It’s time to start thinking about those worthies who deserve a little something for the holidays. How about an e-meter? Or a leather-bound collection of L. Ron Hubbard’s works? Yes, if you have some spare change (a lot of spare change!), you’ll find all that and more at the interactive Dianetics and Scientology 2014 Holiday Catalogue.
For only $5,000, for instance, you can get this:
Now that’s a classy way to audit!
If you can’t afford that, you can get study tapes and books for $175 and up. And for only $675 ($750 Canadian), you can get a 16-volume set all about L. Ron Hubbard:
And finally, if you’re feeling really flush, here’s a leatherbound, gilded, tooled, and marbled-paper copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s writings, so fancy that the price isn’t even quoted (it says “Contact the Planetary Dissemination Unit or your Publications Org for donations information”). It must run thousands of dollars. Still, what is money compared to the pleasure this set would bring your loved ones?
No thanks, but may I suggest added this one to your reading list:
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.
http://www.amazon.com/Going-Clear-Scientology-Hollywood-Prison/dp/0307745309
Excellent investigative journalism by Lawrence Wright who also wrote the definitive: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
I’ve read it, and recommend it highly, as I do The Looming Tower (which won a Pulitzer Prize, and is must reading for those who see religion as irrelevant to terrorism).
Wright writes really well. Read a lot of his articles in the New Yorker. I’ve had his looming Tower for awhile: must get to it…this century…Just ordered the scientology one.
You missed the chance to write “Wright writes right well.” 🙂
You’re right, but I’m not from the South, where I mighta said That’s right white of ya to point that out:-)
Wright’s book is going to be the basis of a major HBO documentary, due out next year: http://tonyortega.org/2014/11/24/hbo-and-bbc-battling-to-get-full-length-films-about-scientology-out-first/
Man, the e-meter has come a long way since the initial version that used two aluminum cans for hand grips. Oh wait, no it hasn’t. It’s just gotten more expensive.
Surely I’m not the only one who thought that e-meter was some kind of hi-tech milking machine for cows?
I’m not very sophisticated about all this newfangledy marital technology, can anyone tell me where you’re supposed to insert those electrodes?
It is just a potentiometer, IIRC, so anywhere you want (up to the limit of the meter anyway) …
Certainly someone is being milked.
For all its 1980s styling and gloss, the meter itself seems remarkably imprecise – like a baromater (Stormy, Rain, Change, Fair, Very Dry) without the numbers. I guess that gives the auditor additional latitude to load the reading with their own prejudices.
Remarkably imprecise? Please. “The Mark Ultra VIII E-meter is the ultimate masterpiece in accuracy”. It says so right there in the illustration. Also “unequalled precision, clarity and ease of operation… with accuracy guaranteed for eternity”.
So there, doubter.
Exactly what it is measuring so ultra-accurately is not entirely clear, but whatever it is, it’s measuring it with unprecedented accuracy. Probably almost as accurate as a Rohrschach inkblot test.
The pleasure is all David Miscavige’s….
b&
“Miscavigey, Miscavigey, there’s no one like Macavity,
For he’s a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square—
But when a crime’s discovered, then Miscavigey’s not there!”
Apologies to TS Eliot and cats everywhere.
Busted flat in San Jacinto, waiting for a ride, but I was feeling nearly as elated as Miscavige’s face. L. Ron thumbed a Sea Org down, just before the mud slide, and he rode us past the gates of old Gold Base.
If you have to ask, you’ll never know.
Oh those were the days, when it was just me and L. Ron Hubbard McGee
Me and my Sci-en-to-logy.
damn that’s much better. 🙂
… for certain values of “better”.
Values that would have had Georg Cantor packing his bags back to the asylum.
I had got as far as “Janis?”
Not completely stone deaf and moozik-iggorant. But I really had to struggle to place the lyrics of that one.
Aargghh, you just ruined my teatime snack. How can people be such suckers???!!!
See next post?
If L Ron Hubbard had to go a lie detector from the 1930s, why not just go for the golden lasso rather than the skin galvanometer?
Even the Catholic church doesn’t go so far as to hook you up to a rudimentary lie detector when they take confession (nor take detailed notes to blackmail you with later).
You think they don’t take detailed notes? What sort of a bureaucracy would it be, then?
We better hurry up. Prices increase on January 1st!
Maybe its just me, but that first picture (of the e-meter) reminds me of a variety of sex toys.
A little bit of googling tells me that something like 20,000 Mark VIIIs (like the one shown) were originally produced with serial ports for the cans. These had to be retrofitted with USB ports before it could actually be released. D’oh!
Well they are made for screwing people, so … you’re not far off the mark.
You’re right. This one does look well-suited to measure galvanic foreskin response.
Errr, why would you want to measure galvanic foreskin response?
Actually, I’m not sure I want to know. Then I wonder – what do you do with the high proportion of foreskin-free males?
And I’m still not sure if I want to know or not. I hope it’s something tediously mundane. Then I remember how they got semen samples out of Diane Blood’s dead husband. There must be video somewhere, in the nastier recesses of the Internet.
It might have something to do with exorcism, as the highly-scientific website that I linked to seems to indicate. Apparently, this “team of PhD’s, Masters students and psychology professionals” who compiled “the most comprehensive psychology dictionary ever created online” saw fit to include “foreskin” in the related terms at lower right. What’s even cooler though, is that the lack of anything online (besides this post now) with the exact phrase “galvanic foreskin response” means that one might want to measure it precisely to get a Masters or even a PhD in psychology! It’s there, ripe for the pickings… ew. Uh, rather, it’s up for grabs! ew. No, scratch that… ew. Nevermind.
…to get a Masters – and a Johnson!
(Except that M&J were quite remarkably uninterested in measuring anything about the foreskin: http://www.circumstitions.com/Sexuality.html#m&j )
Beat me to it….
b&
why would you want to measure galvanic foreskin response?
For fun and profit. Mostly profit.
I love the way precision is guaranteed for “eternity” on that machine. And is this a naive question, but just what are you supposed to do with those electrodes given they come in “five sizes for maximum comfort”?
Scientology is evidence of just how stupid people can be, how desperation can make others utterly credulous, and of the complete lack of conscience of some when it comes to making money from the vulnerable.
Several countries have de-registered or refused to register Scientology as a religion for tax purposes. I don’t get how they manage to escape indictment for fraud in those they remain in.
Officially, you hold them in your hands. Unofficially…well, that’s between you and your counselor. 😉
As for the fraud charge, at least in the US they are technically required by the FDA to put a warning label on it the same way mediums are supposed to label their service (for entertainment puposes only, or for religious purposes only, or not for medical diagnostic use, or something similar). Not all of them do, but that’s what got them out of the ‘fraud’ category in the ’70s when it went to court.
If you want to have your way with the government, nothing beats a team of high-powered lawyers making never-ending threats of costly litigation. The “Church” has plenty of members with very deep pockets and the DOJ has other fish to fry.
I will be taking a second look at Scientology – I had no idea they had such elegeantly-bound books! That’s how you know they are legit.
And they have a “Planetary Dissemination Unit,” how many organizations can claim that? (Whatever that is…)
My understanding is it’s the division responsible for distributing literature, their Ministry of Propaganda, if you will.
Google tells me it’s specifically the placement of books in libraries – not by donating them, of course, but by having members purchase them.
Geeez!
planetary dissembling.
Don’t the Morons (am I missing a letter ‘m’?) have some theology that gives an entire planet to each of their members? So they’d probably have a “Planetary Dissemination Unit” too. After all, who’d want a planet that’s covered in someone else’s semen?
If I found a religion (when my friend falls off his medications again), perhaps we should make a ritual of whacking one out. It’ll go down a storm with teenage boys, having holy sanction for sticky sheets.
I think only the men get to own the planets but then they can have lots of wives to give them lots of children.
Well, of course it’s only the men. That goes without saying.
If I found a religion I’d bury it again quick.
(Sorry, dreadful pun I know…)
But whom to contact if I need shipping to another planet?
Ask Mars One, they’re in the same market.
According to this e-meter reading, by gullibalistic vector is right on 11! I’ll buy!
While walking through Times Square several years ago the Tiniest Scientologist (she was like four feet tall!) told me that Dianetics and Scientology were completely unrelated. I had walked past the local Scientology temple not 10 minutes earlier and saw they had Dianetics books displayed in the window in several languages. I’d even seen them for sale at the Scientology tables in subway stations. Maybe all the auditing had shrunken that tiny Scientologist. Or maybe it was all the lies she told to the wogs she tried to sell on her products.
The Mark Ultra VIII works great if you combine it with a tube compressor and parametric eq.
I tried that. Unfortunately, I got inverse peaks in my frequency modulation.
I’m OK now though.
The secret is that *both* phase switches need to be engaged before the independent gain stages work properly.
And a REALLY hot cup of tea!
Even more amazing than people buying E-Meters to me is people spending anything more than used paperback bookstore prices for anything written by LRH. Maybe even garage sale used paperback prices, and only out of morbid curiosity.
I once dabbled in some of LRH’s writings, mostly his SF, precisely because I was morbidly curious. The few things I read were uniformly bad. Cheesey, juvenile, and despite the SF writing and inventing a religion thing, agressively unimaginative.
In fact my first impression was a feeling almost precisely like what I felt when as a young adult I read a “book” I had written (and illustrated!) when I was in 3rd or 4th grade, probably for the first time since I had written it. I was sheepishly embarrassed by just how simplistic it really was. In my mind that book had seemed much better than that and I had always been proud of it, up until that reading of it!
Anyway, that is pretty much exactly how I felt reading LRH’s stuff. I was sheepishly embarrassed for him. It is really bad, and anyone who reads it and thinks it is something special is saying something important about themselves that we should pay attention to.
Uh oh. There’s a tag on the loose.
😀
Travolting.
Cruisin’ for a bruisin’
These puns are right up my (Kirstie) Alley!
Probably assembled by children in Corea.
Or by chicks.
For sure it’s not by any of Santa’s Elfman.
Danny Elfman is one? Oh, that just hurts my feelings!!! Weird Science indeed!
Had to google it. Thank Ceiling Cat it was not Danny. whew. I love that dude and Oingo Boingo and his lyrics would be so contradictory of Scientolyshit.
Was the reference Jenna?
There’s a bunch of Elfmans: There’s Jenna & Bodhi (“Hey, man, you’re making fun of my religion”) Elfman, and Richard, Danny’s niece-in-law, nephew, and brother, respectively. But I’m happy to report that Danny seems to be too smart for that shit.
Elfmans or Elfmen? Or is that Númenóreans?
From the house of Elron (Hubbard).
Travolting!! +1.
Paul Haggis is the one I was really surprised to have found out was a recovering member. He seemed much too bright for thst.
Has anyone launched an iPhone App for the e-meter? 😉
You just *had* to ask, didn’t you? Then I just had to look.
The answer is yes. Also runs on iPad, Mac OS X, Android, and Windows. Christ in a chicken basket.
Gonna have to remember “Christ in a chicken basket”. Did you make it up?
I had to Google it to see if I made it up or not. Then I remembered why it popped into my head. Way in the early days of The Onion, when it was still mostly a paper rag and some Onion News audio clips, there was an audio clip about the moon landing, and it stuck in my head from there. It was, however, preceded by the obligatory “Jesus H”.
I think I have the original Onion clip in my audio files somewhere. It’s always so irritating when they get reposted with background ambient music or visuals that don’t fit. And none of this stuff exists on the Onion site anymore.
But I did find this gem from 3 years ago: http://www.theonion.com/articles/nasa-completes-52year-mission-to-find-kill-god,19263/
Thanks for your research. Those are hilarious,especially the first one. Always wondered what the H stood for. Maybe just H like the S in Harry S Truman.
According to many members of this site, I have been informed that “H” stands for “Haploid”. The wiki traces this etymology back to Cecil Adams. (so it’s GOTTA be true, as Cecil is NEVER wrong. Ever.)
I guess Uncle Cecil dismissed “Haploid” back in 1976 as whimsy unbecoming of such a serious question, but still saw fit to mention it. It’s still the explanation that I favor. I am so glad that this question merits a wiki entry. Makes life so much more fun.
Whoops — WIKI ENTRY. There.
😉 Good ol’ Mark Twain. For the record, it’s not only men who utter that profanity…
I’m speechless.
“Contact the Planetary Dissemination Unit”
Yeah, we’ll all get right on that.
We owe scientology a tremendous thanks. By creating a new religion right under our very noses, in modern times when we can document it pretty well, they have made it abundantly clear how the process works, how one can go from con to deification in a very short time, and how little one can trust the writings of the faithful. It’s the Outsider Test made so plain that I feel many Christians, even, are slightly rattled by it.
Excellent point!
<It’s the Outsider Test made so plain that I feel many Christians, even, are slightly rattled by it.
I think many of them are if you bring it up.
Some of my mates were making fun of scientology( we used to rehearse right next to one of their centers ) and I couldn’t help remark that their basic premise( Aliens did it ) is not less plausible than that of any other religion.
Some of them agreed.
Ach du lieber. Blockquote fail.
I dunno. A virgin gives birth to a boy who grows up to be a charismatic preacher who is executed, rises from the dead and six weeks later ascends into the sky. Sure there’s a lot of hocus pocus involved, but there is evidence at least for the existence of virgins, baby boys, preachers, and executions. Aliens, not so much.
I guess it depends on how you look at it.
The chance of there being alien life ( besides us ) is up for debate.
So the question might be: What are the odds of a human virgin birth on this planet as opposed to the odds for life* on another.
*This is of course ignoring scientology’s idea of advanced aliens. 🙂
Another good book is Beyond Belief, by Jenna Miscavige Hill. She is the niece of David. Her experiences as a Sea Org cadet, starting when she signed a billion-year contract (at the age of seven), are harrowing and disturbing. Growing us, she was allowed little contact with her parents. She escaped at 21.
For those who can’t afford the deluxe e-meter I created a set of DIY instructions last year so you can build your own. I suspect that it works as well as the official one.
http://pictoraltheology.blogspot.com/2013/10/diy.html
Won’t the noodlinesses call patent infringement;-)
It’s actually a F meter so I should be ok
But the collander?
… is an (e-)meter-fore for the holeness of the original concept of the e-(for emetic?)-meter.
if you say so…
A collander makes perfect sense. When you aren’t auditing, you can make pasta
makes sense, but I was referring to the copyrighting thereof
I don’t think followers of the FSM are terribly litigious. Maybe linguineous…
Linguineous+1
I guess the f-meter is a fett(uccini) accompli…
I will pass
So the E-meter’s still around?!
I’ve got an E-meter. It cost $18, was made in Korea, and is labelled “Universal Multimeter”. Set the dial to ‘2000 kOhm’ and you can see the needle moving according to how tight you grip the probes.
It also measures voltage, current (for small currents) and will test diodes. And it looks like a proper test instrument, not a pseudo-alien prop from a 1950’s UFO B-movie.
What a pity to waste money with a signature collection of this scientific fiction theology garbage! Let’s see what happens with the the work of other non-con man, Euler:
“The Swiss Academy of Sciences established the Euler Commission in 1907 with the charge to publish all of Euler’s papers, correspondence, manuscripts, notes,
and diaries. … Publication of the collected works of Euler began in 1911 but was stopped while still incomplete. It was resumed a few years ago and is now essentially complete, except for a few volumes of Series IV A and some of Series IV B; these are in preparation and scheduled to appear soon.” (http://www.ams.org/bookstore/pspdf/euler-prev.pdf)
Need to say anything else?
Had a look at the catalog and my favorite page is one which offers “Processing Indoctrination Packs”
http://www.bridgepub.com/holiday/catalog.html#10-11
“Visual descriptions of how auditing works, what is expected of the preclear, the processes one will be running, and the exact anatomy of what is happening in the mind. It’s all here for maximum speed and progress”
Disappointed! I thought the “OUR GIFT TO YOU” item was a personal vibrator!
Which, as we know, are much less icky than communal vibrators.
That E-Meter looks more like an irony meter to me. Or at least what I imagine an irony meter to look like.