This one goes out to the dreamers (a Scientology moment)

NOTE. Posting this video in no way endorses or promotes or says "hey, hey, hey" to the vile practice of Scientology. I just want to show you these guys' new strategy. They've replaced those cheesy rallies and Veg-e-Matic-style announcer with THIS - steamy, dreamy images that don't really mean anything. Nicely shot, however, which is really why I posted it. 

The cut-off text is just crap anyway.

Scientology: the wrong way to cry

Note to shameful-secret-watchers-of-A&E: I am just as hooked on "that Scientology show" as you are - maybe even more so, because I have a thing about cults. And I have a thing about cults because I have experienced devastating religious abuse, and dealt with it by walking away from it. I have yet to come to the point where I can write about it in any detail, but in two instances, trusted spiritual leaders were ejected or went to jail for breaking every moral and ethical law that exists, up to and including sexual assault. The fact that the religious trauma of my childhood somehow, unbelievably, happened again in adulthood still makes my head spin.

This means that shows like this can "trigger" me. And they do. Boy do they. Why do I keep coming back for more?

But I have to admit, the above video by a former Scientologist (I used only a snippet, and purposely didn't put a name on it) got to me. He literally stuck his face right into the camera and wailed. This is the opposite of what I see on "that Scientology show", where people seem to have an awfully hard time dealing with tears.

It's understandable that everyone cries on this show. If it were me, I would have committed suicide a long time ago, so to a person I think they are heroic, and have the right to display any and all emotions that are left over from this bizarre quasi-military UFO cult.

But to a person, including (and especially) Leah Remini, they cry in a funny way.

I don't think I have ever seen anyone allow a tear to trickle down their face on this show. It's always very carefully dabbed away with a tissue before it escapes the bottom eyelid.

I've seen people cry like this before, and it makes me wonder if they have trouble with emotion, or are even afraid of it, afraid of letting it overflow. 

Is this the Scientology way? Or are these people so emotionally brutalized that they are afraid to let that particular emotional rain fall?

In the case of Leah, the careful dabs are like a science experiment with blotting paper. I wondered at first if she were trying to preserve her perfect makeup. She IS pretty free with the lip collagen, after all (her lips are a different size and shape every week, which is a distraction), and maybe doesn't want puffy eyes to match.

But then I saw others doing it, and it was even more mysterious. In this one, the lady even seems to be offering up her single tear as a kind of sacrifice.

Dab, dab, dab. No nose-blowing either, no rivers of snot such as you'd get with a real flood of tears.

In case you think I'm being flip - all right, I am, but as compelling as it is, this is a reality TV show, which (as with all of them) you have to take with a tiny grain of salt. I have no doubt these people suffered horrendous trauma and will spend a lifetime trying to get past it. But I also get the feeling their ordeal is being packaged by the producers in a way which will appeal to the largest possible segment of the public. And this isn't fair to them any more than it's fair to the rest of us.

Scientologists are lunatics, in my book, and their ugly paramilitary organization is an offshoot of Nazi Germany more than anyone yet realizes. Some day, the connections will be found, whether from Hubbard or that insane little pipsqueak who comes up to Tom Cruise's belly button (and never mind the ramifications of THAT). Scientology rallies have a Nuremberg flavor to them, the wide, dizzying camera angles reminiscent of Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. The histrionic announcer on those pep-rally-style videos is so ludicrous that it's almost funny, sort of a cross between Adolf Hitler and a spokesman for Ron Popeil.

Right. So we've established that this is an evil regime, and brutal for people to exit without consequences. But what about the guy in the first video? I confess I didn't watch the whole thing, because I couldn't, but I know that it's about Scientology and his attempt to escape it. He has a whole series of them, written from the perspective of a persecuted gay man who was lured in by the promise of acting gigs. I've never seen anyone cry "at" a camera before, to the point of nearly jamming it down his throat, and it kind of turned me off. I also noticed there were no tears - I mean, none at all, not even the blotting paper kind, though he wiped away "something" at the end. But he did not have the red or inflamed or even the watery eyes of weeping. HE WASN'T CRYING, folks, which means that he was pretending to cry, trying to make us think he was. And he wasn't.

This video produced a flood of sympathetic comments, the usual Greek chorus of deliberately elicited/stage-managed support. I don't know what's going on here, but my solar plexus gong is ringing, and I feel as if I'm being played. It's powerful stuff, which means it should NOT be played with, at all. Ever.  People have been jerked around enough, haven't they? But here it is, and I know there is a lot more. It just seems offensive to me, like a plea for my sympathy. I also see all sorts of tweets and loyal fan comments and even a "documentary" this guy made, but I have to say to you at this point, I really doubt if this guy was ever a Scientologist. My spidey sense/fake-o-meter is telling me he wasn't. 

Even if he was, I think it was peripheral. He saw an ad in the back of a comic book, walked in and out of his own volition and never spent time licking floors in the Hole. Maybe he even did it to have something to blog about? I don't think he was ever enmeshed or entrenched like the survivors on the Leah Remini show. He walked out, disappointed that he wasn't getting gigs. The YouTube thumbnails are a bit depressing: Sex with Scientology Celebrities and my $5000.00 Tshirt! Mom Interviewing Me about Scientology, Big Blue and Masturbation! Offer to Star in Scientology-Themed XXX Gay Film! etc. etc. etc. He even boasts of meeting Tom Cruise. 

Scientology is a way for this guy to get the kind of attention he thinks he needs, and it's working. Behind it is that peculiar stew or fever that means he is working his way relentlessly towards a reality series of his own. 

For after all - isn't that the ultimate goal of every one of us?

Post-blogservations. I noticed today - not that I notice these things - that the above YouTuber announced the reason he went so over the top the other night. He says his grandma died. He never said anything about this last night when he was swallowing the camera lens. At least he could have made it his dog! His Nana must be really pissed, because now he can't write about her any more.

Small Men for Scientology

Scientology: living the nightmare

How Scientology ruined my life

It happened again this morning.

I say "again" because it was "again", the second time I've run into this problem - a problem so bizarre that no one I've asked seems to know anything about it.

I was tooling through Facebook as usual, trying in vain to skip the ubiquitous Donald Trump articles, when bung. The thing froze, I mean Facebook. I thought: fine, it happens, I'll just wait it out, it'll unfreeze in a second.

Then.

It came up again, a warning so ominous it hit me in the pit of the stomach.

It was a little box at the top of the page, and it went something like:

WARNING. Your files are unresponsive. If you wish to wait until they are responsive again, click WAIT. If not, click KILL and the files will be KILLED.

They listed the three most recent files I had opened. At the top was my Facebook page.

There were two rather large, strange-looking buttons: on the right, a WAIT; on the left, a KILL. Beside the KILL was the most bizarre graphic ever seen: it looked like a cartoon "file" (a paper file, literally) that had been nuked and was now dead. It was lying in a heap, and its eyes were two black x's. Smoke, or something, was coming out of it.

I cannot tell you how ominous and horrible it looked.

What do you do when you see a thing like that? Everything was frozen, I couldn't get out of there. I had no idea if the "kill button" would really work if I clicked on it. I was even tempted to click on it, to find out. But I knew that it could be catastrophic.

So I clicked WAIT, and eventually the box went away and things went back to "normal", or as normal as they could be after a Facebook hijacking.

What gives me the queasies is that nobody, but nobody knows what this is. I couldn't find anything close to the nasty little "killed file" graphic. I did find some information, after some digging, about what it means to "kill" on the internet. It's not quite what I thought, fortunately. To fix it, there's some sort of program you can buy online:

A simple-to-use program that offers support for context menu integration for helping you removes files securely from the computer

File Kill is a lightweight software application that helps you delete data permanently from your computer.

If you opt for a normal deletion process, you should take into account that your sensitive data may be retrieved using recovery tools, so you are still exposed to data leakage issues.

This is why you need dedicated utilities, like File Kill, for making sure the information is wiped out securely from your system.

File Kill offers support for context menu integration, so you can easily select the files to be processed.

The file deletion process can be carried out using of the multiple pass methods (e.g. one, three, thirty-five). What’s more, you are allowed to stop, pause, or resume the wiping task.

File Kill needs up to several minutes to complete a deletion operation with a high number of passes, and it stresses up the CPU and memory, so the overall performance of the computer may be burned.

Since it doesn’t require much computer knowledge to work with this tool, even rookies can set up the dedicated parameters with minimum effort.

However, more experienced users may find it pretty inconvenient to work with a tool that doesn’t offer support for powerful deletion algorithms, such as Gutmann, which is able to securely overwrite the contents of files, and the well-known sanitization algorithm, DoD 5220.22-M, just to name a few suggestions.

To sum things up, File Kill seems to be the right choice in case you are looking for an easy-to-use program that helps you delete data securely in just a few steps. Thanks to its straightforward approach, it can be mastered by beginners and professionals alike.

Secure shredder Shred file Secure deletion Shredder Shred Erase Eraser

File Kill was reviewed by (X)

DOWNLOAD File Kill 0.8 for WindowsCHANGELOG for File Kill 0.8

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Windows Installer Clean Up Utility

Autorun Eater

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Powerful Cookies

Raxso Drive Magix

                                                                 "Short as Shit"

And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

And oh, yes. Give me File Kill any day. It just sounds so friendly! My ass. It's about as friendly as an organized Scientology harassment campaign. The kind where they never let you see your mother again. Such terms: Autorun Eater, Direct X Eradicator! Not to mention the Pocket Killbox (nice and portable, they should do an infomercial on it for KVOS), Direct X Happy Uninstall, and Powerful Cookies. What do they put in those cookies, do you think?

I thought it was called "delete". I really did. If you wanted to get rid of something, you deleted it! Oh, the police could retrieve it if they needed to, but I didn't need to worry about that. I assumed that if it was still around, it was up in the "cloud" somewhere, wherever that is, but it didn't bother me because I had no criminal record. I'm too boring to bother with.

Now this. For the second time. And I did nothing to bring it on.

Or. . . 

I said some bad things about David Miscavige, I admit. I said he was short. REALLY short, which he is. Short as shit. Which he is! Tom Cruise is five-foot-six, and look at how he TOWERS over that little dickweed. 

He's a prick, but everybody says so. They wouldn't come after me. Would they? Would they really kill my Facebook page?

But this cannot be from Facebook. The warning even looked weird. Not Facebookian at all. And that cartoon! What a piece of shit THAT was. Is it a prank? A virus? A particularly nasty form of clickbait? Just a way to scare the jeezus out of me on a Monday morning?

I wish I had a screenshot of this thing, it was so evil you wouldn't believe it. Why would this even come up? Why would I want to kill ANYTHING, let alone my (I assume) entire Facebook page? All it did was freeze for half a minute or so. 

Stuff freezes. It doesn't mean you DID anything. 

I rebooted, but felt nervous that this could come up again. It had kept some kind of record of the other two pages I had recently gone on. But so fucking what, Google keeps records on ALL that shit! Come to that, how could you "kill" a webpage that exists, that is still there? It's not possible. 

Sounds like something the CIA might do, or Kirstie Alley or John Travolta, or someone worse. If there is anybody worse. 

ANTICLIMACTIC UPDATE. After working on it literally all day, I did finally find out what the hell this is. It's something to do with Google Chrome, not Facebook, but it's too technical for me to begin to describe.

These things are called Kill Pages, which sounds like Mafia rather than Scientology.  The thing that came up looked something like this:

That's pretty much what I remembered. I don't know why I wasn't able to find this up to now, but I may have used the wrong search terms. "Unresponsive" seemed to be the key word.

Nothing to do with Scientology. Damn! It's Google Chrome. What an anticlimax. I was pretty much right about that poor nuked file, however, the asterisk-like eyes and smoke or steam floating in the air. It's toast.

I found all sorts of instructions as to how to fix this. I'm going to ask my son. I never again want to read the instructions "KILL THEM" while I'm trying to enjoy my morning coffee and a bit of Facebook.

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

This is the full documentary in English (in spite of the Spanish title). Absolutely hair-raising. Scientology is worth more billions than Donald Trump. What made me shiver were the huge Nazi-like emblems at the front of their (massive) rallies), and the lame quasi-military costumes that have nothing to do with the military. Not to mention the demented, babbling, universally-worshipped founder (L. Ron Hubbard) who by his own admission had untreated psychiatric illness. And note the cartoonishly-overblown "medal" Tom Cruise is wearing, mainly for going around blasting everyone who doesn't adhere to his/their beliefs.

I am really surprised this is still up and have a feeling it won't be much longer. And please, guys at YouTube, don't start pounding ME with a hammer because I shared this. Sharing YouTube videos on your blog is one hundred per cent OK, or why would there be a "share" button?

Hey, Xenu! Scientology and you

You had me at hello: positively my LAST gif!

Intense scene, one of the most iconic (God, that word!) love scenes in contemporary cinema. It kicks ass, in other words. Would it play today, do you think, given the revelations about Tom and Katie. . . about Suri's high heels at 3 years old. . . about that Scientology video, and the naked bathhouse candid shots (just kidding, but Katie may have had "something" up her sleeve to get that divorce so fast)? 

And how about Renee, and her by-now-famous sudden loss of literacy, the way she was completely unable to read off a card at the Oscars? She wasn't even straining to read or trying to hold the card up to her face or do any of the things we'd associate with having trouble reading. She tilted her head and stood there, later just handing the card off to someone less incapacitated. 

In Jerry Maguire, Renee was a sweet little thing, a cinnamon heart in the middle of a toxic world, and we ate her up. People made fun of her unusual looks (after all, she does have a strange kind of squint), unaware that her mother is descended from the indigenous peoples of Scandinavia. But not being able to read or stand very straight is something else again, alarming, and seems to indicate a shocking lack of self-awareness. It's ironic, since Hollywood is all about self-awareness, vanity and narcissism. Was she just too far gone to realize how she looked?