Tetherd Cow Ahead

I keep promising to turn the scathing bovine eye of The Cow onto Scientology at some point but whenever attempt to pick up my quill on that particular subject my brain just turns to custard. It should be just like shooting fish in a barrel, but heck, it’s such a small barrel and there are so many big fish and if I wanted to do something futile and time-wasting I could just go play another level of BioShock and have a LOT more fun …

Anyways, Atlas Cerise brings my attention to this story in the Guardian about some recent antics involving the Church* of Scientology. To synopsize: a young man picketing the CoS headquarters in London as part of a peaceful demonstration by the anti-Scientology group Anonymous was arrested and is facing prosecution for calling Scientology a ‘cult’.

Let me make it quite clear what’s happening here, because it’s way more scary than the usual dumbo stuff that the Scientologists themselves manage to concoct: the CoS itself is not bringing this accusation against the teenager responsible; it’s the City of London Police who have charged the boy. He was told by an officer that the word ‘cult’ was ‘abusive and insulting’ and that he could not carry a placard which read ‘Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.’

This is how the Ask Oxford online dictionary defines the word ‘cult’:

cult • noun 1 a system of religious worship directed towards a particular figure or object. 2 a small religious group regarded as strange or as imposing excessive control over members. 3 something popular or fashionable among a particular section of society.

Hands up who thinks the Bill are going to pull this one off?

What’s deeply worrying is that the best proper accusation that the UK Law can bring against this boy would appear to be that he was airing an opinion. If that kind of thing is encouraged, then Scientologists and all the other loonies like them will get a free ticket to legitimacy.

If you’re not scared about that, you should be.

UPDATE: Well, I don’t know why it surprises me to find out† that, in fact, it seems that the CoS was involved in the above incident. Not directly, but certainly implicitly. It turns out that for some time now the City of London Police have been, shall we say, receptive to offers of entertainment and donations from L. Ron’s flock. It appears that the laws under which the young man I mentioned above were detained are almost never actually acted upon, except, perhaps when you have friends in the right places.

Let there be no mistake: Dotty belief combined with money & influence always equals setbacks for the human species. Just look at the havoc the Catholic Church has managed in its time.

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*Even though I am in no way religiously inclined, something really grates on me having to refer to these loons as a ‘church’. They are no more a church than the entire fandom of Dungeons & Dragons is a church, only a lot less rooted in reality.

†Thanks to the Skeptical Rogues.

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My dear Acowlytes! I apologize for my somewhat lengthy absence of late. My excuse, I think, is a pretty good one – Violet Towne and I were married in a simple and, I like to think, moving ceremony a few weekends back. There was much carousing with friends and family and I believe that a good time was had by all (certainly from my perspective anyway). Since then there has been a bit of holidaying and not a lot of sitting at computers, and hence an almost complete lack of Cow.

Not that The Cow was ever far from my thoughts as we trekked around the southern coast of Victoria on our honeymoon. Simple Graphics Man was up to his old tricks at many of our stops, and there were some great photo opportunities which I’ll share with you in due course.

And there was Scientology. Yes, no matter where you go, the lunatics will find some way to reach into your life. I’ve been meaning to do a Scientology piece for a little while now, and whilst this will not be it, I must share with you my thoughts on the recent Tom Cruise embarrassment that managed to filter into my attention as I was waiting in the queue in a great little fish & chip shop in the coastal town of Apollo Bay.

If you didn’t manage to catch it, seriously, go take a look. The Tomster could have done no worse if he’d put on a clown suit and declared himself the reincarnation of Bozo.

It wasn’t till I arrived home and scrutinized the video on YouTube that I realised how much in the error of my ways I was. I think that I have been mistaken all this time… Tom Cruise, and Scientology itself, are actually in the service of The Cow! Scoff not, faithful Cowpokes! I didn’t spot it immediately either…

OMG!!! I immediately searched for other clues that Tom and his Thetan-zapping buddies might be doing the Work of the Church of the Tetherd Cow. Well, for a start, there is the excellent science-fiction art-direction…

…persuasive evidence in itself. But if there was truly any Cow agenda operating well it might manifest itself in, oh, a wedding ceremony, say. Is there, maybe, a Scientology Wedding ceremony?

Aha! There is! Scrolling down through the incomprehensible juvenile drivel lengthy ritual that Katie and Tom presumably endured when they got hitched, we uncover the following poignant observation:

Now, (groom’s name),
girls need clothes
And food and
Tender happiness and frills
A pan, a comb,
perhaps a cat
All caprice if you will
But still
They need them.
Do you then
Provide?
Do you?†

“Perhaps a cat”!!!!!???? Scientology requires the Groom to provide a cat? Whoa! Need I draw anyone a picture?! Violet Towne is such a lucky girl.

Tom Cruise, for actions undercover in the service of The Cow, we salute you!

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*“These are the times, now people. These are the times we will all remember.” You betcha Tom. We’ll all remember.

†I kid you not. This is really in the Scientology Wedding Ceremony.

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Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

I’ve just encountered ‘the world’s first interactive natural spring water – H²Om Water with Intention‘ Yes, you heard right: H²Om, as in Ommmmmmmm…

You can visit the website if you’ve got the stomach, but I’ll save you the pain: these people are selling bottled water that has been infused with nothing other than (supposedly) positive energy. From their blurb:

H²Om water with intention has revolutionized the bottled water industry by creating the world’s first vibrationally charged, interactive bottled water.

Got that? The water is vibrationally charged. And, to reiterate, it’s also interactive. If your Bullshit Detector Meters haven’t pinned yet, allow me to elaborate: the concept behind this water appears to be that those who drink it think about positive things while they are doing so, and then this somehow makes the water better. It’s not explained exactly how this works, nor in exactly what way the water is better. It’s just better.

The H²Om people have trademarked the slogan Think It While You Drink It™ a catchphrase that simultaneously illuminates the stupidity of the Trademarking system and the brainlessness of anyone who believes that a witless motto such as this actually means anything.

H²Om’s Vibration Hydrationâ„¢ (Oh Spare Me!â„¢) comes in seven great vibrational ‘flavours’: Love, Perfect Health, Gratitude, Prosperity, Will Power, Joy and Peace (I swear I’m not making this up).

Now I want to emphasize here, in case you didn’t get it, that these ‘flavours’ aren’t actually anything, like, flavoursome. If you buy a bottle of, say, ‘Joy’, it’s going to taste exactly the same as ‘Prosperity’- it’s only the vibrations that will be different (shit, I’m laughing as I type this – it’s so much like a parody I can’t actually believe that these people are serious).

Best of all, if this water doesn’t unequivocally bring you Peace/Joy/Love/Pretzels, H²Om have the ultimate escape clause: the water is interactive you loser – if it’s not working it’s your fault!

Still not with me? Still giving them the benefit of the doubt? Not laughing as much as me yet? Then read on:

As an added bonus, once our water is in the bottle, we play a restorative compositions of music, frequencies, and spoken word to the water.

Spoken word? Wha?

Nice water. Nice joyful pretty water. I love you water. You are the best water in the universe. Pretty pretty water. Lovely watery joyful prosperous water.

Seriously. It’s going to be something just like that, right?

Yup. If there’s one thing this website doesn’t lack it’s pages of incomprehensible waffle:

There are several distinctive vibrational frequencies that are infused in each bottle of H2Om. The First is the vibrational frequency of the label. The use of words, symbols and colors on the label. Each bottle contains the symbol of the Absolute “Om”. It also contains the vibratory word “Love” or “Perfect Health” etc. written on the label in many of the world’s languages. A specific color vibration has also been chosen for each bottle, this color coordinates with the corresponding chakra.

Now I know what you’re going to say – this is all flimsy bollocks and no-one is going to fall for this claptrap without some kind of basis in fact! Well, it’s just about now that H²Om wheels out its supporting ‘evidence’ for their miraculous product, and it comes in the form of an endorsement from a personage who was slated to appear in a future edition of the TCA Educational Series ‘Woo Woo Beliefs‘, a minimally educated Japanese ‘doctor’* Masaru Emoto. Some of you may have seen Dr Emoto’s claims promoted in the risible What the Bleep do We Know, a film that is rooted in reality to about the same extent as, oh, your average Warner Brothers’ Roadrunner cartoon.

To encapsulate, Dr Emoto has formulated some ideas (it’s absurd to call them hypotheses, since he doesn’t even pretend to adopt any form of scientific protocol) that water crystallizes in certain ways according to its response to people’s thoughts and emotions. That’s all you need to know – I’ll examine Dr Emoto further at a later time. It is sufficient to note that the H²Om people are so besotted by Dr Emoto that they have made him a partner in their company and are in the process of launching a new line with his imprimatur.

And you know what? I just bet they have the box-office attendance figures for What the Bleep framed on the H²Om office wall, with all the zeros emphasized in fluorescent hi-lighter.

Given the size of that demographic, it’s evident that H²Om’s marketing is dead accurate in one respect anyway: it is very obviously water with intention. Oh yeah. Intention of the people who make it to get filthy rich by exploiting the gullibility of simpletons.

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*His ‘doctorate’ in Alternative Medicine was awarded by an uncredited pay-your-way ‘university’ in India. Make of that what you will.

Thanks Sean for bringing the H²Om website to my attention.

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WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series: Episode #3

This is Raël. Raël believes* that he is the prophetic ambassador on Earth for The Elohim, a race of superhuman beings that created all life on our planet.

In 1973 Raël was a racing car driver called Claude Vorilhon. It so happened that while Claude was visiting a secluded area of the French countryside, a member of The Elohim appeared in a silvery saucer-shaped space-ship to give him a message to pass on to all humankind. After this, he evidently felt compelled to change his name (well, fair enough I guess – Claude is a somewhat underwhelming name for a cult leader†) and run up a huge account with Persil.

Now, see, this is where those aliens of superior intellect always seem to go tragically wrong. Out of all the effective methods they could conceivably adopt to get their message across, they invariably choose to use as their mouthpiece someone like a racing car driver with eccentric dress sense.

We can only speculate that the process that takes place in Elohim Central every time they turn their attention our way goes something like this:

Elohim Subordinate: Oh Noble and Thrice-Blesséd Grand Master Elohim! We desperately need to save Humankind! Despite all our efforts so far, they continue to ignore our message! What should we do?

Grand Master Elohim: Fellow Elohim! Land your Glorious Silvery Saucer in a hidden field in France! Wait, then, for a deceitful man of questionable intelligence to come by, and impart the Galactic Wisdom to him. Do this in a cryptic and abstruse manner, and refer frequently to scientifically dubious concepts such as anti-gravity and faster-than-light travel.

Elohim Subordinate: As you wish, Grand Master. Only, do you think that maybe this time we might have better success if we landed our Glorious Silvery Saucer in Times Square and delivered a PowerPoint presentation? There are a lot of people there at all times of the day, some of them with video cameras. Perhaps the humans would be more likely to believe us if we did that?

Grand Master Elohim: Are you crazy??!! We don’t want them to know that we are responsible for PowerPoint!

On one of his trips to an Elohim planet (an experience detailed in his imaginatively titled book Extraterrestrials Took Me to Their Planet) Raël was shown all kinds of genetic & molecular tinkering by the aliens and as a consequence introduced those concepts into his movement. He set up the controversial Clonaid in 1997 as a ‘stepping stone to the achievement of immortality’ promising as a sideline to help gay couples have cloned children and to allow people to resurrect identical duplicates of deceased pets (I mean, wtf?). Clonaid gained notoriety in 2002 when Brigitte Boisselier, a Raëlien member of ‘The Order of Angels’, claimed that she had successfully created a cloned baby girl named Eve. The contention was of course rubbish, but it gained the sect a lot of publicity.

Bafflingly, Raël continues to attract people to his beliefs and declares that he has 60,000+ followers. There is no doubt that a portion of the appeal to many is the Raëlian cult’s endorsement of sexual promiscuity among members. This is no surprise after all; sex and science fiction have gone hand-in-hand for decades.

So, is he really a deluded dingbat who thinks that he can communicate with aliens and bootstrap the human race into a new era of enlightenment? Or is he a cynical conman who’s found that starting a religion is a great way to get money, sex and plenty of time in the spotlight. He wouldn’t be the only one.

Maybe we should let his ex-wife, Marie-Paul have the last word. When asked in 2003 if she thought Raël was crazy she said he was ‘not mad, just devious, crafty, manipulative and very, very clever’.

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*Or, like Jasmuheen, says he believes…

†Not that Jim Jones cared much, I guess.

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WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series: Episode #2

This is David Icke. He is a conspiracy theorist par excellence. David believes that some thousands of years ago, an alien civilization of humanoid reptiles came to our planet and colonized it, interbreeding with humans, yet craftily preserving a special lizardy bloodline that continues to this day. These ‘Reptilians’ have worked their way into positions of power and so rule our world, luckily being able to ‘shape-shift’ to human form at will in order to keep the hideous truth from the rest of us unsuspecting monkey-folk.

When they’re in private they supposedly revert to their scaly forms (undoubtedly with an exclamation of ‘Thank Mangar-kunjer-kunja! I couldn’t have stood another minute in that sweaty hairy jumpsuit!’) in which they presumably relax on a warm rock with a nice chilled glass of raw egg and a big bowl of crunchy flies.

I want you to pause and reflect for a moment. What I’ve just outlined is not some scenario for a B-Grade science fiction film* – this is a matter of actual fact as far as David Icke is concerned. And he has a labyrinthine website that is testament to his efforts to prove it. Be sure to put aside a couple of hours if you intend to visit it though, because it demonstrates about as much structural logic and coherence as David’s belief system.

One of the things you can find, if you have the tenacity, is a list of people who are really lizards. This includes: George Bush (plausible, I guess), Dick Cheney (obviously), Al Gore (look at the profile), Gordon Gecko (haha, just kiddin’) and the Queen of England and all her sons (that explains the blue blood). There is also a generous sprinkling of US politicians (of all political inclinations, lest you think Mr Icke is being partisan).

When people have suggested in David’s earshot that he might be, well, crazy, he is on record as saying ‘People would have said the same thing of Jesus’. Which of course instantly confirms his status as a loony since, as we know, comparing oneself to Jesus or Napoleon is Indicator #1 on the Bedlam Admittance Guide.

So, how, according to David Icke, are we to have any hope of ever determining who are the Lizard Overlords among us? ‘Just pray for God to reveal it to you,’ he says.

I rest my case.

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*Well, actually, it is, come to think of it.

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Jasmuheen grabs a midnight snack.