I clicked onto their sites twice, thinking they were ANTI blogs and felt stupid afterwards.

Mary…i watched about 20 minutes of the Scn channel as i was staying in a hotel due to the Camp Fire in No Calif..
Pretty boring..i don’t see how anyone can watch for long

The little boards on the bottom of the walls

Mary, I do not know it’s true but someone recently commented that the CSN had numbers too small to be reported. Certainly, their web address gets too few hits to be bothered about. Sadly, I’ve clicked into their domain a couple of times lately by accident. SO I boosted their “stats” by one or two, which is bad, but the drivel didn’t at all make me “curious”, which is good and I’ll be checking where links are taking me more carefully, another good thing.

“Against this background it is amazing that any mission exists..”

No scientology “missions” exist, or at least none who bring in new members in any quantity sufficient for them to stay open to continue luring in new members.

with all of the old, viable ones imploded into the SMI network, which won’t allow them to do anything that might WORK, there’s no existing workable models which can be followed. And the old mission-holders, AFAICT, are all declared, so can’t help by imparting their wisdom, can’t step IN the mini-orgs that SMI has dictated and suppressively enforces

Few if any of the the orgs can exceed the statistics of the most successful of the missions during Scientology’s heyday.

But what did Samuels do to achieve that success? Did his missions, like others that were appearing to thrive, resort to facilitating loan fraud, treating staff like Sea Org with long hours and low pay (and often the necessity of moonlighting or relying on other sources of money), and hounding members including if they tried to leave?

A search turned up that Samuels ended up embroiled in a couple of infamous fraud trials in Portland. He appears to have conceded in court that rooms at his Portland mission were bugged, which was a common tactic – taken from the “hard sell” tactics of car dealers, so that supervisors could listen for customers’ weaknesses, and even spy on the discussions of couples when sales people had left the room, and better figure how to manipulate them into closing a sale:

http://www.lermanet.com/scientologynews/portland-titchbourne-1983.htm

Samuels was part of skulduggery, including witness tampering and perjury as part of a GO operation, during a 1979 fraud court case (the same year that Bent Corydon’s large Riverside mission was raided by authorities for loan fraud):

https://www.scientology-lies.com/press/oregonian/1985-04-19/witness-says-judge-probed.html

I realize that some people didn’t experience any of this, or just a little bit that they didn’t realize was as extensive as it might have been – such is essentially my case. But I also think it’s those people who had it best, and escaped the worst, who may be more likely to maintain a bit of interest and even nostalgia, and comment in forums like this, while those hardest hit by unethical and even illegal tactics and left bitter or actually ruined, and with the most first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing, may be less likely to be heard from.

Also, it’s interesting to note that Samuels’ and the missions of just one or two other mission holders accounted for something approaching half of all US missions income – apparently only a couple of people, with the best locations (mostly on the West Coast) and a hardcore if not even lawless attitude towards making sales, could really make a go of Dianetics and Scientology, regardless.

Since SMI was created, there ARE NO Missions, only mini-micro orgs hamstrung by the same policies and mismanagement that keep the orgs small and inviable. As someone else said recently, there is ONE “mission” which survives on Flag’s cast-offs which seems to be somewhat viable for the moment. Other than NOI, there are no new scientologists being recruited, so Flag will eventually run out people they can cast aside. Flag can’t really pull people in off the street, try as they might with the failed “block party” and similar, so that mission will have to somehow break free of its bonds and find its own public for the few services they’re allowed to deliver

Kat, “Members” don’t look at reality or compare the hyperbole to it. Those who do look and compare are ex-members for the most part.

Valerie, anyone who looked at a franchise would see that they are doomed to be small orgs run by SMI as badly as or worse than orgs are. In 6 decades, Tubby could only ever get one org at a time to be truly (in his mind) profitable, usually because he was AT that org and drawing surpluses of patrons to his current location. More recently (since Ron’s death), the result of his mismanagement policies and DM’s “doing it all” micromanagement is that ONE org is really profitable: Flag. The flagship,”Freewinds” SHOULD be wildly profitable for many of the same reasons Flag is, but it isn’t because it can’t deal in volume as Flag does and can neither expand nor overcome the built-in bureaucratic “bloat” required by Tubby’s paleolithic, never-to-be-changed policies. While he was on the “high seas”, the Apollo SHOULD have been very profitable with him onboard and developing the OT levels, the Ls and the Class XII auditors, but that was hamstrung by his policies and his mercurial moods when dealing with the governments where they docked and operated. Finally, he ran out of ports he could run away to, so he returned to land (Clearwater & the Flag land base), but NEVER examined reality and couldn’t see that he should have made a few changes “here and there”. DM has no reason to change because he can continue to live like an Arab prince with the cash and slaves he has to hand and Flag’s income alone can keep the rest of the shell of scientology financed until the game is over there IS no shell of scientology to prop up. Currently, there are only a few whales being milked for their money until they dry up and are tossed away as useless relics.