Thank you, Rip 🙂 We’ve both had nice wins along this line, it seems!

I’m SO glad he failed with you.

SO glad you followed your gut.

When I reflect on the times I followed my gut, when I didn’t give in, when I stood firm.. ..I feel stronger.

Thanks for reminding me.

Years back when I first heard the phrase, “gives me the “NO” feeling” … It rang so true for me.

Wow. I didn’t know this. A double stat for confirming someone twice. Triple, quadruple stat, accordingly. NOW I understand why we public got all those calls, confirming, reconfirming, re-reconfirming – endless calls, so annoying. “What a complete waste of time”, I would seethe, mostly silently, sometimes not silently. But no. No, the endless calls were NOT a waste of THEIR time. They were increasing their stats. Amazing. Thank you, jere.

SP, Current estimates are more like 3,000 to 3,500 SO. I think there’s a lot of overlap between membership and org staff, but I’ve never been able to get enough information to assess that odd angle accurately, plus it’s hard to categorize given that so many staff “moonlight” full-time at what are effectively their real paying jobs.

Certainly, the ratios of Sea Org and staff to members are bizarrely low, whatever they are exactly, whether it’s 5:1 or 2:1 – in most normal churches it’s more like one minister and one administrator per 100 parishioners, with only a tiny amount of overhead at the regional and national level (including religious orders, if any).

I’ll second that “PLENTY of parking, as in an utterly empty lot.

æ What will happen when the drug cartels find out that Scientology wants to wean people off drugs?”

NOTHING, as anyone who looks into the scheme discovers quickly that scientology is long on supposed aspiration, very short on doing anything meaningful toward those ends.

“Confirm your attendance! REconfirm your attendance!”

That doubles their stat of RSVPs, of course. ANYthing for a statpush.

and that list of job openings: Isn’t that just the list of all posts in a Narconon?

Met him once, and once was enough to shoot him straight up and vertically to tops on my list of least-liked Sea Org members. What a bullying yet phony and smarmy man was, his patina of false modesty not quite hiding how impressed he was with himself. He requested a “comm cycle” with me and then proceeded to reg me for a much more expensive WISE membership that I neither needed nor wanted. I could see he was confidant of being able to devastate me with his charm. Yes, he had a nice looking face, I’ll grant him that. And he was actually being charming so far as words and manner went. But – and not to get all ’70s on you – I didn’t trust his “energy”/ You know how a cat will just raise its back sometimes for no apparent reason sometimes? That was my reaction to him and his charm, although I hid it, of course. I was polite, I let him talk but inwardly shrank from him and didn’t upgrade my WISE membership, fobbing him off with an agreement to discuss it further at another time, giving him my phone number, etc. Fast forward; a year or so later I attended something at which he was head speaker. In the intermission I walked by a room in which he was reaming out his wife, Bronwyn, about something. Face ripping her for something in a cold, contemptuous way and then he threw a sheaf of papers he was holding at her…ugh. She just stood there silently. I guess she knew her husband…I walked away, remembering my instinctive reaction to him, marvelling, “I was right! He is bad news!” Sometimes it pays to listen to your instincts 🙂
Oh, and last but not least, once I was out of the cult I read online that he had been in charge of the RPF at Flag, or somewhere. Double ugh!

It’s a great movie to watch with live comments. Or as a drinking game.