The St. Petersburg Times (or the SP Times, heh) is reporting that to the chagrin of some petitioning locals who are primarily Scientologists, the Clearwater City Council has no intent of preventing Anonymous protesters from assembling in downtown Clearwater. As was posted on a few days ago, business workers, managers and owners - again, most of whom are Scientologists - petitioned to have Anonymous protesters banned from protesting in downtown Clearwater, saying that it is negatively affecting their businesses on protest days. They claimed that the protesters were not peaceful (though they gave no actual evidence of this claim), that they were preventing customers from entering their stores, and that they were ruining the local ambiance. The Council spent less than two minutes on this disingenuous clearly cult-related petition, and have no intention of considering the issue any further. Hear, hear!

Just a quick suggestion to local business owners concerned about their financial viability. Y’know what can really hurt your business? Having it located in a town that a malevolent cult is trying and having some success in taking over as their mecca. A recent Gallup study has demonstrated an unsurprising social trend: Scientologists are the least trusted religious/spiritual group in the US. So when retirees who are interested in flying South for their Golden Years, some are probably not going to want to live in a town over-run by aggressive cultists. And when vacationers are picking amongst Florida hotspots, which of the following are they most likely to have an immediately negative opinion of: Daytona, St. Petersburg, Tampa, Orlanda, or Scientologisrael? (Note: I am not implying that contemporary Judaism is morally comparable to Scientology).

For more on Scientology, click here.

WISE= World Institute of Scientology Enterprises. This is the Scientology front group that raises money for the cult and tries to recruit new members by providing expensive business consulting which includes the application of “LRH Tech”.

The one thing I’m curious about regarding the claims of this video is the statement that Scientology has no belief, no faith. What about Xenu, body thetans and thetans, then? This may not be a God theory, but it is certainly a set of faith-based beliefs regarding the nature of humanity.

For more on Scientology, click here.

For more on Scientology, click here.

A British blogger has apparently been targeted by e-Scilons. After running this post on the London Anonymous protester Epic Nose Guy’s Court Summons for displaying a sign which (accurately) called Scientology a dangerous cult, the blogger received this message from his web host 1 & 1:

Dear *******, (Customer ID: ******) Thank you for continuing to use 1&1 Internet. We sincerely apologize for contacting you regarding this matter, but multiple complaints have been directed to us regarding a recent entry on your site Right Where You Are Sitting Now! - Exploring the Underground and Counterculture…so you don\’t have to! Please call us re: at your earliest convieniance (lol they can’t spell) quoting your customer reference number ********. In the meantime, if you would consider temporarily removing the entry, we would appreciate it.

Upon contacting 1 & 1, the blogger learned that all of the complaints came within the span of one hour and only two of the complainers left a name. What were the names, you ask? The first was “Mark Bunker”. Heh. Cute. For those of you who do not know, Mark is only one of the world’s most well-known critics of the Cult of Scientology. The second name wasn’t nearly as chuckle-inducing. It was the name of the blogger’s mother. This is just plain creepy.

Once the blogger explained all of this to 1&1, they dropped it and chalked up the complaints as a prank. Not really a prank, though. To use new underground Internet slang, suppressing critical speech is the new black for Scientology. It’s the in thing. Anybody who’s anybody is doing it! They’ve been doing it for a while in Clearwater. Heck, they’re trying it again RIGHT NOW! They’ve also tried it in Philadelphia. As a Toronto Anon accurately declared on her sign this past Saturday at Operation: FairGameStop, CULTS HATE TRUTH.

But the blogger is nevertheless understandably a little freaked out by how one of the plaintants gave his mother’s name. He has had a bit of a history with the cult, having been harassed while researching them (e.g., their personality test) during his Master’s Degree research. As he has surely learned by now, and as the Cult of Scientology administration is learning more and more by the day, when CoS tries to silence one critic they have to deal with ALL OF THEM. What this means in this case is that their attempts to have his post taken down will have the same effect as their attempts to take down their hysterical Tom Cruise video: many times more people will see what CoS does not want them to see. Their gun just doesn’t seem to run out of bullets for their feet, does it?

For more on Scientology, click here.

A group of Clearwater merchants located near the local Cult of Scientology base have produced a petition asking Clearwater Mayor Frank Hibbard to prevent local Anonymous protesters of the cult from protesting. In reading this petition, it is very clear that Scientology is behind this. The contents of the letter are so completely Scientologized (i.e., full of lies that serve the interests of the Cult of Scientology - feel free to add this term to Urban Dictionary, by the way) as to remove any sense of mystery regarding the primary driving factor behind the petition and the signatures on it.

 The meat of the petition, with personal commentary inserted [in parentheses and italics]:

“In the last months, a group of masked protesters have come to downtown Clearwater to demonstrate. They have told the media and the City that they are peacefully protesting. This is far from the truth and their actions are detrimental to the conduct of business in downtown. There have been three protests, and in each they walked through the downtown area yelling and screaming.

Their actions have prevented customers from coming in our stores [Prevented? What, are they standing in front of merchants' doors taunting or blocking customers?]. Saturday is a very busy day for us commerce-wise and having literally no sales for those three days hurts our economy and not just our personal economies. We have employees that need to be paid. We charge sales tax. These people are making it difficult for us to attract customers downtown [Oh, well a thousand apologies, dignified merchants. From now on protesters will try to organize their efforts against abusive deceitful terrorist cults in a manner that is more convenient to your bottom line].

The City of Clearwater is putting a lot of effort into revitalizing downtown and we hate to see it wasted due to a group of kids who should be using their time to build the community, not trying to tear it down [This is a classic instance of Clearwater Scientology political rhetoric. I stomached this deluded line of argumentation multiple times while watching Mark "Wise Beard Man" Bunker's videos of Clearwater City Commission Meetings, as a means of making socially conscious citizen cult whistle-blowers look like they're the bad guys while Scientology is just the poor little kid brother who wants to help]. We do not like having them here and they, with their masks, odd costumes, chanting and yelling, are not welcome.

I do not know if the City has a law to prevent people such as this from stopping commerce as they have been doing. They do have the right to peacefully protest, but they are in no way peaceful [They're not? What charges have been laid? On what rational grounds should a mayor override the freedom of assembly and speech of protesters of a dangerous cult who only maintain anonymity out of reasonable fear of being Fair Game'd? On what grounds do we say that what this group is doing is so destructive as to warrant overriding some of their most fundamental rights - rights foundational to America?]. They are intimidating our customers (both non-Scientologists and Scientologists alike) and we do not appreciate it [Really? How so? Anonymous protesters have made significant efforts to publicize the reasons for their masks and their protests. And yes, I can understand that 100 masked individuals can be perturbing. But the reason for the masks is downright terrifying. If you want to get rid of the masks why not work on applying the law to the "Church" of Scienterrorism].”

So Who Signed The Petition?

There are a total of 37 signatures.

Are they all Owners? NO! In fact, reading through the petition, only about 11 signatures are clearly those of owners. A few signatures came from managers, so lets be nice and count them, too. That brings the total to 14. There are a number of signatures that do not specify the role of the signatory. Some of these may be managers or owners. However, there are also signatures from one person who simply listed them self as “Clearwater resident”, three signatures from employees of a single establishment, and a number of other signatures from people who have last names different from the last name given in the store name. From this, it looks like we might have somewhere around 20-22 signatures from managers and owners.

Were all entries legible and complete? No. A number of entries are indecipherable chicken scratch, one person simply listed her first name (what is this, fifth grade?), and one person scribbled her first name and the initial of her surname (I guess there must have been two people with the same name in this middle school class).

Might any of the signatories just happen to be Scientologists?  The answer is Yes. Using Truth About Scientology’s listings of Scientology course completions, I found that at the very least 57% of the legible signatures on this petition (over 1/3 of signatures were illegible) were of people who have taken Scientology courses - usually quite a few of them. More specifically, of the 37 signatures 23 were readable and 13 of the signatories were found to have taken Scientology courses. All other signatories’ Scientology status is unknown. Important: I was initially going to post the names of all legible signatories here, along with links verifying those said to have taken Scientology courses. However, I have decided to remove this from the post out of fear of possible harassment from the cult. If I can be given reason to be confident that I will not be hassled, I may post them - I have saved the linked list on my hard drive.

UPDATE: Thanks to David Mudkips for notifying me of the hard investigative work that Anons on Enturbulation.Org put into figuring out any potential ties of signatories to Scientology. This group of Anons has thus far found that at least 73% of legible signatures are of Scientologists. Moreover, in some cases the businesses sold Scientology-related products and/or were listed in Scientology’s World Institute of Scientology Enterprises (WISE) directory.

So how do these numbers compare to census data? While Scientologists made up at least 73 percent of the petition signatories, Scientologists only make up around 11% of Clearwater citizens - and this was before the protests. What an interesting coincidence that the population subset that wishes to thwart protests against Scientology just happens to have a proportion of Scientologists that is more than 6.5 times that of the City!

Note: It is definitely conceivable that just because the people above are known to have taken Scientology does not necessarily mean that they are Scientologists. However, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if they’ve taken courses and are signing this document which makes claims that seemingly only a person committed to Scientology would make, they’re probably a Scientologist. And if that’s not good enough reason for you, I can just say that I’m following Scientology’s lead of calling anyone who has ever taken a single Scientology course at any point a Scientologist.

Conclusion:

Lets call a spade a spade. This petition is hardly about economics. The petition is clearly motivated primarily by Scientology. The proportion of signatories who are Scientologists exceeds the proportion of Scientologists in all of Clearwater by more than 650%. The fallacious accusations and political rhetoric are the sorts used consistently and exclusively by Scientologists.

Next Course of Action:

To e-mail my findings to Mayor Frank Hibbard. On it!

For more on Scientology, click here.

This well-produced video featuring former Office of Special Affairs (OSA; i.e., Scientology’s own CIA) agent Frank Oliver reviews Scientology training documents covering such churchly operatives as breaking and entering through doors and safes, and blackmail. Oliver also describes the structure and operations of OSA, its role in Scientology, and how it has been described by former head of the Los Angeles office of the FBI as one of the most effective intelligence operations in the United States, “rivaling even that of the FBI”.

For more on Scientology, click here.

Alongside a well-placed ad from the Cult of Scientology encouraging viewers to “Get the facts” is an article by John Brown entitled The Ideal Scientologist: Konrad Aigner. This must-read story summarizes the life and death in Scientology of Konrad Aigner.

Aigner joined the cult in 1976, after leaving his family’s German farm to take up employment as a bus driver in Munich. Aigner became a committed Scientologist, devoting himself to crossing Scientology’s disingenuously-named Bridge to Total Freedom, which Brown described as “a very expensive process, currently believed to cost US$360,000″ that leads not to Total Freedom “but to Total Disillusionment, as several OT8s have stated in no uncertain terms.”

In order to be able to devote more funds to traversing the Bridge, Aigner returned to the family farm in 1995 and began working as an independent bus driver. Aigner’s family reported changes in Konrad. Normally cheerful and easy-going, Konrad was said to have become tense, nervous and preoccupied. In 1996, Aigner tried to leave Scientology but ended up sticking around. In 1997, Konrad told his mother that he wanted out, claiming that “he had learned something so terrible that it would kill her to hear about it”. That August, after three months in a coma, Aigner was dead.

Brown writes:

No-one seems to doubt that it was his involvement with Scientology which, directly or indirectly, led to his premature death, and it may be significant that vitamins were found among his possessions after his death. Konrad died of multiple organ failure - his heart, lungs and stomach had all stopped working. The autopsy report notes that their condition was abnormal for a man of his age. No answer to this mysterious collapse has so far been found. However several things point to a notorious and dangerous Scientology practice known as the Purification Rundown or Purif. It involves overdosing on vitamins and spending many hours for several consecutive days, in a very hot sauna. Prolonged exposure to abnormally high body temperatures causes soft tissue damage and death. Consequently multiple organ failure is a feature of severe or repeated heat exhaustion. An individual can survive a single episode if given the proper emergency treatment but he remains vulnerable to even a modest rise in body temperature for an unknown period. If Konrad had been forced to prolong his ‘purif’ or repeat it too often, it could produce exactly the symptoms which killed him. It is in fact difficult to think of any other possible explanation. He was already sweating and shaking before he left for Munich, which suggests that damage had already been done. As in other Scientology deaths we can point to the cult’s negligence, arrogance, irresponsibility and a lack of the normal care due to one human being from another.

The Cult of Scientology’s impact on Aigner’s family continued even after Konrad’s passing.

This simple bachelor who lived at home, worked hard, lived frugally, never went on holiday, left huge debts. His brother Bernard calculated that during the last few months of his life Konrad had paid the cult 70,000 marks and estimated that his total payments over the years were at least 600,000 marks. Not only his own savings but those of his family had been given to Scientology. To repay his loans his brothers and sisters had to sell their land. The only thing they managed to save was their parents’ house, and a useless e-meter for which their brother had paid 8,000 marks. ‘We cannot bring Konrad back to life, but maybe he can serve as a warning to others.’

For more on the Cult of Scientology, click here.

This message is to Scientology dissidents of Battle Creek, Michigan. Where were you yesterday!? I just checked out Ed Brayton’s popular ScienceBlogs blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars, where I read that the Battle Creek protest was effectively a no-show. Aside from Ed, there was one other person there - who may well have been there in good part to meet Ed!

This was a good opportunity to spread the word on Scientology, as Ed was attending in order to interview Battle Creek Anons for a piece on Dispatches, which would have no doubt been read by thousands of people. I am not privy to Brayton’s traffic stats, but judging from the number of visitors that come to The Frame Problem when he drops a link, I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets around 5,000 hits a day. Furthermore, having one of the more visited blogs on Seed Magazine’s ScienceBlogs may have helped move the Scientology protest up a few notches on the agendas of other ScienceBlog bloggers, many of whom are also read by thousands of surfers a day.

If any Battle Creek Anons read this, perhaps leave a comment in the comment section of his post and maybe an interview could be worked out…

A London protester who goes by the pseudonym “Epic Nose Guy” was handed a Court Summons yesterday at Operation: FairGameStop in London for not giving up his right to accurately refer to the Cult of Scientology as a cult. ENG was told by an officer to discontinue displaying his sign and was given 30 minutes to do so. ENG decided not to do this, on the grounds that Scientology does in fact reflect multiple dictionary definitions of cult and that he has the right to call a spade a spade.

This is absolutely ridiculous on multiple grounds. Firstly, Scientology does indeed fit the bill of being a cult.

Here are some relevant attributes of cults as specified by a the American Heritage Dictionary:

• a particular system of religious worship, esp. with reference to its rites and ceremonies.
• a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.
• a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.
• any system for treating human sickness that originated by a person usually claiming to have sole insight into the nature of disease, and that employs methods regarded as unorthodox or unscientific

Secondly, why should Scientology get special consideration? Scientology itself calls psychiatry an evil nazi pseudoscience that is responsible for many of the worst crimes of the Holocaust and for many of the greatest problems facing humanity today and in the past. On what grounds is it okay for Scientologists to make these types of disingenuous statements while it is not okay for protesters of Scientology to apply the semantically valid label “cult” to Scientology? Is it because Scientology is a religion? Well, this is not at all a valid differentiating factor, for two reasons. Firstly, Scientology is not a religion, and England does not recognize it as such. Secondly, even if it were a religion, so what? Can we please move past the inane notions that religions are special and that religion is a license for special treatment?

For more on Scientology from The Frame Problem, click here.