Don't panic Haiti, the Scientologists are coming!

[cynical lady]

Psychopath, conman, liar, fantasist, fraudster, bully, tax evader, megalomaniac – it's fair to say L Ron Hubbard's death was a blow to global humanitarianism. Happily, there is a silver lining to the cloud that has hung over Earth since the founder of Scientology shed his corporeal form in 1986. That silver- lining is the high profile, expansionist figures who represent his organisation today – and the good news is that they're turning their thoughts to Haiti.

 

Were an ***** like you to itemise the myriad things that this most wretched of disaster zones currently lacked, chances are you'd omit "militant Scientologists who claim post-traumatic stress is a conspiracy created by the evil psychiatric profession, and who believe the correct response to extreme shock is to touch sufferers with one finger, before attempting to convert them to the ways of Hubbard".

 

All I can say is, thank God for John Travolta. The Wild Hogs legend has unveiled his response to the unfolding crisis, announcing: "I have arranged for a plane to take down some Volunteer Ministers and some supplies and some medics." For the medics and supplies John must obviously be thanked, but for the Volunteer Ministers – arriving in Haiti via Air Travolta along with scores from other Scientology churches – the same cannot be said.

 

According to an official press release, the corps will be on hand to dispense "spiritual first aid" to Haitians. Because really, nothing should feel more appropriate right now than gadding about Port-au-Prince offering survivors the chance to be hooked up to an e-meter. Hopefully if they find any gay people, they can begin curing them.

 

For the Volunteer Ministers, you see, a tragedy is not so much a tragedy as a tragitunity.

 

But please, don't take Lost in Showbiz's word for it – take that of L Ron himself, who personally decreed the strategy he called "Casualty Contact", in which he advised Scientologists to scan newspapers for reports of accidents or bereavements, searching for "people who have been victimised one way or another by life".

 

Stipulating that one way to do this was to trawl hospitals, Hubbard declared of the ambulance-chasing Scientologist that, "He should represent himself . . . as a minister whose compassion was compelled by the newspaper story concerning the person [. . .] However, in handling the press he should simply say that it is a mission of the church to assist those who are in need of assistance. He should avoid any lengthy discussions of Scientology and should talk about the work of ministers and how all too few ministers these days get around to places where they are needed. It's straight recruiting!"

 

Casualty Contact has since modulated into the Volunteer Ministers programme, whose yellow tents are increasingly visible at high-profile disaster sites, and often enlivened by special appearances by their celebrity adherents. Within these tents Scientologists administer the aforementioned Touch Assists, whose purpose is to "speed the Thetan's ability to heal or repair a condition with his body".

 

After 9/11, aid agencies at Ground Zero voiced concern that the Volunteer Ministers had displayed their leaflets around the disaster site and operated in the restricted area without authorisation until this was pointed out to the police, who then denied them access. Two days after the tragedy, and presenting themselves as an organisation called National Mental Health Assistance, representatives of the Church of Scientology duped Fox News into running the church's freephone number for five hours on the bottom of the screen, apparently in the belief that it was the official outreach hotline. Fox News removed it after an irate intervention from the real National Mental Health Association.

 

"The public needs to understand that the Scientologists are using this tragedy to recruit new members," the president of the NMHA stated. "They are not providing mental health assistance."

 

Au contraire, say the Scientologists, who claim they provide a unique brand of "meaningful help" during catastrophes. They were there after the tsunami, after Katrina – with added Travolta – and in Beslan, before being asked to leave after the local Russian health ministry judged their techniques unhelpful to already severely traumatised children.

 

And of course they were there after the 7 July attacks, when an undercover BBC investigation taped the leader of the London branch of the Church's anti-psychiatry movement laughing that their role in the immediate aftermath of the bombings was "fighting the psychiatrists; keeping the psychs away [from survivors]". One survivor who happened to have mental health training voiced his shock that Scientologists had attempted to recruit him and others.

 

What sort of numbers they'll do in Haiti remains to be seen, but hats off to Travolta and the church leaders for deploying in this way. As for Scientology's most famous face, do recall "the Mr Cruise response to 9/11" – setting up the First New York Hubbard Detox project where firemen who had breathed in the World Trade Centre dust were encouraged to submit to the "Purification Rundown", discarding their medication and taking endless saunas along with high doses of niacin, much to the despair of their doctors. Whether even Tom's nuclear self-confidence extends to mooting the First Port-au-Prince Hubbard Detox Project, only time will tell.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/22/john-travolta-scientologists-haiti

[General Duke]

Nice article, how on Earth people believe this nonsense ? Scientologists and feminists are the scourge of humanity.

[cynical lady]

I beg your pardon? Care to elaborate as to how you’ve managed to insert feminism on that sentence?

[General Duke]

^^^No dear, I don’t care to elaborate.

[cynical lady]

How remarkable of you.

[Cara.]

Originally posted by cynical lady:

I beg your pardon? Care to elaborate as to how you’ve managed to insert feminism on that sentence?

Come on CL, why don't you just admit that feminists are responsible for all the tragedies and calamities of the 20th and 21st centuries!

 

Hitler? Feminist.

The nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagazaki? Feminists.

Pol Pot? He ran a 5K marathon to support breast cancer research. Twice.

Osama bin Laden? A passionate believer that men and women should be equal before the law.

Dick Cheney? Cannot get enough of Girl Scout cookies.

The Haiti earthquake? Plate Tectonics just shows you how unstable Mother Earth is, she should learn to settle down and find a man. Obviously "global warming" is really just hot flashes from early menopause. Can you say "biological clock is ticking away"?

[Kamaavi]

^lol

[General Duke]

Originally posted by cynical lady:

How remarkable of you.

The remarkable thing is, that Cara is spot on she forgot to add to her list; R Kelly, Mickey Mouse, Chris Eubanks and Mr T of the A team.

Feminisam is as a ludicrous invention, like Mickey Mouse but much more harmfull.

[5]

Why did you post this, cynical lady?

[Blessed]

Originally posted by Cara.:

quote:Originally posted by cynical lady:

I beg your pardon? Care to elaborate as to how you’ve managed to insert feminism on that sentence?

Come on CL, why don't you just admit that feminists are responsible for all the tragedies and calamities of the 20th and 21st centuries!

 

Hitler? Feminist.

The nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagazaki? Feminists.

Pol Pot? He ran a 5K marathon to support breast cancer research. Twice.

Osama bin Laden? A passionate believer that men and women should be equal before the law.

Dick Cheney? Cannot get enough of Girl Scout cookies.

The Haiti earthquake? Plate Tectonics just shows you how unstable Mother Earth is, she should learn to settle down and find a man. Obviously "global warming" is really just hot flashes from early menopause. Can you say "biological clock is ticking away"?

LMAO.

 

Thanks, Cara.

[Cicero]

I don't think you can paint all feminists with a broad-brush. If it weren't for those vocal, fiercely intelligent 'feminists' in the womens rights movement, history would give a different verdict on this struggle. That being said, feminists have their fair share of loose canons and crackpot shrews. They often prowl around for non-existent wrongs so they can express deep offense and heartfelt grievance. In a 1998 review of the book: Intellectual Impostors by Sokal and Bricmont, Dawkins says

 

The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation". Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us" (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an 'in' word). Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics" privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:

 

The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.

 

Yes. You read that right. There's plenty of proofs in Newton's Principia that demonstrate his perverse yearning to ravage women. And Einstein? Why was he so obsessed with light? Duh. The speed of light is a big number. And men like to use big things to dominate women. There I said it.

 

P.S. I think all pommies (post-modernists) and ninnies should peruse this book. Oh no, they'll just start deconstructing it won't they? :rolleyes: