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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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The slashing of the government’s proposed budget by the two China-aligned parties in the legislature, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), has apparently resulted in blowback from the US. On the recent junket to US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, KMT legislators reported that they were confronted by US officials and congressmen angered at the cuts to the defense budget. The United Daily News (UDN), the longtime KMT party paper, now KMT-aligned media, responded to US anger by blaming the foreign media. Its regular column, the Cold Eye Collection (冷眼集), attacked the international media last month in
On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre
Feb. 10 to Feb. 16 More than three decades after penning the iconic High Green Mountains (高山青), a frail Teng Yu-ping (鄧禹平) finally visited the verdant peaks and blue streams of Alishan described in the lyrics. Often mistaken as an indigenous folk song, it was actually created in 1949 by Chinese filmmakers while shooting a scene for the movie Happenings in Alishan (阿里山風雲) in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), recounts director Chang Ying (張英) in the 1999 book, Chang Ying’s Contributions to Taiwanese Cinema and Theater (打鑼三響包得行: 張英對台灣影劇的貢獻). The team was meant to return to China after filming, but
Power struggles are never pretty. Fortunately, Taiwan is a democracy so there is no blood in the streets, but there are volunteers collecting signatures to recall nearly half of the legislature. With the exceptions of the “September Strife” in 2013 and the Sunflower movement occupation of the Legislative Yuan and the aftermath in 2014, for 16 years the legislative and executive branches of government were relatively at peace because the ruling party also controlled the legislature. Now they are at war. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) holds the presidency and the Executive Yuan and the pan-blue coalition led by the