Xenu's Paradox
Jan. 27th, 2013 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogIt hasn't been a good week for your friendly neighborhood Operating Thetans at Ye Olde Church of Scientology.
Wait Wait took the first swing at them on NPR yesterday morning. The Not My Job guest was tech guru Guy Kawasaki, who somehow got roped into answering questions about the e-meterologists. Before beginning, he revealed that L. Ron's lawyers threatened to sue him over a slide of a fake book he put in one of his speech backgrounds titled "Guy-anetics." These guys can find anything. Probably even this blog. Xenu Xenu Xenu! There, that's $30,000 in intentional copyright violations right there!
Anyway.... Here. Try the questions and see if you're smarter than a Scientologist:[Poll #1892846]
Sorry, but this information is only revealed at OT Level III and up. Okay, it was C, C and B, or possibly D to all three. You didn't highlight that sentence in the blank space there, did you? You evil suppressive person, you.
----
Continuing the daily NPR bashing of this one true religion, On the Media then leveled strikes two and three. First, it gave an outlet to New Yorker author Lawrence Wright, who has expanded his 2012 expose of the church in those pages into a new book called "Going Clear." Wright talked about the secrecy, strangeness and outright paranoia of officials of the organization in response to media coverage. Long a part of its history, it escalated when the church began a pattern of going on offense in court cases to silence its detractors; in Wright's view, Scientology achieved its long-desired tax exempt status in the US simply by suing the asses off the IRS and its agents and threatening to embarrass them with published stories of their incompetence, profligacy and infidelity. (And suing the church for libel was out, because truth is always a defense to these things.) The first public records of Xenu the Space Alien came out of such a court case, where a judge ruled that the "evidence" of such beliefs was part of the public record. The church sent a human chain of 1500 members to block public access to the clerk's office containing the documents, but the LA Times slipped them out through a back door for all to see and, now, mock.
In a separate story, OTM reported how The Atlantic became embroiled in a scandal over printing a Scientology puff piece on its website with only the most minimal designation of it as "sponsored content." It's since been taken down and apologized for (although mirrors of its text are available all over), and it's opened both a discussion of the journalistic ethics of what now is referred to as "native advertising" (and we on the editorial side always used to refer to as "shameless shilling") and a treasure trove of parody of such "advertorials," the best, of course, coming from The Onion:
It ends with a link to taliban.com, which, sadly, turns out to be a parked site. Think of the advertising opportunities L. Ron could work out of a merger with those guys!
Wait Wait took the first swing at them on NPR yesterday morning. The Not My Job guest was tech guru Guy Kawasaki, who somehow got roped into answering questions about the e-meterologists. Before beginning, he revealed that L. Ron's lawyers threatened to sue him over a slide of a fake book he put in one of his speech backgrounds titled "Guy-anetics." These guys can find anything. Probably even this blog. Xenu Xenu Xenu! There, that's $30,000 in intentional copyright violations right there!
Anyway.... Here. Try the questions and see if you're smarter than a Scientologist:[Poll #1892846]
Sorry, but this information is only revealed at OT Level III and up. Okay, it was C, C and B, or possibly D to all three. You didn't highlight that sentence in the blank space there, did you? You evil suppressive person, you.
----
Continuing the daily NPR bashing of this one true religion, On the Media then leveled strikes two and three. First, it gave an outlet to New Yorker author Lawrence Wright, who has expanded his 2012 expose of the church in those pages into a new book called "Going Clear." Wright talked about the secrecy, strangeness and outright paranoia of officials of the organization in response to media coverage. Long a part of its history, it escalated when the church began a pattern of going on offense in court cases to silence its detractors; in Wright's view, Scientology achieved its long-desired tax exempt status in the US simply by suing the asses off the IRS and its agents and threatening to embarrass them with published stories of their incompetence, profligacy and infidelity. (And suing the church for libel was out, because truth is always a defense to these things.) The first public records of Xenu the Space Alien came out of such a court case, where a judge ruled that the "evidence" of such beliefs was part of the public record. The church sent a human chain of 1500 members to block public access to the clerk's office containing the documents, but the LA Times slipped them out through a back door for all to see and, now, mock.
In a separate story, OTM reported how The Atlantic became embroiled in a scandal over printing a Scientology puff piece on its website with only the most minimal designation of it as "sponsored content." It's since been taken down and apologized for (although mirrors of its text are available all over), and it's opened both a discussion of the journalistic ethics of what now is referred to as "native advertising" (and we on the editorial side always used to refer to as "shameless shilling") and a treasure trove of parody of such "advertorials," the best, of course, coming from The Onion:
It ends with a link to taliban.com, which, sadly, turns out to be a parked site. Think of the advertising opportunities L. Ron could work out of a merger with those guys!
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no subject
Date: 2013-01-28 12:55 am (UTC)Apparently SMERSH was for real - and the Soviets had three SMERSH units during and just after World War II, according to Wikipedia. One under Beria, one reporting directly to Stalin and probably watching Beria like a hawk, and one in the Navy which was presumably not quite as interesting as the others...
no subject
Date: 2013-01-28 01:04 am (UTC)As one Get Smart episode revealed, KAOS was a Delaware corporation. Hey, international organizations of evil have to shelter themselves from taxes, too, yaknow. And if you can't get a religious exemption....
no subject
Date: 2013-01-28 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-28 12:19 pm (UTC)