“I have not lost my mind – its backed up on disc.”

Now THAT is hilarious.

I MUST get me of those buttons, and plenty of extras for gag gifts!

Cracking up, here!

In answer to your first question, : If Regraded Being’s comedic talent and satiric style has seeped into my consciousness to the point where I unintentionally imitate him, I’d say that’s a good thing, Jere 🙂 Forget about drawing, though; I get panic attacks drawing stick figures, and no, I’m not joking, that’s true.

Got it on everything as re the coffee versus the decaf. Due to insomnia I gave up all caffeine 10 years ago. Very hard to do. Based on what I experienced kicking caffeine, I don’t know how people give up cocaine and heroin. It was very hard for me to do but very worthwhile, as now I sleep like the proverbial baby. Deep, refreshing sleep. I’ll never go back to caffeine and be sleepless again. That said, I still crave it, occasionally. Understandable because I was “Forty years a slave.” Regular vitamins and brewers yeast drinks help a lot with caffeine and sugar cravings. All part of my routine now.

Hey, don’t worry. On June something or other, I was beached by our own Jenny Linson. Oh the days that have pasted ..
I wish you well Jere ?

I Yawnalot said:
“LOL, I’ve had extensive Scientology – my mind and memory are fucked!”

I hear ya’. Remember, I attested to ‘Clear’ so all of the really long-term memories are gone 😉
AND I had a stroke — from too much smoking, I’m told. Right Hemisphere artery block by a clot, which means the left side of the body stopped talking to anyone/anything else. ’twas an Eerie feeling. I couldn’t even tell the left side wasn’t “there” No static or an equivalent, just a blank channel when I thought to move those limbs. Right side limbs perforce have had to do all the heavy lifting(literally) From a 10-finger touch typist clearing 120 clean WPM,(my talking speed), I’m reduced to about 1,000 W/Hour, pretty sloppy/dirty.That’s SO slow, I forget I wrote this thought twice before in THIS composition, so should delete some of the extra words. OR I lose the train of my thought and wander all over the landscape. One thing I love about Mac OS is how some useful apps are right to hand so I don’t have to remember things, just where to find the app where I put the things. That’s why I have a button that proudly proclaims: “I have not lost my mind— it’s backed up on disk” [AND SO IT IS—to an extent. [The docs at the rehab hospital loved it, as they saw how useful my little iBook laptop had been in the first few months after the stroke.] Since I DID technically lose the right half of my brain & mind in the stroke, short-term memory could have been compromised; If it is, *I* can’t see it other than writing the same things several times in a row in my compositions/comments/replies. It’s frustrating because I can’t seem to make it briefer, but that’s not lethal,or even much of a change as it was a problem before the stroke: forgetting that I’d already written that thought, so should delete all but one copy of it.
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Okay, okay, Ron said the brain isn’t the mind, and vice versa, but WHERE was his evidence? I defy anyone to operate the body except through the brain, OR to have any sense of mind without the brain. It takes both sides of the brain working together to create new memories, the neurologists have decided within the last decade that Ive been paying close attention, though old memories aren’t lost if you “turn the power off”, as in a stroke. One thing I’ve been doing with Pat and other long-term friends is checking the accuracy of my long-term memories. (this LT only; I’m interested in what is known to be stored in the grey matter. I’ve been looking at the situation from the *inside* of a radically modified hardware/firmware machine for the last decade and don’t see the truth of Ron’s hypotheses, just the ‘logic’ by which he chose those conclusions. It was the easy, comfortable, simple answer, the way he demanded all his answers be, or seem. Neurological research is better equipped than ever before , and has gotten close to reading some minds through mapping electrical activity in and around the brain. They could identify, for instance, that a subject was thinking about or seeing a picture of a boat a few years ago, differentiating from a colored square and other shapes .They’d progressed to a more mobile skullcap which they were trying to use to control his wheelchair, and beginning to compose text with the skullcap easier/faster than Hawkings had available with his writing tool, IIRC, was mouth-controlled. & speech synthesis. If the skull cap gets debugged, it’ll be a godsend for those who are without even one working hand/foot or tongue and have a lazy eye that won’t focus properly (small joke) . Their goal, of course, is a human-cyborg blended entity. Sounds like fun. MY wish, of course, is a replacement right brain so I can walk, run, climb, and ski again. Is that too much to ask? Might be nice to be able to get more physical with Pat, but she says I’m doing fine romancing her one-handed,along my many verbal flirtations. She calls me a “terrible flirt”, and I’m NOT improving with practice. Funny, everything ELSE I practiced with her got better.

I’m surprised how reflective and self-aware I’ve gotten, but that makes sense because it’s been SUCH a big change and I’m never certain when an internal perception might spring something loose. As I found in the hospitals, I’m not patient, but I am persistent. That can substitute, I was told.
My opinion is currently that the brain is the computer and firmware operating system, with connections to & from each muscle in the body, and direct connect to each of the sense organs. [That’s one gawdawful lot of connectors and nerves, but they’re all supposed to be there. If they’re not, you can’t necessarily perceive them missing. It’s not, in my experience, a buzzing of static or similar, it’s a completely blank channel, no one home, no one talking,no one listening. As a fair athlete up to the stroke, it’s sorta humbling. Instead of being able to visualize a complex motion, the simple mottos become complex, sorta like when we started learning how to
In that, I’d say The Mind is or the minds are the program or programs running on the computer, the brain the physical computer, including a multi-level RAM or DRAM, which stores its data even without a sound electrical connection and periodic power bumps to maintain the memory & its connections to other neurons . One interesting neuro idea I heard watching Science/Discovery shows was that the brain primarily controls movement, with certain “muscle memory” activities being stored in the spine or nerve bundles in the extremities. Seems to explain some things for me. For instance, though I don’t have volitional control of my left side, when I do a big cat-yawn, the left arm and leg join in. Also, a couple ties when I nearly fell, the left leg jumped to the right place to maintain balance. I can’t perceive HOW it happened as those nerves are still not back and reporting muscle/joint positions and amount of effort expended;in short, the the proprioceptive nerve system; I just observed the external actions and my core muscle/nerve system reported the overall balancing act. something I can’t disagree with given how completely the loss of my right brain affected my left extremities, is the left-right swap between one side of the brain and the other side of the body. The cute little NOTES app has an interesting feature: Type “Wake Pat at 1PM” and Reminders sets a to-do that wakes up at 1, sets a reminder that’ll come up exactly at 1;00PM and say:”Wake Pat NOW”… Handy, and something I could have used at work when they paid me to keep a Windows XP box running for 8 hours of work — NOT easy under windoze with all its known, never scheduled-to-be-fixed BUGS. We got good at noticing certain things happening, then shutting down before the crash OR ‘freeze’/hang. You see, Windoze had a “few” known bugs that got in the way of work when we pushed it hard, which was usually, it was our JOB to push the machines to their limits. SOME of those bugs we tripped over had been there since the dos days(NOT NXIVM’s DOS, but the original geek-only command-line interface that WAS the “blue screen of death”) Their “fixes” oft-times were work-arounds involving “don’t do that or the system may hang/crash” and WE had to write a module that wrapped around that part of the OS, shepherding it away from trying self-destructive actions. FRUSTRATING , particularly how easily malware got around Micros..t’s laughable ‘security’, and how many known bugs we had to work around in a supposed “mature” system. I had a list of 4, or was it 5, that I’d discovered. Sadly Micros..t had fair-gamed all their competitors, so MicroS..t was the only game on the Wintel boxes.Also sadly, TPTB specified Windoze OS and MS programming /database languages, so we were stuck with that. The one application we’d done in Powerbuilder, a decent database & interface builder some else had chosen years previously was fast, clean, and stable under Windows NT. When migrated to XP, it mysteriously crashed on our users’ machines. Funniest thing: when they went to the candy cotton color scheme, the application died. In the “plain” colors scheme, like we programmers preferred, it was fine. ODD behavior it’equivalents’ often were themselves malware gateways. One ‘suite’ of apps was the bane of our existences for a while as we chased down their hijinks on each of our machines. after awhile, we trusted NOTHING we didn’t create, and no MS product or OS with less than a 2.0 version number. Took them that long to find/fix the new problems which involved creating & testing a bunch of stupid little apps. what a PITA, as my v1.0, build 1 apps were expected to work flawlessly. We had a QA/testing section as large as the programmer section to prove or debug our stuff. Wy can’t Microsoft do similarly. Why do the 1st few versions wind up being beta test versions? Meanwhile, back at home, we could depend on our Mac OS, built on UNIX and rock-solid to be here for us, no muss, no fuss, no MicroS..t headaches.

Cindy:
“Jere, you said that nowadays when they beach someone the church is paying them large money. Is this hush money to keep them from talking badly about Scn or Davey?”

I believe that’s the case, as was done to Debby Cook and other high-value route-outs. If you’ve been reading these “ASC” sites and been paying attention, you’ve as much idea as I do. I’ve been away so long, I knew/met only a few of the current personalities, though the stereotypes[GOTTA be a better word!]have remained true. Dwarfenführer is fairly unique, and I’ve met him and found his measure(..err…lack thereof) but that Grant Cardone… I doubt I met him, but he looks SO familiar. He probably reminds me of a used car salesman who tried to rip me off years ago That’s the -type that I’m looking for.Might be a psychological typing system, might be something more body-soul related, Archetype just popped up, but that’s not QUITE it, though closer than stereotype. AND… We’re back to “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Ain’t it grand that these great old cliches keep on keeping on?
Still, that tip-of-the-tongue disease kills me

Jere, Philly seems to be a small and failing org – in spite of being in a metro area with a population that’s one of the largest in country, we hear almost nothing from them. And it doesn’t have any missions left either, either – across all of the rest of Miscavige’s home state, there’s just the token “city office” in Pittsburgh that’s actually in a suburb inconveniently far outside the city, and a satellite of the Cincy org.

Thanks for the report about their siting. They could literally be in Times Square and it wouldn’t help their inability to recruit nowadays – the New York City org is hardly doing any better, and it has that prime sit in the heart of the country’s largest city.

The building is one that they bought early on in the campaign to put all their orgs in “ideal” facilities when it was still focused on acquiring historic buildings in city centers. They obviously had to wait for one that that they could make a deal on, and the fact that it sat so long means that it would probably be hard to ever sell again, though it’s even possible that like Boston and now St. Louis they will end up trying to dump it and buy one of those office park buildings that are cheaper to renovate.

The plight of Philly and other orgs like the ones I’ve cited, show how Scientology is on the verge of dying out across the heartland (extending into Canada, as well) and the East Coast.

Jere, you said that nowadays when they beach someone the church is paying them large money. Is this hush money to keep them from talking badly about Scn or Davey?

Peacemaker:”Most of the recent “ideal” facilities orgs are being moved in to, have been in commercial office parks and industrial areas, though no others I’m aware of in what sounds like a landscape of urban decay.”

I guess I haven’t stressed enough how BAD an idea Philly’s idle Morg’s site is.

It’s right around the corner from Wanamaker’s flagship store, so it’s a bit like NY when they were across from Macy’s, which worked OK 45-50 years ago. Trouble is, even Wanamakers, with its big(for Philly) draw around Xmas, is having trouble keeping its white elephant open in that depressed an area. The 15-story Morg, which was an abandoned piano manufacturer’s warehouse for awhile and couldn’t sell. (for Years, I believe) It’s not a real *dangerous* area, per se,— No place in philly is —other than compared to other nearby areas — but it’s a foreboding place, empty and abandoned. Slightly better is their current org location a few blocks away, but they’re making no inroads into the SE pennsylvania area from there that I’ve caught wind of. It SHOULD be great for body-routing, between the downtown Mall and convention center and Chinatown, ALL big draws of people with time on their hands, but … nada, nix, nuttin’ … , as best I can determine. All that effort squandered. The staff who are still THERE are real troopers, hanging in when all hope is lost. HEY! Wasn’t Aaron Smith Levin from here? Would love to hear him weigh in…. And BTW: How’s that big, Bad “SP DOG” doing? Fat and sassy, I hope, having vanquished all those OTs with a wag of his tail….