
I bet Gunhild Jacobs and John Goodwin have harbored “blow” thoughts though. John looks like he’s actually in lower conditions, I bet he is.
But if I had any say, I’d get pro MCs and let the MCs try to have more fun with the event and run it like other sci fi writer awards events, or similar events.
That ‘firewall’ between Author Services (or is it just Bridge Publications now?) seems to be leaky. Very leaky. Maybe Larry Niven will finally notice the scam.
Niven has known of the scam for decades
Catch the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLLGKOItSYk
and go to the 01:56:34 Gregory Benford and Lee Purcell moment.
Gregory Benford has been contest judging the longest, so he says, and Gregory thinks its getting better. I guess possibly the writing might be getting better, has anyone been reading the writers’ stuff?
I wonder how many of the sci fi greats are rolling in their graves. Who knows? I’m not an editor, I wonder what the editors’ frank views are?
Maybe some sci fi real writers ought to pipe up on today’s sci fi writing on this blog and inform us. I never was that bright to even appreciate sci fi, sad to admit.
Fantasy is strong today. GOOD Sci-Fi has been in decline.
Interesting, since Hubbard even thought of himself more on the fantasy side rather than hardcore sci fi side of the niche. I wonder how Hubbard’s fantasy holds up for creativity.
I was such a wishful dupe to Hubbard’s Scientology, I sometimes wondered that exact thought when I was an ASI staffer.
It’s inconceivable, how Hubbard made his ‘serious career’ the Scientology cult movement.
He might have garnered better full life recognition had he stuck to just his pre Dianetics/Scientology career accomplishments, that’s so obvious.
But the Dianetics/Scientology messed up fake quack-therapy-past-lives-dead-alien-soul-exorcism Scientology nonsense movement was a big self created mess that ruins a limited look at Hubbard as merely a pretty good fantasy and mild sci fi writer of the “Golden Age.”
Hubbard’s life as Dianetics/Scientology movement creator and micromanager total boss during his life, was his own worst on display and a legacy he can’t get out of being most thought of Founder/boss of that vs the good fantasy writer.
He so obviously ought to have stuck with fantasy fiction.
Chuck, I wonder why he choose Sci-Fi theme for his last two works? I haven’t read more than a couple of his earlier works. Ol’ Doc & Typewriter.
In hindsight I suspected he was trying to prove that our science fictionesque percolating ideas which normally we think are fiction, are really factual.
Example, the Xenu story is real.
Same example: his writing the movie screen play “Revolt in the Stars” prior to him discarding that full production plan to then write “Battlefield Earth” (and the ASI traffic strongly strongly push to turn BE into a movie, which John Travolta on his shoulders that was done to the results none too pretty), and then he wrote Mission Earth. Other ASI traffic says to in turn review his earlier pulp/sci fi era books for in turn attempting movies out of each one.
If someone suffered reading his whole fiction corpus of works, in sequence, and saw all his private writings and plans for what to do in his final years with his whole legacy fiction “properties”, it kind of makes me today guess he almost made the crossover, had “Revolt In The Stars” come out even as a book, which it still could be converted into a book, someone like Kevin Anderson might even be paid to do that, who knows, in the future. Miscavige would be the one to say yes or no to that.
Most likely everything in Scientology’s major decision making will be off the table for any discussion until Miscavige is gone from the top decision making role over the movement.
Also, all the smart public Scientololgists seem forever rightly fearful of ever jumping into the Sea Org and trying to move up to the top councils to replace all the former WDC and Exec Strata and top persons who conceived of strategies in ASI for ASI, today.
Who wants to move to be Miscavige’s top decision making replacement and take on the full mantle of all of Hubbard’s final orders and the whole swarming movement’s Hubbard policies? Not anyone. Another Hubbard subject problem.
Fiction in general, as books or films, remember in the “tech” (quackery) Hubbard writings, the “Past Life Remedies” includes enjoying fiction movies and such, to percolate people’s minds, and even “run” (answer the Hubbard quack “tech” questioning) and come up with “imaginary” answers, which the person then wrongly in fact but rightly for the Hubbard movement, comes to conclude their “fiction” and imagination were in some senses “real.”.
As real as Xenu.
One more answer, if you painfully read the Introduction to “Battlefield Earth” and if you read the “Rocky Mountain News” article when BE came out, the fake Hubbard interview which possibly even Vaughn Young did most of the writing for that article/interview, Hubbard touches on why he chose “hard” science fiction over fantasy, a PR answer by Hubbard is how I saw that. I just didn’t know what else were his motives, in fact when BE came out, I didn’t even know he’d already written and didn’t push into production “Revolt Int The Stars” (nor did I even know that Xenu was a character in “Revolt In The Stars” and I didn’t know OT 3 story to even know that “Revolt In The Stars” could and would have been a great tying together of fiction to reality, a message which he possibly even wished the public to be given that idea by their watching the movie “Revolt In the Stars” and then Xenu who’s story is only half told in RTS, the viewers would possibly be lured into doing Scientology to pay to learn the real secret story of Xenu on OT 3, and “body-thetans”—since “body-thetans” and their “case” travail they cause is NOT told at all in RTS.)
LOVED the title of this piece. VWD Mike!!!!
One thing that we can count on with Scientology is rampant Hypocrisy.
Everything done “for humanity” is actually self serving.
For any of us who actually wanted to help others, Scientology was a bust.
To me Scientology is truly evil. And qualifies as 100% antisocial by a Hubbards own standards.
I’m right there with you, BK. There is no redeeming value in Scientology. It’s a worldwide scam. People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to play make believe! The sooner it falls apart, the better.
BKmole: from someone like myself that was never “in” but has watched the craziness from”inside” groups of scientology people, my opinion is that you have nailed this 100% spot on. I see zero helping of others. I see the very definition of antisocial behavior at it’s peak while claiming the opposite. To me scientology is no more than a self-serving club that spends tons of money to put up a fake appearance where their actions are opposite of what they say.
Nothing like “TRUTH” being spoken!
Well said.
In googling the acronym WOTF, I came across an entry for the “Way of the Future.” It’s a new “church” of artificial intelligence. It’s leader is Anthony Levandowski. Looks like Mister McCabbage has some competition. Or perhaps imitation is the sincerist form of flattery. Cult watchers, beware.
You’d think they’d know how to spell ‘heartfelt.’ This is yet another underhanded effort to deceive unsuspecting writers into promoting Scientology and its front group Awful Services.
All the non-secular activities have ceased so it is down to this now…
Hello all, I have just been to my local High Street for some shopping and I literally stopped dead. The local JW’s are out with their little stand offering a tome titled The Way of Happiness, it took a few seconds for my brain to catch-up. I thought for just a second that the Scientologists were out in my area. Given that the nearby town is the drug Capitol of the NW England I assumed that they would not touch this area with a barge pole. But if I made the mistake of confusing the JW’s and Sc many more people could do the same. It begs the questions, do the JW,s think that by almost copying the Way To Happiness they appear to be a less distrusted organisation ? Are they banned from the tv and Internet as well ? Does DM know his copyright is possibly being infringed ? Will DM sue the JW,s ? Will it be handbags at twenty paces in High Streets up and down the country ? Does this qualify as a WTF moment .
This is a major WTF moment! Jehovah’s Witnesses passing out WTH booklets!? What’s next…Mormon’s doing the Comm course?
And being bullbaited by the Moonies 🙂
Combine dogs of different lines, the result is normally more robust than the comination of overeducated dogs. So, a joint venture with JW and SC would become a robust new cult. Why not? The advantage: it is easier to be aware of them. And more funny. Lets hope the evils are washed out then.
My mother -n law warned me when I was younger about the JW. She said never let them in your home. Their like coachroaches. Once they get in it’s hard to get them out!!! Same for Scientology or so I’ve heard. So I guess birds of a feather flock together!!
The JWs are very aggressive and THICK. Open the door to them once and they’ll always return. A polite refusal is beyond their ability to comprehend. Feed them once and they’ll press the bar for their pellet forevermore. Nut jobs.