Last week: Rome, Italy

Just now: Washington, DC

Next week: (guess)

Churches of Scientology are opening or moving in bigger premises.  The official statistic of Church groups, Missions and Churches is 8,071.

Amazing.

- L

PS: And here is another photo that just appeared in the Washington Post (4 November 2009):

On Wednesday, October 28, 2009, a federal Grand Jury in Los Angeles indicted Brian Thomas Mettenbrink, a member of the cyber hate group Anonymous, for his part in the January 2008 attempted destruction of Scientology websites owned by the Church of Scientology.

Mettenbrink, 20, is charged with conspiracy and “transmission of a code, information, program, or command to a protected computer.” The indictment states that he obtained a computer program from an Anonymous website and executed a “DDOS” attack from his dormitory at Iowa State University against Church computers in Los Angeles. A DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack occurs where a large amount of malicious Internet traffic is directed at a website or a set of websites, with the intent to overwhelm and shut down the websites.

Mettenbrink is the second member of Anonymous to face criminal charges relating to this attack. In May 2009, Dmitriy Guzner, then 18, pleaded guilty to computer hacking charges for his role in the attack on Church computers. He is currently awaiting sentencing.

(This: http://www.pitchengine.com/scientology-news-federal-crime-charges-against-anonymous/31666/)

PS: This post triggered off some spam, so I closed the comments. If you have something intelligent to say please do so here.

Sorry,

I won’t find the time to answer all emails today (but I’ll try by tomorrow, I promise). For starters, here is an article from Scientology Myths that should give some answers:

Q: Is Scientology against homosexuality?

There was some early writings that appeared to be “anti-gay”, stating that homosexuality was covertly hostile. But one must look at that in the context of the times. In the 1940s – 1950s most people in western countries did consider homosexuality to be a mental or even physical illness.

I do not have any knowledge or evidence of anti-homosexual actions taken by the church at any point, other than the few writings on the subject. It was pretty much left alone for many years.

Then in 1967 Hubbard issued a policy which reads, in part, “It has never been any part of my plans to regulate or to attempt to regulate the private lives of individuals. Whenever this has occurred, it has not resulted in any improved condition… Therefore all former rules, regulations and polices relating to the sexual activities of Scientologists are cancelled.”

Hubbard later released a book about ethical behavior that was silent on the subject of homosexuality, and offered a gender-neutral ethical guidelines about being faithful to one’s partner and avoiding promiscuity.

The Church of Scientology is a leading proponent for human rights for all people of earth as can be seen by their campaigns with Youth for Human Rights and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.

Just out: International Religious Freedom report 2009

France: “Discrimination against Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, and other groups considered dangerous sects or cults remained a concern and may have contributed to acts of vandalism against these groups. Some groups expressed concern that MIVILUDES [government] publications contributed to public mistrust of minority religions.”

Germany: “…there continue to be concerns about societal and governmental (federal and state) treatment of certain religious minorities, notably Scientologists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Muslims.”

Development countries, what should I say…

- Louanne

Russia’s ban on the Church of Scientology is illegal, the European Court of Human Rights said Thursday in a binding ruling.

The court said Russia cannot ban the Church of Scientology just because it has not been in the country for long and awarded each of the groups euro5,000 ($7,270) in damages. The groups together also received euro10,000 ($14,500) for costs, which they shared.

The case was brought to the Strasbourg-based court by two Russian Scientology branches that were refused listing as “religious organizations” because they have not existed for at least 15 years as required by Russia’s Religions Act. (Source: Associated Press)

Ban stupidity and arrogance from government’s ranks, I say.

- L

A couple of days ago the Church of Scientology put the 100th “Meet a Scientologist” video on YouTube. I am curious what the responses are.

My favorite one is this one (vrooom!):

And here is the whole playlist.

I saw the video crew when they came by. Maybe I should have agreed to an interview. Hm.. next time.

- L

Hi there,

and thanks for visiting this blog! I put it up to give you the opportunity to ask questions, about Scientology, Scientologists, David Miscavige and whatever you feel is related to that. If you are here to make statements or raise a fuss, you are violating the only rule this blog has. So please, don’t to it.

- Louanne

Up to late last night I had never heard of Liskula Cohen and I am not much into “super models” either. But the blonde catwalker just recently made a dent into a situation I had talked about in earlier comments: trolling.

Cohen was the victim of an anonymous blogger who spread bias and falsehoods about her. The catwalker did not just swallow it but went against Blogger.com – Google Inc, that is – to obtain the blogger’s IP and email addresses. Last Monday she succeeded: as ABCNews reported yesterday “Cohen took Google to court in hopes of forcing the company to reveal the writer’s identity — and won.”

A little googling found me a courtesy copy of the actual court document. Google was ordered to “provide petitioner with information as to the identity of the Anonymous Blogger(s), specifically that person’s or persons’ name(s), address(es), email address(es), IP address(es), telephone number(s), and all other information that would assist in ascertaining the identity of that person or persons.”

And they did. Google provided the information to Liskula Cohen’s lawyers right away. She now plans to pull through a libel suit against the troll.

Oh, I can hear the sleazebags clamoring about privacy and free speech and the usual trash that is put on the table when it comes to anonymous jerks taking responsibility for their doing. Certainly one can argue that Freedom of Speech must be protected by all means and I agree.

But your own freedom ends where you violate somebody else’s.

Hi there,

and thanks for visiting this blog! I put it up to give you the opportunity to ask questions, about Scientology, Scientologists and whatever you feel is related to that. If you are here to make statements or raise a fuss, you are violating the only rule this blog has. So please, don’t to it.

- Louanne

This is an old thread. The new one is here: http://scientologymyths.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/got-questions-try-this/