Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Eve Online - An Update

OK, my first piece of coursework for the masters course I've started is due in on Friday, and I also have a product releasing to user acceptance testing the same day, so I've been a bit busy.  But here is an update.  I'll do the linking-to-my-sources bit when I get a chance.

Basically, CCP have been denying everything.  Even the bits they concede are true (everything bar the CCP Sharkbait claims), they deny.  The events are rigged, but hey, they're not rigged.  The devs are Best Friends Forever with BoB members and give them advanced notice of upcoming game features, but Iceland is a lonely rock where it's usually dark, and Devs need friends too!

The denials are one thing, but another is that they have threatened to sue any players who continue to claim that they are cheating.  This, of course, is a prime example of a SLAPP: a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.  This is where a company threatens an individual with legal action in order to silence that individual, relying on their greater resources to bluff the individual into backing down, despite the lack of legal merits of the case.

Goonfleet is full of lawyers.  However, CCP's tactic has apparently worked: our leader has quit and cancelled his accounts in disgust.  The new leadership has taken a more passive-aggressive line, as can be seen in this reply to CCP.  The letter is still damning of CCP's attitudes, but has retreated to more defensible lines and adopted a more conciliatory voice.  The hope is that we can force CCP to act professionally and remove its links to BoB members: the biggest complaint and the one most convincingly proven of the three.

Anyway, there has been a thread on F13 for months updating people on CCP's constant scandals and cheating.  That says something in itself!  But one new poster there recently tried to explain, in sociological and cultural terms, why many of us get so upset while CCP refuse to even accept that a problem exists, or to deal firmly with those of their employees (like T20), who are unequivocally proven to cheat and to favour their friends in BoB:

Keep in mind what Iceland is. It's an expanding rock with a lot of fish around it and one big city.  Ninety-six percent of its inhabitants belong to a single religious denomination. (Evangelical Lutheran, fyi!) When you live in this kind of hardtack land, you get an ingrained sense of cultural interdependence. There's so little habitable land in Iceland that if you have a disagreement, or break some rules, or whatever, you can't just up and move away. You can't be a singular unit - you have to interact with others, make deals with them, smooth things over, just make things work. You don't burn any bridges because odds are you're going to have to cross that bridge again.

In [North America], we can write off people no problem. You're in Cali and going to lose your house because you got fired? Move to Nevada and restart your life as a fry cook. In Iceland it's not so easy. The community is so intermingled and isolated that firing/blackballing/shaming someone not only creates much more relative trauma in their life, but creates more backlash on you. So the natural response when these kind of bad things surface is to look at the elements of good and worth - instead of the singular black marks that get you termed in the U.S. - and fix the environment, not the person. CCP, as a company, seems to follow my hypothesis pretty well.

Members of BoB, as stated earlier, have been very helpful to CCP in some endeavours and no doubt CCP appreciates this and communicates with those people in what we in NA consider wholly inappropriate because they're in the same boat - pulling the same rope - etc. In a sense, they're much more part of the team than the pole's length that NA companies expect between customer and vendor. As far as what NA customers expect, it's wholly incestuous. This isn't bad or wrong, but it IS different. When Goonfleet comes in, offering nothing of value and tearing down people that have been part of the team socially, verbally, in-game, etc., CCP's individuals tolerate them only as much as they have to. CCP's response clearly shows they could absolutely care less if every GF desubbed right now. Assuming my hypotheses are correct, not knowing this leads to some pretty ugly stuff, as we've seen.

EVE is a microcosm of Iceland itself, even. It was designed to force interdependence, in fact, it's by far the most interdependent game world in existence right now. To CCP, the notion of Pax BoB probably isn't as abhorrent as it is to NA customers, and thus they feel comfortable sending the only other major force in EVE up the river.

And again, please note that I don't think of this as bad or wrong; it's just a different way of doing things than what NA customers expect. But since CCP relies on NA customers, they're either going to have to trim their playerbase down to people who are OK with this way of thinking or become, well, Blizzard. No pun intended.

There is, necessarily, a degree of simplification there, but I find it to be a good description of at least a factor in the equation.  Another factor, of course, is "small company owned largely by their staff who are hard to fire for cheating".

CCP "Denial": Yes We Do It But Only Because We Want To

In yet another extraordinary piece of foot-in-mouth community management, CCP's community manager denies that the company fix the results of role-playing events by, uhm, admitting that they fix role-playing events.  I've reposted it here as it's not very easy to find, and I don't think it is even available to non-subscribers to view.  The thread, however, is here:

Following up with the results of our investigations as they come available, we would like to present the following in regards to the allegations of rigged events.

This was investigated previously, the results of which were posted here. Nothing new has been presented that merits re-opening the investigation into the events following the actions taken against the player/volunteer who violated a Non-Disclosure Agreement in regards to the Cult of Tetrimon event arc.

Concerning the allegation of event rigging in particular, the document referenced in the 'Open Letter' is not a finalized script of events, but a proposal and living document based on player interaction with the event arc. The paragraph he refers to states:

“As said earlier, we can have the ending open if allowed by you or we can stack the cards in favor of Theology Council so that we after the arc go back to a T2 status quo for the Empire, but without any Tetrimon Cult (who will be forever branded traitors of the Empire and utterly wiped out).”

In short, it simply gives CCP the option of deciding which direction to move EVE’s Prime Fiction at the end of the arc or to allow unfolding events to determine what is to follow. The claims of CCP rigging events to benefit a player, corporation or alliance are groundless.

kieron
Community Manager,

In other words, Kieron says that the claims of rigging are "groundless", while admitting that the events are rigged, apparently to give CCP "the option of deciding which direction to move EVE’s Prime Fiction".  Extraordinarily incompetent spin: I wonder if he even reads what he says.  Or perhaps the dissimulation, while poorly done, is intentional: forced to admit to rigging events, Kieron weasels his way out by claiming that these are not done to "benefit a player, corporation or alliance".  Presumably, when an alliance now known to be closely tied to the developers, and in regular, back-channel contact with them, received a mothership in such an event, turning out to be in just the right place at just the right time, this did not, in fact, benefit them?

I don't really go in for the whole Eve-Online roleplaying thing myself: I like the pew-pew and don't much want to challenge people to prithee mount their space-steeds and verily to do space-battle with the wicked dark space-knights or whatever.  But CCP's events team have long been notorious as the most corrupt in a corrupt organisation: even their fiercer defenders on the Bob side of this argument, like MahrinSkrel on F13, admit that this is the case, with massive prizes awarded without competition to developers' friends (a mothership was then the biggest and most expensive object in the game).  I had hoped that they would sieze the chance to make a clean sweep now, and to show good faith at the least in an attempt to turn their practises around.  It appears that this is not to be.

CCP Sharkbait - A True Professional

As the row over CCP's alleged corruption rumbles on, let's take a minute to look at the work of CCP Sharkbait, the man at the centre of one of the three controversies.  What better way to do so than to follow him on his rounds, dealing with his customers with charm and a comforting word?

Here we see him at work, speaking in local in a system with several hundred players.

Here he is again, on the job and fixing a broken system.  Raph Koster take note!  This is community management as it should be done.

Clearly a man of great professionalism.  Not at all the sort of person to abuse his position.

In any case, CCP has at least partially folded on this one, and has agreed to notify the CEO before any staff member enters his corporation, and to give reasons as to why it is being done.  They still are unable to explain why this occurred, given that no corporation member had submitted a petition regarding player-owned structures since February at the latest, and why the petition from the CEO complaining about this illicit entry was deleted.

PS - Some of the Goonfleet players are having fun posting outside the official CCP-Is-Corrupt thread, using what the Jacobites called "artful devices" to express themselves.  Acrostic support-call poetry is proving a particularly popular pastime.  Here is a fine example of the genre.  There are plenty of these right now.

Edit - Picture links updated since the originals were removed.  Thanks to Brad for the spot!

Eve Misconduct - CCP Story Rather Leaky

The initial, official CCP response to the allegations regarding CCP Sharkbait and his surreptitious assumption of the role of director in a Goonswarm corporation is that he was investigating a bugged Player Owned Structure (POS) at the request of the owner corporation itself, Darkstar1.

That would seem like him off the hook.

Except that the CEO of Darkstar1 sheds some light on this:

"Statement on dev misconduct:

for the record, Darkstar1 has 3 pos in game only, both are and have always worked fine and have never been petitioned by anyone in the corp for not working, the statement given by CCP is incorrect and simply not true,

LUCASWV, - CEO of Darkstar1"

Allowing for the fact that he doesn't know enough English to know that "both" and "all" are not synonymous (we have a lot of foreigners in Something Awful, and so in Goonfleet and our allied corporations), this is a pretty damning statement.  Especially viewed in conjunction with his reports of the immediate deletion of his petition, and the refusal to escalate it to managerial level.

If nothing else, CCP sure are dumb.

Eve Online Scandals - Some More Evidence

Well, at least one of the three alleged scandals turns out not to be alleged at all.  Dianabolic has never been the smartest tool in the shed, and faced with allegations that BoB players are able to call directly on CCP developers and complain to them or have in-game features changed, Dianabolic's repsonse is "well, obviously!"

Here are some pictures of his postings, capturing this for those of you understandably unable to bring themselves to enter the Eve-Online forums.  If your monitor can't display them in a high-enough res on this page, right-click and use "open in new window" from your context window.  apologies for what it does to my right navbar, but I don't have time to change my css settings for megapictures right now!



I think someone needs to learn when to stop talking and shut up rather than boasting about how close you are to the developers.  If CCP are wise they'll say "we've tried keeping responsible links, it doesn't work.  All contact must now be official and logged."

In another development, corroborating evidence has emerged of the scandalous removal and blacklisting of Raekhan, the ISD reporter who BoB demanded be removed using the links Dianabolic admits to having, above:

Admiral_Chamrajnagar: ok anyone know an ISD named rekan?
Macayle: why?
[IC]Raekhan: I'm right here.
Admiral_Chamrajnagar: you need to leave that system
Admiral_Chamrajnagar: you are making an ass of yourself
Admiral_Chamrajnagar: and of ccp
[IC]Raekhan: ?
Admiral_Chamrajnagar: enticing the player base is not actions that you want to do
[IC]Raekhan: What..are...you....
[IC]Raekhan: ?
Cortes feels a facepalm coming on
[EA]Aristaqis: enticing? Was he putting on a strip show or something? [IC]Tsuki facepalms
Admiral_Chamrajnagar: the local player base asked him to politly stop pushing dreads
Admiral_Chamrajnagar: that were undergoing a siege operation
[IC]Raekhan: I was not pushing a dread.
[IC]Raekhan: I'm 70KM away.
Admiral_Chamrajnagar: it does not matter.. posting in local "no"
Admiral_Chamrajnagar: and that "your not going away"
Admiral_Chamrajnagar: and that all you hear is "static"
Admiral_Chamrajnagar: and to complain to eris discordia
Admiral_Chamrajnagar: is not helpfull at all
Cortes: which wouldn't do much good given I'm the IC VA

To make this clear, the "Admiral" is an Eve database admin who has just received an MSN messenger IM from Orange Species, a member of BoB, demanding that Raekhan be removed.  I imagine that database admins are not usually supposed to involve themselves in community discipline, as well as the management of Eve CCP's voluntary employees in the ISD division. To recap, Raekhan's boss immediately reported this action to Internal affairs, who discovered that the Admiral character was a CCP employee then promptly fired Raekhan, as well as removing all his associated rights and player account, and have refused to answer any queries or petitions regarding what happened.

And to prove who Admiral Chamrajnagar is?  Here is another screenshot, which I'll only link to in order to save on leeching the bandwidth of the poster:

http://freenet-homepage.de/winchip2/2007.02.16.18.19.49.PNG

What you see there is the same Eve developer, Chamrajnagar, coincidentally in-system when BoB destroyed a logged-out D2 titan worth over a thousand dollars, congratulating them on what they had done.  His comments are in blue on the left, his profile is centre-page, showing that he is a database admin.

Eve-Online Dramabombs

The initial response by CCP to the allegations of widespread corruption of the last 24 hours has been interesting.

Clearly, they have learned from the mistake made in handling previous dramabombs.  This time, after taking down the forums, they posted this news item, acknowledging that the accusations have been made.  That's a good thing, and suggests a degree of transparency.  That the person who posted it is CCP Arkanon, head of CCP's Internal Affairs team, set up after the T20 dev-cheating scandal (when a CCP developer caught cheating was essentially excused for his actions, despite their immense potential effect on the gameworld).

On the downside, only one of the three allegations is mentioned in that item, and there seems to be a degree of prejudice here, in that before the Internal affairs department - themselves implicated in the scandal regarding improper BoB-ISD contact - has investigated the suggestion is made that the developer involved was probably just doing his job.  I, too, were I in his position, would find some sort of semi-believable reason to act before making such an outrageous move.

While CCP Sharkbait and the potentially illicit corporate transactions he carried out (and about which all petitions were locked and deleted, and any attempt to escalate refused - so "just doing his job" sounds fishy at best) might well be the most vital in terms of immediate effect, it is the fixing of events, and the ability of BoB members to have ISD employees threatened and, ultimately, fired that I find most unpleasant.  It, yet again, points to a culture of involvement between certain players and CCP as an organisation that is at best hugely unprofessional, and at worst downright corrupt.

One neutral (non-Goonfleet) poster said it best last night in a now-locked thread: if CCP just admitted up-front that this is their sandbox, which they run largely for their own benefit, and that the choices were reduced to "Eve - love it or leave it" then such frankness would, at least, not leave such an unpleasant stench of petty, grubby corruption in the nostrils.

If anyone feels that they are of strong-enough character to descend into the nine levels of hell which are the Eve-O forums, then a discussion thread has been allowed by CCP: another wise move, and another lesson learned from the T20 scandal.  If nothing else, it leaves their board moderators only one place to look.

PS - Rather disappointingly, I seem not to have got myself a ban.  Some on the Goonfleet forums are proudly flaunting their pariah status.  How I envy them.

Eve Online Developer Cheating Again

I'm off to get myself banned from the Eve-Online forums...

That might seem an unusual thing to do.  Eve-Online being a lol-internet-spaceships game that I've played for a year or so, and their forums being a dreary, childish message-board that I habitually avoid.  But new evidence has come to light that certain of the game developers are flagrantly cheating, and I am rather keen to get myself banned.

CCP devs have cheated before: One of them, T20, was involved in a rather squalid little scandal where he gave himself rare and expensive items (blueprints) that allowed him to make money at will.  He also turned out to have been head of the capital fleet of the alliance band of Brothers, and to have been feeding them information on upcoming developments in the game.  On another occasion, roleplaying events in the game were rigged to grant extremely valuable items to BoB members, and to prevent those items falling into the hands of their enemies.

 It transpires that several new instances of cheating have occurred recently.  one is yet further cheating and favouritism in the RP events.

A second is that a director of Goonfleet (Bob enemies) member corporation Dark Star noticed an email saying that "CCP Sharkbait has left the company".  That a dev (indicated by the prefix CCP) had ever joined his coporation was news to him, so he checked the logs.  It transpires that CCP Sharkbait joined the company at 1:27, made himself director, then left 14 minutes later.  Presumably having looked at the location of their secret capital ship yards and other such assets.  This is big, big stuff.  I can only assume that his ***-up in missing the logs means that he'll be fired.  If he isn't then CCP has big problems.

Finally, this.  I'll post the transcript of the person who reported it, an in-game reporter with roles in a semi-official organisation run by CCP:

I was floating around in my Polaris frig, watching one of the massive, 270+-in-local battles in the south, BOB vs COALTION, BoB had already destroyed thier second POS in the system....when I 'text-jumped' (using admin "tr/ 'playername' jumpto command) to a certain Dread pilot I knew was in the action. Doing so teleports a polaris frig to that players ship...at 1 FOOT distance. I jumped to this position and immediately orbitted the gaggle of 20 dreads at 80KM, standard operating proceedure for ISD reporters....

A minute later, Daakon, of BoB, began yelling in local "Hey, Reporter, you bumped our dread!!!" This was a falsehood, since the dread I jumped to was on the outside of the group and I made sure not to do just that.

I ignored him. A year and a half of Reportering and you get used to ALL BoB members trying to order/bully you around. It is a common practice (WAY TOO GODDAMN COMMON) that ISD members are ordered to completely ignore.

Eventually, Mr. Daakon began giving me DIRECT ORDERS. "You must leave the system. Now. Move, you ***!!"

My response?
"Um...no?"

Their response was pretty indicative of the manner in which BoB is used to ordering CCP personnel around...in LOCAL CHANNEL of 250+, Daakon replied:

"Well, I guess I'll have to call up my friends in CCP and get you dealt with."

I was sitting in ISD's IRC channel, as is required anytime you are logged in as an ISD char, and I decided to inform my dept. head of this development. He seemed amused....

Until 40 seconds later....

ISD IRC acounts have a lot of symbols in their usernames. They signify time-in-service, department membership, and other things, but after 40 seconds, a BRAND NEW userID appeared, bereft of any such demarcations or designations...an illegal and brand new ID...

"Hey, anyone know some reporter named Raekhan!?"
Me:"Um, yeah, that's me."
"LEAVE THAT SYSTEM NOW, YOU ARE EMBARRASSING THE ISD AND CCP THE COMPANY!!"
Me: ORLY!?
My ISD BOSS: 'ORLY!'

the next minutes were interesting, as my ISD-IC dept head began briefing me on the minbute-by-minute actions of the internal affairs team (formed after your T-20 revelation I should point out) LEAPED on this matter in seconds.

Me: "So I guess a BoB director claiming he has CCP buddies at his beckon call, and the fact that said buddy showed up 40 sec later, will raise some heads at CCP?"
Boss: "Oh, I think it already has...."
Me: "Well, at least something good will come from all this mess..."
Boss: "We have his IP address."
Boss: "He's posting from CCP, he's Staff."
Boss: He's in the QA department...."
*after long pause*
Boss: Well, I'll tell you how this goes tomorrow, take care, Rae..."

I signed off.

Turns out, within 3 hours, every ISD-related account I had was banned.

ISD-ingame char, banned.
Forum-ISD, banned.
EVE-Online.com Admin access, banned.
AURORA-TEAMSPEAK, banned.
The freaking ISD-COUNTERSTRIKE server, banned.

In other words, a player who was a BoB member threatened a member of a CCP-sponsored organisation that he would have a dev deal with him if he didn't obey him.  Within a short time, that BoB member had pulled sufficient strings to have a developer at CCP make up a new username for anonymity, warn him off, then have him fired and have his rights revoked.  Nasty stuff, and deeply corrupt.

So our glorious fuhrer, the Mitanni, has ordered us to prepare to unleash the threadnaught.  Several percent of the entire userbase of Eve-Online is made up of Goonfleet members.  If CCP won't show willing to investiagte these issues, then we will post publicly about them.  When that is locked and hidden, we will all post.  Thousands of us.  We've done it once before and they buckled, accepting that they had corruption present and setting up an internal-affairs team.  Let's see what happens this time.

Edit:  We took their forums down.  Or, more likely, they took them down themselves, with thousands of posts detailing their malfeasance and linking to our open letter.  They were providing the very stocks in which they were being pilloried.

Next stage will probably be spreading the word to media outlets, as well as slashdot, Penny Arcade, digg et al.  There are over ninety-thousand paid-up goons, with a lot of contacts.

I am intrigued as to whether they got round to banning me.

Edit Again: if you're coming to this post directly, then I've put a lot more evidence on the main page.

Edit Yet Again!:

Hi, Raphael Scoria
You are receiving this notice in regard to the Forum warnings you have received. Your posting privileges have now been suspended for 24 hours. This temporary ban will be lifted in 24 hours from now.

Huzzah.  I can hold my head up in SpaceGBS after all.

All Hail Xenu!

BBC reporter John Sweeney has, for some time, been filming an investigative piece on famed sci-fi role-players Scientology, a group of dedicated hobbyists who pretend to live inside the fictional creations of child-kidnapping yachting enthusiast L.Ron "I'm going to invent a religion that's going to make me a fortune" Hubbard.

The piece will be shown this week on Panorama, and will doubtless be available for download from both the BBC site and youtube soon thereafter for those of you unlucky enough to live in heathen climes. That programme will no doubt show the usual, pretty hideous aspects of Scientology: families "disconnected" (Scientology members told by their organisation that they are not allowed ever to see their concerned relatives again); security guards, suborned police officers, undercover investigators and aggressively lunatic officials all sent to harass those who criticise them.  Here, for instance, is another reporter who took an interest in Scientology.  Note the police officer breaking the law, the provocation and aggressive crowding and intimidation from followers and so on.  The reporter is accused of being a wife-beater, a child-molester and more by some fairly vicious scientologists: "we're so much bigger than you, Mark...".

That reporter dealt with it well.  Sweeney, on the other hand, actually snapped at one point: within hours the Scientologists had disseminated the video of the event.  Frankly, I'm just glad to see he cares that much about his subject.  I'd have done that far sooner, myself, rather than after months of provocation.  Sweeney himself discusses the incident on the BBC's own site. He has said that "while making our BBC Panorama film "Scientology and Me" I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a "bigot" by star Scientologists, brain-washed - that is how it felt to me - in a mock up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers."

Scientologists in Clearwater were and are particularly aggressive, and have gone a long way towards infiltrating the local police department and local governmental departments..  At the moment there is a copy of fairly good piece on it on youtube, complete with court testimony, although I imagine they'll push to get it removed, so if the link is down, search youtube for "Clearwater Police Scientologist".  Some of the footage is deeply disturbing (like at 7:34, for instance).  More disturbing yet is the fact that the man who runs the organisation that made that film, Bob Minton, spent about ten million dollars down through the years fighting against Scientology.  Then, one day, during a court trial about the death of a young Scientologist under the care of the Scientology organisation, he called the lawyer in that case, saying "Ken, you have to help me, they've got me this time. If you don't drop the case Monday morning, the blood and death of my daughters, my wife and myself will be on your hands."^***

Scientology is a massive pyramid sales scam: members pay huge amounts of money - literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases - for access to a mixture of "treatment" (being hooked up to a machine that does nothing* and asked standard psych 101 questions, and oooh, do they hate the real psychiatrists!) and fairy stories.  Let's have a look at a story that, were you a Scientologist, you would pay a great deal of money to discover:

"one of these slaves suddenly got the big idea of mass" and Arslycus "broke to pieces and scattered around in that particular part of the sky as being of too great a mass to sustain itself". This was, apparently, "about the point where you got the law of gravity coming in strongly. And after that the law of gravity began to affect itself on the universe more and more and more and more and you started to get all kinds of suns and planets and the most fantastic array of things." (Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures, L.Ron Hubbard)

Hubbard was a huge drug user and addict himself, and that influence on his loony followers really shows through in works like "Have You Lived Before This Life?", which is a collection of past-life experiences as recounted, presumably with a straight face, by Scientologists in "auditing".  These experiences included:

• A past life as a robot working in a factory in space, which had gold animals hanging around it which "appeared solid but periodically imploded or exploded". It ground up discs to make small animals, which were then "inflated after blowing up through a totem and a cat devil" before being sent to other planets. A planet blew up, and the robot was blamed. He was drugged and forced to work the grinder.
• A past life "55,000,000,000,000,000,000 years ago" in which the being had to do outside repairs on a space ship. He suffered radiation burns and fell off, plunging into an ocean on the planet below. A manta ray killed him and he in turn inhabited the manta ray.
• A past life as a trouble-making free being on Mars "469,476,600 years ago". He tried to inhabit a "doll body", but he was captured and beaten up. The being was zapped with a ray gun by a Martian bishop in front of a congregation chanting "God is Love", before being run over by a large car and a steamroller. He was then frozen in an ice cube and dropped on Planet ZX 432, where he took another robot body and zapped and killed another robot. He took off in a flying saucer and died when it exploded.
• A past life in which a being went to a planet where the forces of good were fighting evil black magic forces. After 74,000 years of battle, implants and hallucinations, he lost the fight, and joined the black magic side. He went to another planet on a space ship, where he was "deceived into a love affair with a robot decked out as a beautiful red-haired girl."
• Being transformed into an intergalactic walrus which perished after falling out of a flying saucer.
• Being "a very happy being who ... strayed to the planet Nostra" 23,064,000,000 years ago.**

An intergalactic walrus.  Classic.  I'd say that you just can't make this stuff up.  But you can, if your name is Hubbard.

Here is what Hubbard said about facing up to investigation into Scientology:

(1) Spot who is attacking us.
(2) Start investigating them promptly for felonies or worse using own professionals, not outside agencies.
(3) Double curve our reply by saying we welcome an investigation of them.
(4) Start feeding lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press.

Don't ever tamely submit to an investigation of us. Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way. You can get "reasonable about it" and lose. Sure we break no laws. Sure we have nothing to hide. BUT attackers are simply an anti-Scientology propaganda agency so far as we are concerned. They have proven they want no facts and will only lie no matter what they discover. So BANISH all ideas that any fair hearing is intended and start our attack with their first breath. Never wait. Never talk about us - only them. Use their blood, sex, crime to get headlines. Don't use us. I speak from 15 years of experience in this. There has never yet been an attacker who was not reeking with crime. All we had to do was look for it and murder would come out. -- Attacks on Scientology, "Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter,"

Have a look at some of the more revolting elements of Scientology here on Wikipedia.

Hubbard is best summed up by Mr Justice Latey, a judge in the English High Court:

"... he has made these, among other false claims:
That he was a much decorated war hero. He was not.
That he commanded a corvette squadron. He did not.
That he was awarded the Purple Heart, a gallantry decoration for those wounded in action. He was not wounded and was not decorated.
That he was crippled and blinded in the war and cured himself with Dianetic technique. He was not crippled and was not blinded.
That he was sent by U.S. Naval Intelligence to break up a black magic ring in California. He was not. He was himself a member of that occult group and practiced ritual sexual magic in it.
That he was a graduate of George Washington University and an atomic physicist. The facts are that he completed only one year of college and failed the one course on nuclear physics in which he enrolled.
There is no dispute about any of this. The evidence is unchallenged"

Of course, it's not really funny.  People actually buy this stuff.  Apparently naughty Xenu collected 178 billion excess-to-requirements people up, froze them, flew them through space to Earth in exact replicas of DC-8 airliners with the engines taken off, packed them around volcanos and blew them up using nuclear weapons around 75,000,000 million years ago.  That, in 1997, would have cost you $17,500 to discover.  Leaving aside this tale's obvious nature as a dangerously seductive philosophy, we are left wondering why our Xenu didn't get a few hundred miles out of his atmosphere, strike his head with his hand, say "duh, how stupid am I?  Just jettison them here in space and save ourselves a journey of hundred of light-years!" and head back for tea and Thetans.  Come to that, just why the volcanoes were not, themselves sufficient to the task is not satisfactorily explained.

I'm off to watch a pirated version of Battlefield Earth.

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*"...the E-Meter has no proven usefulness in the diagnosis, treatment or prevention of any disease, nor is it medically or scientifically capable of improving any bodily function." - 1971 ruling of the United States District Court, District of Columbia (333 F. Supp. 357)

** Hubbard, L. Ron [1950] (October 1977). Have You Lived Before This Life?, 1977 edition, Los Angeles, California: Church of Scientology of California Publications Organization.

*** O'Neil, Deborah. "How Scientology turned its biggest critic", St. Petersburg Times, 2002-07-07