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May 15, 2012, 9:00 PM

Suggested by Gloria Stevenson

the responses from the winner and the finalists.)

A fascinating discussion. But you need not have a philosophy about meat-eating to understand that we — Americans, that is — need to do less of it. In fact, only if meat were produced at no or little expense to the environment, public health or animal welfare (as, arguably, some of it is), would our decisions about whether to raise and kill animals for food come down to ethics.

The purely pragmatic reasons to eat less meat (and animal products in general) are abundant. And while I’ve addressed them before, I’ll continue until the floods come to Manhattan.

Five years ago, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization published a report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which maintained that 18 percent of greenhouse gases were attributable to the raising of animals for food. The number was startling.

A couple of years later, however, it was suggested that the number was too small. Two environmental specialists for the World Bank, Robert Goodland (the bank’s former lead environmental adviser) and Jeff Anhang, claimed, in an article in World Watch, that the number was more like 51 percent. It’s been suggested that that number is extreme, but the men stand by it, as Mr. Goodland wrote to me this week: “All that greenhouse gas isn’t emitted directly by animals. ”But according to the most widely-used rules of counting greenhouse gases, indirect emissions should be counted when they are large and when something can be done to mitigate or reduce them.”

The exact number doesn’t matter. What does is that few people take the role of livestock in producing greenhouse gases seriously enough. Even most climate change experts focus on new forms of energy — which cannot possibly be effective quickly enough or produced on a broad enough scale to avert what may be the coming catastrophe — and often ignore the much easier fix of adjusting our eating habits.

It’s good that we’re eating somewhat less meat, but it still amounts to something just shy of a staggering 200 pounds per person per year. And no matter how that number changes domestically, on the world scale there’s troubling movement in the wrong direction. Meat consumption in China is now twice what it is in the United States (in 1978 it was only one-third). We still eat twice as much per capita as the Chinese, but when they catch up they’ll consume more than four times as much as we do.

If you believe that earth’s natural resources are limitless, which maybe was excusable 100 years ago but is the height of ignorance now, or that “technology will fix it” or that we can simply go mine them in outer space with Newt Gingrich, I guess none of this worries you. But if you believe in reality, and you’d like that to be a place that your kids get to enjoy, this is a big deal.

A primer: The earth may very well be running out of clean water, and by some estimates it takes 100 times more water (up to 2,500 gallons) to produce a pound of grain-fed beef than it does to produce a pound of wheat. We’re also running out of land: somewhere around45 percent of the world’s land is either directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, and as forests are cleared to create new land for grazing animals or growing feed crops, the earth’s capacity to sequester greenhouse gases (trees are especially good at this) diminishes.

threat to public health; and the link (though not as strong as sugar’s) to many of the lifestyle diseases that are wreaking havoc on our health.

Here’s the thing: It’s seldom that such enormous problems have such simple solutions, but this is one that does. We can tackle climate change without inventing new cars or spending billions on mass transit or trillions on new forms of energy, though all of that is not only desirable but essential.

As the global appetite for meat grows, we’ll doubtless figure out a way to satisfy it. But no matter how profitable that may be for producers, the toll it would take on our finite and dwindling resources would be unconscionable.

We have to think about producing and eating meat in those terms. Anything else would be unethical.
________
This piece is reproduced in toto due to its compelling importance.

Mark Bittman is a bestselling cookbook author, journalist and television personality. His friendly, informal approach to home cooking has shown millions that fancy execution is no substitute for flavor and soul.

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Gretchen Rossi & the Pussycat Dolls—the arrogance of beauty

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

By George Milton, Hipographia
Crack-TV Chronicles
The housewife that couldn't

Gretchen Rossi—one of the stars of Bravo's seminal franchise, Real Housewives of Orange County, is a lucky genetic accident. By that I mean she's outside the norm. In the bell-shaped distribution she's one of those creatures sitting pretty on one of the extremes—the extremely fortunate one—the coordinates inhabited by people blessed with perfect body, features and voice, the kind that answers a teenager's wet prayers. Rossi's looks are the prime if not sole reason why Bravo picked her to impersonate a "real housewife"—a suitably Orwellian term for a woman who's neither a housewife nor very real.

Prancing around, Gretchen evokes an awful lot a real-life "pleasure model" in the spirit of Pris, the tragic replicant (played by Daryl Hanna) in the classic sci-fi Blade Runner. Pris was an advanced "biological robot"— a "skin job"—as "replicants" were contemptuously called by special cops assigned to track them and "retire" them when they violated the rules and landed on Earth. Pleasure models were expressly designed to serve as sex objects for colonies of "off-world" soldiers. (Yes, it wasn't much of a PC world.) Such bionic creatures had little raison d'etre beyond that task, understood in its most unadorned sense.

I suppose Rossi is not particularly concerned about such things, and I doubt very much she saw Blade Runner. I equally doubt she could ever make a connection with the Pris character, obvious as it is. That kind of thinking is foreign to Gretchen and her hedonistic tribe, always on the go and with little time for culture of any kind. Well, come to think of it, brain and culture (as long as the looks last) may be quite unnecessary. That's where the arrogance of beauty comes in.

The pedestal shakes

In any case, the Barbie Doll aura hovering over Gretchen Rossi suddenly went ultra dark when her abysmal performing talents—at least when it comes to singing—were revealed recently in Las Vegas. You see, the lady wanted to sing—not just romp— on a Vegas stage and she eventually got her wish—but with disastrous results. (To be fair, it seems the whole cockamammie idea originated with her limp Svengali boyfriend, the cunning but ultimately equally clueless Slade).

The Housewives regurgitate capitalism's values through every pore. Despite all the primping it's not a pretty sight.

The venue chosen for Gretchen's Vegas debut was a burlesque act, the aptly named Pussycat Dolls, which is chiefly conceived as a pretext to serve titillating soft-porn to well-heeled gawkers. For safety's sake, the picked musical number was Fever, an old standard practically owned by Peggy Lee. It's not a terribly complicated song; it doesn't require great vocal gymnastics. A minimum of competency is all it demands to make anyone shine.

That was not to be, however. Armed with only some desultory vocal training (or maybe because of it) in Gretchen's hands, from the first riff, Fever became an unrecognizable, nailscratching-on-glass, traumatizing mess. To say that it was jaw-dropping bad is not to write figuratively but literally: several of the "wives" and not a small number in the audience simply looked at the undulating blond figure in utter disbelief. As such, Gretchen did set something of a record: a record for what now must stand as the worst ever rendition of Fever on a professional setting. Now, many will say, the lady can't hit a note, is tone-deaf, etc., etc., but what about her acting chops? Am afraid that not much can be expected in that department, either. Like many esthetic accidents, she's managed to secure a television spot, so, technically, she's on TV already, but she's playing herself, not exactly a demanding part. Beyond that a huge interrogation mark beckons.

Gretchen Rossi and her ilk, products of a plastic, less introspective generation than even the relative youngsters strutting now around in their mid and late 40s, are faithful products of a culture shaped and punctuated by marketing values. In this crowd, the glitter is what counts, but the glitter can stretch only so far. As such, they seem to lack a capacity for pathos. Marilyn M, beautiful though she was, and not precisely endowed with great culture at the start, had it. Far from the dumb blonde so many saw in her (thanks mostly to the publicity boys) she was also possessed of a curious mind; she could be equally fascinated by a Di Maggio and an Arthur Miller. And superficial as many of her roles were, the person behind the flickering mask was clearly there: her biography is nothing if not poignant. Such chiaroscuro is almost entirely absent in these women, who mindlessly swim and wallow in the most appalling materialistic banality, boasting a set of mediocre, ignorant, self-absorbed personalities that elevates shallowness and pettiness to new highs. Uber consumerists, though, that they all surely are.

The cautionary note about the Gretchens of the world is that the power of looks is usually a whimsical one. The beauty window is fleeting. And while many beauties may escape a downward spiral, a significant number will not. For them, the phone will simply stop ringing, the golden touch will be gone. The bubble of lust that put some wind under their wings, to use the cliche, securing them fame and money, will become but a weakened breath incapable of sustaining flight. Then what? If they haven't hooked the right daddy to keep them in style by then, they will face a bitter, steep decline and ever tougher choices as time continues to take its inexorable toll.

Incidentally, such is the cookie cutter template of mediocrity defining this lot that I could have written this piece on just about any of them. Slade (Smiley) bombs as a comedy act and Gretchen can't sing, but neither can LuAnne Nadeau (aka LuAnn de Lesseps, or as Countess LuAnn) of the NY franchise; and both Melissa Gorga (RHONJ) and Kim Solziak (RHOA) are not exactly brimming with talent, albeit gall, nourished by a chorus of sycophants, is in ample supply. Meanwhile it's Bravo that gets to have the last laugh. Shamelessly catering to the most rancid forms of hoi polloi voyeurism the channel specializes in nouveau riche decadence reality tv (not that imaginative, by old riche standards) but equally contemptible. Contemptible, by the way, is not the same as lacking in audience appeal. Like a twisted car wreck, a multitude seems to be willing to watch such programs at any cost, a suitable commentary on the times we live.

George Milton is a young television critic for Hipographia. His views are not exactly popular.

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The Big Empty: Eating Cheetos with the hungry ghosts of the corporate state

by Phil Rockstroh

Due to the consolidation of wealth and privilege into fewer and fewer hands, thus requiring escalating amounts of officially mandated surveillance and brutality to maintain social order, the natural trajectory of unregulated capitalism tends towards hyper-authoritarian excess, even towards fascism. Moreover, by the standards of capitalist ideology, and exacerbated by the rigged nature of economic and social arrangements — large segments of society are deemed losers, and, resultantly, will grow restive, if scapegoats aren’t invented to mitigate a sense of humiliation and displace rage. Accordingly, rightist demagogic fictions can seize the psyches of large segments of the general public: immigrant interlopers wreck the economy; minority layabouts suck-up public funds; gays and women, possessed of dubious morality, destroy the nation’s moral fabric; lefties are driven to challenge the system, but only because of their spite, borne of jealousy.

The “purer” the form of capitalism the faster the rise of fascism. There is a dark and bitter grace to this: Fascism is the deranged agency that sends the capitalist machine into systemic runaway, thus the system crashes and burns — and out of its ashes and debris…a more humane system can come into being.

Although the yearning for freedom is inborn, as is the case with the development of any skill or talent, one must open oneself to its promise by discipline and practice. Otherwise, attempts at exercising freedom — free will’s dance with resistant and changing circumstance — can be an ugly sight to behold.

Witness the following litany of the lost evinced by us, the denizens of late-stage capitalism: The dismal air haunted and minds distracted … cluttered by the ceaseless chatter of those dim ghosts of human discourse known as text messages and tweets; the parade of preening narcissists and prattling sub-cretins that is celebrity culture and Reality Television; the joyless bacchanal termed the nation’s epidemic of obesity.

Experiencing freedom involves risk, imagination, and discipline. In contrast, choosing between purchasing a bag of Cheetos or a bag of Doritos … amounts to not quite the same thing. Resisting the call to freedom leaves an individual empty, and bag after bag of salted snack food will not sate the hollow ache within when one chooses the benumbing safety of culturally proffered palliatives over living out the truth of one’s being.

A thousand text messages will never replace a single kiss…because a kiss conjures both the soul’s numinosity and brings earthly complications — the stuff of freedom.

When your heart aches, you are experiencing or being beckoned towards your destiny. Depending on the choices that you make, you can become waylaid at a fast food drive-thru or risk the road towards freedom that unfurls before you.

Hint: The excessive heft acquired by your hindquarters will begin to shrink as you begin a long distance trek in the direction of freedom.

What forces unloose titanic appetites…devoid of reason and restraint? Why is more than you can ever need never enough?

How is it that a trillion dollars can be spent on military weaponry, but the collective psyche of this nation continues to be gripped by nebulous fear?

Expressed in mythopoeic lexicon: The appetite of a Titan (e.g., the limit-devoid greed and empty appetite of late capitalism) will grow so random and ravenous that he will devour his own young, while his presence will cause the young to construct Icarusian wings…but an (infantilized by the internalization of consumerist impulsiveness) adult-child of the corporate state can never devour enough sky, thus put enough distance between himself and his own titanic need to escape earthly circumstance…until his wings of wax are undone by the steadfast sun, and he is returned to the inhuman eternity of the sea’s briny womb (e.g., languishing in the media hologram, avoiding the implications of personal destiny-denied and global-wide ecocide).

The appetite of the earth is insatiable. Life must live on death. To become fully human, one must make peace with this fact by an acceptance of limits, by drawing lines of demarcation between necessity and titanic want.

Storytellers, poets, novelists i.e, myth makers have told this ageless tale of woe and warning for millenia. To ignore the admonition above amounts to insertion of your name into the following list: Tantalus, Midas, Lady Macbeth, George Babbitt, Captain Ahab, Gatsby, Cthulhu, Fred C. Dobbs, Marquise de Merteuil, Patrick Bateman, Mr. Burns, Gollem, the denizens of both Goldman Sachs and your local mall’s food court…Ignore the warning and insert your name here: (……………………).

One needs one’s emptiness every bit as much as one has the need to be “fulfilled.” How so? Because room is required within so that new awareness can grow. Therefore, love your inner, empty places. It is the method that you live your way into the future.

From time to time, I have been asked, how does one cope with the ever increasing “complexity” of our age. Short answer: It would be ill-advised to become adapted to a madhouse.

Instead, attempt to view complexity as future compost. At this stage, a song of grief is as resonate as a song of ebullience…Rot ensures renewal; the future is compost and compost is the future. Thus: Rejoice in the reek. Mortification restores our humanity, turning us away from the tyranny of unchecked proliferation. It bestows us with the ability to love our limits.

In this, it is synonymous with grace.

In a nation defined by vast wealth disparity and the deprivation it causes others on the planet, by means of impoverished lives and ecological devastation, taking more than one’s share contributes to the vast harm done. The corporate food industry wrought epidemic of obesity in the U.S. is a microcosmic representation of a global-wide system of macro-imperialism.

There is a need in both the besieged psyche of an individual and its societal analog — in our own case, in the collective psyche of a declining nation — to worship and fear phantoms and view flesh and blood as phantasmal. As a culture, for example, we elevate celebrity culture to cultic status while ignoring the suffering of the poor; the teabagger crowd is accepted as a legitimate political movement, not as corporate state Astroturf; that there exist people known as Islamo-Fascists; and the acceptance as fact by all too many the noxious corporate media fiction that the energies of the Occupy Wall Street movement have faded — but the outcomes of the overpriced theatrical artifice of U.S. election cycles represents the democratic expression of the political will of a free people.

Phantoms arrive in the psyche when one refuses life’s ongoing invitation to commune with flesh and blood beings; to engage the rigors of insightful thought; to know both the agony and the release of heart-opening engagement and falsity-cleaving insight.

Apropos: “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” –Carl Jung

As we are surrounded by gibbering, imploring media phantoms, our hunger to regain a resonating relationship with the world at large grows…yet the corporate state proffers drive thru window cuisine. We give them our life blood — and, in return, we settle for an evening at Applebees. And the plundering class insist we are privileged to be offered this…that our plight could be worse…we could spend our hours languishing in one of their foreign sweatshops.

As the one percent has acquired their grotesquely bloated assets, large segments of the American middle and laboring classes have acquired larger and larger amounts of excess body fat. As corporate executives have sweetened their salaries with limitless perks and multimillion dollar bonuses, their workforce has sucked down copious portions of high fructose-based soft drinks and obesity-engendered disease has increased accordingly.

“Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast.” — James Hillman

To the mind of a child, his/her parent’s view of the world constitutes the very architecture of their psyche. The world carries the imprimatur of their parents’ face. A child’s character begins to develop when he/she begins to compare what they carry within, forged by paternal admonition and action, to their experiences outside the home. If the child remains in a passive position, then his/her personal destiny becomes arrested. This is the poisoned apple proffered to the dormant beauty within us all. Conversely, we must accept the small, hidden aspects of our character (our helpful dwarves) that dwell in a deep forests within, far from the cold castles of paternal expectation, to be able to awaken to hidden potential.

Life in an authoritarian state, which is paternalistic by nature, arrests the psyche’s drive to self-awareness; it puts one to sleep with infantilizing bribes — e.g., all the bright and shiny things of the consumer state — as it manipulates by means of coercive fear — e.g., the looming dragons of poverty and police state intimidation.

“In Freud’s time we felt oppressed in the family, in sexual situations, in our crazy hysterical conversion symptoms, and where we felt oppressed, there was the repressed. Where do we feel that thick kind of oppression today? In institutions–hospitals, universities, businesses; in public buildings, in filling out forms, in traffic…” –James Hillman

There exist few viable alternatives within the present political set-up to address the degradations inflicted by the corporate state and the machinery of duopoly in place to maintain the systems reach and power — and there will not arrive a mainstream prince to confront the vain usurpers and slay the institutional dragons who cling to power in the present era. This is an unpleasant truth, but it is true nevertheless. The sooner one faces this reality: the hopelessly corrupt nature of the present system — the closer we, collectively, move towards the creation of alternative arrangements when the current one collapses from its own corruption.

Poets of previous generations warned that one’s soul could be lost in blind pursuit of vaults of riches and limitless knowledge. It is difficult not to laugh in derision or weep in anguish for a people who sell their soul for access to the contents of a convenience store. Addiction to fattening food speaks of our inner emptiness; so called Reality Television relates to our hunger for social engagement and communion; the images that haunt the corporate state media hologram attract us because we long for the images that rise from the soul.

In timeless stories, such as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, the awakening kiss of a princely figure should not be misapprehended with gender-based overtones of exclusively male power and dominance. Instead, the symbolic prince should be read as — the possibility that unfolds as one’s true calling when one awakens to one’s circumstance. In our time, this timeless tale plays out as: The ongoing challenge we have been given to face and struggle against the life-devouring, institutional dragons of corporate state governance.

Of course, there will never arrive a tacked-on, Disneyesque “happily ever after” ending. There is no distant kingdom of the mind that exists beyond the reach of harm or corruption. If there were, new stories would cease to unfold. By this method, this world beckons us to live out our own unique tale.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com . Visit Phil’s website http://philrockstroh.com / And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100…

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Fragile egos or just imbecility? Why Celebrities Love Scientology

Why Celebrities Love Scientology

By Gabrielle Dunn

[Originally published Mar 16th 2011]

Over the weekend, notorious Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard celebrated what would have been his 100th birthday. The former science-fiction writer (born March 13, 1911) founded the religion Scientology in 1952 as a successor to his self-help series, ‘Dianetics.’

Since then, Scientology has gone mainstream with the aid of big-name celebrity believers like Tom Cruise and John Travolta. But while Scientology’s association with movie stars has gained it publicity, it’s also revealed outlandish, dangerous and cult-ish aspects that leave many wondering how famous actors and actresses could still choose to be involved with the church.

Moviefone talked to Village Voice editor-in-chief and Scientology expert Tony Ortega (who’s written numerous articles about Scientology) about the intense connection between Scientology and celebrity and why so many movie stars follow Hubbard’s bizarre ways.

Moviefone: When did Scientology become so enmeshed in celebrity like it seems to be today?
Tony Ortega: Almost from the start. I did a story about Larry Wollersheim, who joined the church in 1969 and he was telling me about, in the early ’70s, how obsessed they were with trying to get actors. It was something that Hubbard realized early on would be a way to bring in people, to get celebrities attached to his organization. Larry told me around that time, Celebrity Centres were very new and these were places the church built specifically to cater to actors and actresses.

He told me about how they’d decided, for whatever reason, they were going to target Richard Kiel, he was the guy who played Jaws in the James Bond movies. And Larry was telling me about strategy meetings where they would talk about how to meet Richard at openings and stuff like that and to slather him with attention. They tried to convince him that Scientology would help him with various ailments he had; he had problems with pain and that kind of thing. So decades ago, Scientology was obsessed with trying to get actors and actresses into the church with varying success.

It’s one thing to think about why does the church want to do this, but it’s another to wonder why actors and actresses fall for this. But what you have to understand is that actors and actresses are among the most fragile human beings on the planet, and it’s not really hard to convince them they’re the center of the universe. So for years and years, Scientology has been attracting these stars into Scientology and pampering them at the Celebrity Centre. One of the questions I’ve always had is, once they attract a celebrity or an actor into Scientology, do the stars then have to go through the same training as everyone else, or do they get special treatment?

That was my next question.
One of the most interesting things that’s happened in recent years is the defection of a man named Jason Beghe. Jason’s an actor. He’s been the lead in a movie [George A. Romero‘s ‘Monkey Shine’], but he’s more well known as a character actor and he’s been in a lot of TV series. He got sucked into Scientology in the mid-90s and over a 12-year period, he spent, in his estimation, over a million dollars on Scientology training. It turns out these stars go through the same training as everyone else. They do the very bizarre rituals. Jason went through it all. It is true that they get pampered more and they don’t have to do some of the low-pay menial labor that some of the other Scientologists do, but they do go through the same training.

There’s another recent defector named Mark Headleywho was working at the Scientology secret headquarters in the desert for years. He tells a story about how Tom Cruise, when he was first learning how to audit — which is sort of a “talking cure” — they used Mark Headley as a test subject for Tom. Mark had revealed this in a book that he wrote that came out about two years ago or a year ago. It was a very good book. But what wasn’t in the book was, ‘Okay, what was this training like?’ I asked him, ‘You’ve got this movie star across from you who is auditing you. How did it actually go?’ There’s these very strange Scientology practices, one of which Tom Cruise was leading him through, was asking him to talk to a bottle and talk to an ashtray and ask the ashtray to stand up. Just ridiculous stuff.

I found it hard to believe. I said, “Mark, are you telling me that Tom Cruise, after he’d made some of his biggest movies, movie star Tom Cruise, was sitting across from you asking you to speak to a bottle?” He said, “Yeah, that’s how Scientology works.” So I don’t know. It’s a mystery. Why do these stars get attracted to this thing? Why would they go through something so bizarre? I think actors and actresses are more fragile than we realize and they fall for this kind of thing.

What kind of stuff would Scientologists tell a movie star to entice them?
We also saw in the case of Paul Haggis [the director of ‘Crash’] who recently came out … Lawrence Wright did an excellent story on him in ‘The New Yorker’ and he asked him, “How far did you get?” And he got to the highest levels. He went through all that bizarre training, which includes as you go up what’s called “the bridge” in Scientology, once you’ve spent a couple hundred thousand dollars, to a level called OT3, which stands for Operating Thetan 3. This is the level I like to ask ex-members about because Scientology considers it this super-secret thing that if anybody was to read it without being properly trained, it might kill them or something ridiculous. The materials are available online. I’ve read them and I think most reporters have.

It’s a very strange story that L. Ron Hubbard tells about this galactic overlord named Xenu who took care of an overpopulation problem by bringing aliens to planet Earth and blowing them up in volcanoes. It’s very strange stuff. I always ask ex-members, “You’ve spent all this money at that point to find out this is the actual origin story of the world according to Scientology. How did you deal with it?” Lawrence Wright asked Paul Haggis this, and Haggis and a lot of people, they’re so far in at this point that nothing surprises them. They just accept it.

So these well-known stars that you know, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Kirstie Alley,are all high-level Scientologists. They have been through that level. They have all been told that Earth, 75 million years ago, was populated by these alien beings sent by the overlord Xenu, who blew them all up and their disembodied souls are inhabiting human bodies. This is the core of what Scientology is. If you have a problem in your life, it’s because these disembodied alien creatures are attaching themselves to you and preventing you from doing better. So Scientology is the one process, they believe, by which you can remove these alien souls. They’re called body thetans and you can audit them away. It’s strange enough that Tom Cruise and John Travolta belong to this strange organization, but it’s even stranger to realize that’s what they believe. These stars go through that same kind of training, accept it and now try to convince the rest of us that it makes sense when actually it doesn’t at all.

How do these stars accept the ominous or even dangerous tone of the church that doesn’t seem to be a secret?
I think it’s true with any true believer, when you believe that your organization has the truth, the only truth that’s going to save the planet, you’re going to forgive that organization a lot of things. I think that’s what’s going on here. These celebrities will hear about poor treatment of ex-members or disconnection and the way families are ripped apart, and the stars just shrug it off because they believe it’s just the stories of ex-members. They just aren’t going to believe it.

Jason [Beghe] has said they were constantly reassured by church officials that this stuff isn’t true, people are making this stuff up. They’re constantly hearing from people in Scientology that people outside Scientology criticizing it are just a bunch of liars. They’re inclined to believe that because they don’t want to believe they belong to a bad organization. Paul Haggis is a great example where he had heard the criticism, didn’t want to believe it but eventually realized the critics were telling the truth.

What kind of rituals would a celebrity have to do to get to the top level?
They do a lot of auditing and what that is is an E-Meter, which back in the day was literally a couple of soup cans attached to a device; now it’s a little bit more sophisticated. As far as I can tell, it measures skin galvanization, and the needle bounces up and down and they believe it reflects something going on in your brain. They sit and talk about what you’ve done in your life that might have caused problems in your life and watch the needle bounce up and down. They have this endless question-and-answer that they call “rundowns.” It gets to the point where they get pretty aggressive with people. They call them “sec checks” or security checks. They want to find out what crimes you’ve committed. It gets really intimidating. They want these people to believe that what’s holding you back in your life are these bad things you’ve done in your life and if you confess it, you’ll free your mind.

Turns out in a higher level you find out there are these alien creatures attached to you, and you have to go into your past lives and find out why they’re attached to you. It’s so bizarre. But it’s just endless security checks and rundowns and auditing. The strange thing is that when Hubbard first proposed this in the ’50s, he was about Dianetics, the science of the human mind; and he believed it was a challenge to psychiatry. That it was a different kind of talking cure. It was only after he realized he was paying a lot of taxes did it become a religion and he applied for tax-exempt status.

I saw a list of celebrity Scientologists and it seemed pretty random. Do all celebrity Scientologists know each other since it’s such a closed-off group?
They all know each other. People that are in know each other well. You have to understand when you look at a list like that, there are people who have done some things with the church but aren’t necessarily practicing Scientologists. Jason Beghe surprised me by saying that many people don’t know this, but Tom Cruise had gotten away from the church for many years and wasn’t really a practicing member. He only came back about four or five years ago.

If you see a list of people who are “Scientologists,” keep in mind they may have been seen at Scientology activities or contributed some money, but that doesn’t mean they’re practicing Scientologists. I would be very careful looking at a list of celebrities that are supposed to be Scientologists because some of them may be very involved. There’s someone like Kirstie Alley who is not only a practicing Scientologist but who has been very vocal in defending the church, and then there’s some who have a casual relationship with it. Maybe they used a Scientology connection to get a role in a movie, but it doesn’t mean they’re active Scientologists.

What kind of career benefits are promised? Does the church say that if you become a Scientologist you’ll be in this little Hollywood club and you’ll get more roles?
There was a particular acting coach in Hollywood,Milton Katselas, that taught a class that had a lot of Scientologists in it and produced a lot of well-known Scientologist stars. It was well known that you should go to the class to get jobs, and actors went there primarily because they wanted to get work in Hollywood. That was a real breeding ground for them. You’re a young actor in Hollywood. Someone says you need to take this class to get a good role and if you do, you will get a good role — and by the way, we’re all Scientologists, so join! So it’s not surprising that a reputation would grow that you need to get into Scientology to get a good role.

I don’t know that that’s the case today. I think it was definitely the case some years ago. There was definitely a feeling in Hollywood that if you joined Scientology, it’d help you get ahead. Scientology counted on that. But I think the last five years have been so hard on Scientology with so much bad publicity that I don’t know if that’s still the case.

So they felt having movie stars would lend them legitimacy and publicity?
It’s always been their strategy. You go way back. Karen Black was a Scientologist in the early ’70s. They counted on that. They were always trying to find stars they could make associated with it. As Larry Wollershein told me, they were trying to recruit stars but even then, in the early ’70s, the word was out that Scientology was weird. It’s difficult to get somebody in, but when they did, it helped them immensely because it made it seem cool. It made it seem like the thing to do. That’s what they count on. If you have someone like Tom Cruise or John Travolta, then young people will think it must be cool. But it’s been very difficult for them the last few years because there’s been so much negative publicity.

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AMERICA’S AFRICA: Hollywood Celebrities Provide “Mood Music” and “Star Appeal” for US “Humanitarian Wars”

By Finian Cunningham

Crosspost with Global Research, April 23, 2012

It’s a sign of the times: Hollywood heart-throbs, pop divas and TV chat show celebrities are turning on the mood music for America’s never-ending global war.

In a world of lawlessness, state terrorism, rank mendacity and war criminals masquerading as government leaders, what better than to engage the glamor of reassuring celebrities to add a certain “star appeal” to otherwise barbaric endeavours?

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey is one of many prominent liberal ignoramuses unwittingly whitewashing imperialist intervention in Africa and elsewhere. Icons of a culture in complete decadent free-fall, they perpetuate the rot they should be combating. —Eds

George Clooney, Rihanna, Oprah Winfrey are just some of the big names lending their faces and voices to a script worthy of Hollywood – only the script is coming out of the Pentagon.

Perhaps unwitting agents, these consumer-culture icons are ironically lending cover and justification to crimes and human suffering that they claim to be opposed to.

Take actor George Clooney. Last month, he caused a media stir when he was arrested for his part in a demonstration outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington protesting against Khartoum’s alleged violations in neighboring South Sudan. The day before his arrest, Clooney had a private meeting with President Barack Obama in the White House to discuss the Sudanese conflict.

Two weeks later, Obama hosts Salva Kiir, the president of South Sudan, the newly formed North African state which broke away from Sudan last July after decades of civil war. Media reports claimed that Obama urged South Sudan to not engage in conflict over border disputes with its northern neighbour.

Another two weeks later, South Sudan’s army dramatically escalates conflict by invading northern Sudan and seizing its vital oil installations in the district of Heglig. The attack triggered much sabre-rattling by Khartoum with President Omar Bashar all but declaring war on South Sudan. Fears of all-out war have subsided in the past few days after South Sudan’s forces withdrew across the border. This may be just the first of many renewed skirmishes to come.

There is no way, as Glen Ford, editor of Black Agenda Report, points out, that South Sudan would have embarked on such reckless aggression without prior tacit approval from Washington.

On that score, the likes of Clooney provide a crucial propaganda function. The genial screen star lends credibility to the long-running Washington narrative that the villain in the Sudanese conflict is the northern state of Omar Bashar. After all, Bashar is wanted as an alleged war criminal by the Western-controlled International Criminal Court. Clooney’s campaigning, no doubt motivated by well-meaning human concern, nevertheless adds a Hollywood dimension to the fraudulent “responsibility to protect” principle that Washington and other Western powers have been deploying as a cover for neo-imperialist intervention.

Meanwhile, pop diva Rihanna and chat show queen Oprah Winfrey have joined other celebrities in giving emotive public support to Washington’s posse of Special Forces sent to hunt down African renegade Joseph Kony. The elusive rebel commander shot to notoriety after the release of a documentary film, Kony 2012, which accuses his Lord’s Resistance Army of kidnapping, raping and murdering thousands of children in the jungles of Africa. The outpouring of public anger engendered by the film, made by a little-known charity group Invisible Children, coincided conveniently with President Obama announcing the dispatch of American Special Forces to go after Kony across four African countries: Uganda, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.

Sceptics have pointed out that the modern-day bounty hunter saga of Kony and the LRA is long out of date. The height of his alleged depredations was 6-10 years ago during the LRA’s guerrilla war against Uganda state forces. In recent years, the LRA has faded into relative obscurity. To suggest that Kony and his rabble of a few hundred fighters present a threat to African state security or American vital interests is risible.

Hysteria also conceals, conveniently, important historical facts about the causes of conflict in all of these African countries. Conveniently, because Washington’s proxy war-making is a major cause of ongoing conflicts, and yet Washington is posturing, thanks in part to homey celebrities, as a savior of the suffering.

Far more culpable of crimes against humanity than Joseph Kony is Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. For more than 25 years, Ugandan forces under Museveni have been waging scorched-earth campaigns of genocide against his own people to displace them from mineral-rich northern territories. The death toll runs into millions. Down through the genocidal years, Museveni has been backed by successive White House administrations. The notion that Obama has just sent Special Forces to Africa belies the fact that American covert operations have been active in Africa for decades.

In 1996, US Special Forces backed Uganda’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo unleashing a covert war that continues to haunt large swathes of Central and East Africa, with a death toll that again runs into millions.

Another advantage of the US-backed plundering by Museveni in northern Uganda was the provision of a conduit for arms and supplies to the separatists in southern Sudan in their decades-long civil war with Khartoum, which resulted in over two million dead. Humanitarian crises in Sudan from famine and war are therefore a legacy of Western intervention. Yet celebrities like George Clooney are calling for more of this kind of intervention in the guise of “humanitarianism”.

Oil-rich and strategically located, Sudan has been a long-held prize for Washington and other Western powers. When Sudan fragmented along a North-South divide last year, it can be seen as a success of Washington’s proxy war-making and a mere staging post on the way to eventual control over the entire territory. Recall that Sudan was one of the seven countries – along with Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Iran – disclosed by former US General Wesley Clark as part of a 2001 Pentagon plan for hegemony in the world’s oil-rich regions. The re-ignition of Sudanese conflict this month is consistent with a continuation of Western policy of regime change towards Sudan, north and south.

Sudan is one of the main oil producers in Africa. But in recent years, Khartoum’s antagonism with the West meant that China became the dominant partner in Sudan’s oil industry, building refineries and pipelines. Over two-thirds of Sudan’s oil exports were shipped to China in 2010.

US regime change in Sudan would kill two birds with the one stone: gaining control of Sudanese oil and dislodging global competitor China from an important foothold on the African continent.

Uganda is set to become a new African oil giant, with the recent discovery of more fields on its eastern border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. The DRC is known to have vast deposits of metals and minerals.

Untold rich natural resources across the continent of Africa are the real reasons for Washington’s proxy wars that have been responsible for massive misery and poverty and ongoing conflicts that threaten to explode again into all-out wars.

Covering the ugly truth of America’s destruction in Africa are brainless, fact-less, hysterical “documentaries” about African bogeymen and humanitarian crises. Celebrity angst and voice-overs add star quality to the deception and set the scene for the yet more “humanitarian intervention”.

One thing these American celebrities need to get straight in their heads is the fact that their government is on a murderous rampage across the globe from Africa to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and beyond. Syria and Iran show the bloodlust is far from over. The psychopathic mass murders by individuals like Sgt Robert Bales are just the shadows of the criminal wars of American government.

Pleading with this same government to take up humanitarian causes in Africa is like expecting a psychopath to deliver medicine down the barrel of a gun.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Finian Cunningham is Global Research’s Middle East and East Africa Correspondent. cunninghamfinian@gmail.com

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