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It was too good too last: reports have hit newsstands that Hollywood’s most beautiful couple, Brangelina, is to split. While that’s nothing new, the Sunday Times, a renowned conduit of celebrity gossip, the Daily Mail, and News of the World, all ran stories yesterday revealing details of the split.
Though not married, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have inked legal papers setting the groundwork for formal financial separation and joint custody of their children, the reports said.
Still it could be worse, at least the Scientologists haven’t offered to lend them a hand in their hour of need.
The high profile, expansionist figures who represent psychopath, conman, liar, fantasist, fraudster, bully, tax evader, megalomaniac L. Ron Hubbard’s organization have turned their thoughts to Haiti.
Were an idiot like you to itemize 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.”
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 Travolta 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.
Hubbard 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 victimized 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!”
The Volunteer Ministers program’s 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.”
The Scientologists claim they provide a unique brand of “meaningful help” during catastrophes. They were there after the Indian Ocean 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 traumatized children.
And of course they were there after the 7 July terrorism attacks in the UK, 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].”
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 Center 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 Cruise’s nuclear self-confidence extends to mooting the First Port-au-Prince Hubbard Detox Project, only time will tell.
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In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located