Veddddddy interestink, Jane Doe! Yeah, how about it guys? Instead of donating to the Idle Morgue, let’s get these two ads. How hilarious will that be? I believe it will be effective too! I vote for Jane Doe for the AIS post – Association of Independent Scientologists! Send the money to her and we’ll actually have books kept so you can SEEE where your donations are going! LOL! Something you can’t get in the Church, right? Maybe Steve Hall will help us design it?

Indie 8 Million, YES. And also taking people out of the auditor training films because they were declared SP’s, and lying and saying that Johnny Lewis hadn’t practiced Scn for many many years. (not true), and even erasing his picture out of the Narconon picture where he is shaking hands with the head honcho at Narconon and getting his cert, and taking him out of Narconon promo too. What do you all think of the idea of pooling money and buying a big one page ad in USA Today or a Billboard near PAC and one near CW, and putting this stuff on there for the Kool Aid drinking staff and public to see? There is a site that lists all the alterations in tech that DM has done, and the list is extensive. Not sure which one it is, maybe “friendsoflrh.com” Do any of you know the site that does that? What about pooling money and doing an ad campaign to strike while the iron is hot and DM is on the hotseat with Leah and with Shelley and Narconon etc?

+1

John, always enlightening to see your astute take on things Miscavology! How about the aspect of his “financial advisers? ” Do you see any hint of him having “exposed” himself to the actual risk of professional advice? It would appear that being the micro – managing control freak that he is, he would absolutely refuse to have anyone cast their beady little eyes on any sizable fortune where he
can be traced to direct ownership / control thereof. Do you concur?

For CST, keep in mind that it’s still the terminus of the money trail established in the 80s. For-profit Author Services is wholly owned by CST, as well as various things like the LRH Library and Family Trust B. That’s where the license and royalty fees for Hubbard’s works eventually end up, including seven cents for every TWTH booklet.

As for expenses, the vaults have been built. (There have been no reports that they’re continuing with the halted Wyoming one.) They do have maintain the staff and surface buildings. Possibly they’re still preserving LRH’s orginal manuscripts and engraving plates and records to go in titanium boxes, but there’s a couple outpoints…

First, there was a promo that said that for the Golden Age of Schlock revisions, they had millions of LRH’s original documents on hand at Int Base. Aren’t they supposed to be in a vault, treated to remove the acid from the paper, and packed in boxes full of inert gas?

Second, if a vault exists which has ranks and ranks of gleaming titanium cases, does anyone think that David Miscavige could resist showing at least a picture of it at one of his Triumph of Shill presentations?

Yes Indie 8, I love the idea. I really would love to see this. And we could feed it to Tony Ortega for his blog too. Who got it wron gin 2013? And play the original tape where he thanks Marty. And then mention how he changed PDC tape 20 and on and on. This is something we should do!

I remember in the Book of Case Remedies one of the remedies was for being “stuck in a win.”

Don’t forget that a lot of the offshore banks don’t really invest money. They merely hang on to it and protect it for you, for a spiffy fee. It’s not like you’re investing it in a high-octane hedge fund like the one I work for. I would strongly suggest that the investment return on the reserves is fairly close to zero.

I have also heard tales of uncertain reliability that some non-trivial portion of the reserves were turned into physical gold which the cult actually took delivery of (in other words, they own specific gold bars in a specific location, rather than owning certificates, which are far more liquid). Given the recent meltdown in the gold market (which should continue) and the long-term underperformance of gold as an asset, plus the lack of liquidity that comes from taking physical delivery of one’s gold position, I would suspect that the RCS’s gold ownership has been a disaster. As a result, in any anlysis, I would recommend against factoring in any positive investment income on the reserves into one’s calculations. I would also point out that there are many construction projects at Int Base, plus the CST vault properties and presumably many others that are not directly tied to IAS fund-raising campaigns and are thus funded out of reserves. If you look at perhaps $50 to $75 million for the CST properties we know about plus another $150 to $200 million in improvements at Gold (including Miscavige’s empty headquarters office building), that’s enough to knock down an estimate of reserves by a fair amount and cause one to lean towards a more conservative number.

Regardless of whether the reserves are $1.0 or $1.5 or even $2.0 billion, it is indeed more than the RCS needs to stay afloat over the long term. My point is that for the first time, if they start eating into reserves to cover operating losses, that is a very significant watershed moment and does not bode well for them, even though the day of reckoning would of course be far into the future.

The big question mark about the burn rate is the potential for lawsuits to recover monies on account and to recover fraudulently solicited IAS donations (the Garcias) bear fruit. If they do, the RCS could be forced to disgorge a sizable fraction of the reserves. All of a sudden, with a little luck, the reserves get down into the several hundred million dollar range from well over $1 billion. That shaves the margin of error for any idiocy on Miscavige’s part to a very dangerous level, and that could happen relatively quickly (2-3 years, not 20-30).