the lulz are strong with this total celeb scion fuck-up.... comments are hilarious http://tonyortega.org/2013/07/14/leah-remini-blowback-kirstie-alley-calls-for-scientology-celeb-strategy-session/
Can Scientology maintain its celebrity base?
ERIC KELSEY AND PIYA SINHA-ROY, REUTERS
Celebrity scientologists
IMAGE: 1 OF 20
Actress Leah Remini is out, but there's still plenty of Scientology devotees in Hollywood.(WENN.COM)
LOS ANGELES - The departure of U.S. actress Leah Remini from the Church of Scientology this week raised new questions about the relationship top leaders assume with their high-profile Hollywood members and their ability to retain them.
The New York Post, which first reported Remini's defection on Thursday, said the actress chose to leave after "being subjected to years of 'interrogations' and 'thought modification' for questioning leader David Miscavige's rule," citing an unnamed source.
Remini, 43, best known for her role as Carrie Heffernan in the CBS comedy "King of Queens," released a statement thanking supporters on Thursday, but both she and her representatives declined to comment on her reasons for leaving the church.
It was not possible to independently confirm Miscavige's role in Remini's departure.
The Church of Scientology had no comment on Remini leaving the movement but said the allegations against Miscavige and the characterization of interrogations were "categorically false."
Miscavige, 53, who became the church's leader in 1987, refocused Scientology as a celebrity-friendly religion that depended on the name recognition and deep pockets of Hollywood stars, said Janet Reitman, the author of "Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion."
"Celebrities are treated better than any other human being with that organization," she said. "They are the kings and queens of Scientology."
But Remini's departure suggests that celebrities are feeling uncomfortable in the church, especially if leadership is putting them through what Scientology calls security checks, an intense confessional, Reitman said.
"That used to be something the church was careful not to do," the author added. "They would do anything they could to make them comfortable because they needed them."
A SUPPORTER LOST
Scientology, which was founded in 1954 by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, has attracted several Hollywood stars including Tom Cruise and John Travolta.
It believes that humans are immortal beings whose experience extends beyond one lifetime, but critics of the church describe it as a cult that harasses people who try and quit, a criticism the movement rejects.
Former Scientologist Nancy Many, who was involved with the church's celebrity circle for more than two decades and left Scientology in 1996, is a fierce critic and believes Miscavige's power with celebrities is waning.
The New York Post linked Remini's falling out with the church to the 2006 wedding of Cruise and Katie Holmes, when Remini reportedly asked about Miscavige's wife, who was not present.
"Leah asked about David's wife and came under an unbelievable torrent of attack on her, an attack and inquisition," Many told Reuters.
Mike Rinder, a former church spokesman who writes a blog, said Remini got tired of being told what to do.
"As a result, the church has lost one of its most effective supporters - both in the public relations arena and their bank balances," he wrote in a blog post.
Departures from the church have become the trend in recent years, said Reitman.
Well-known names to have left the church recently have been Oscar-winning director Paul Haggis, actor Jason Beghe and Holmes, who left the church after her divorce from Cruise last year.
In Reitman's view, change from within the church is nearly impossible because the church has yet to reform despite the recent spate of celebrities breaking ranks.
"They're just going to continue on as they've been continuing on," Reitman said. "If they were to truly want to rebound, I think they would have to lose their leadership."
Actress Karla Zamudio, ex-Scientology story #20
Karla tells Scientology to get lost.
“Karla left Scientology because she felt that the organization had become overbearing and actually interfered with her personal life, career, and spiritual growth.”
Bad news for the cult, good news for Ms. Zamudio and everyone else!
Update: Karla Zamudio is quoted in a recent newspaper story telling how she was pestered by Scientology sales people at 3:00 in the morning. This excellent story is part of a series in which theSt. Petersburg Times profiles the never-ending greed of this greedy cult.
By Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin, Times Staff Writers In Print: Monday, November 14, 2011.
Pervasive pitch: Scientology book and lecture series, ‘The Basics,’ unleashes a sales frenzy
Most Punchable Faces In Hollywood
The Fresh Prince was once cool, sometime in the 90s, to kids under 14, but really he’s never been as cool as he’d like to think. He’s an enjoyable enough actor when playing the cool competent guy – which is nearly every role he’s in – but lately Big Willy has been flagging.
I say lately, but it’s really been well over a decade since Will actually made a good movie, the last being 2001’s Ali. Since then we’ve had 2 Men in Black movies (both sucked), a Bad Boys sequel (which was a Michael Bay movie – the worst kind of insult you can give a film), Hitch, I Robot, Seven Pounds, I Am Legend and Hancock. The last 2 should’ve been great – a Richard Matheson post-apocalyptic vampire movie? The book is great, the film is not – and Hancock should’ve been way more funny and interesting than it was, based upon the awesome premise.
Will has focused on his family in recent years, taking a break between 2008 and 2012 to look after his kids. Awww! Except looking after his kids means trying to turn them into music and movie stars despite not hitting puberty yet. Yup, Will turned into Joe Jackson, letting everyone know his kids are super-talented like he is, putting his son Jaden into movies like The Karate Kid and signing his daughter Willow to Jay-Z’s label to “sing” songs she “wrote” like “Whip My Hair”. Willow has seemingly escaped her dad’s will to turn her into something she’s not ready for but Jaden unfortunately has been swept up in Hurricane Will, starring alongside his dad in this year’s poorly received sci-fi adventure “After Earth”.
Watching Will shill for After Earth was painful – it was clearly a badly conceived star vehicle for him and his son but Will tried to make it seem like it was an inspired artistic achievement instead of the piece of crap it so clearly was.
Will’s patented clean rap always made sure he would never be cool to most music fans who (rightfully) viewed it as lame and kind of pathetic, though recently he’s claimed Kanye has been trying to get him back in the studio – presumably to record more rap – but who wouldn’t deride a new Will Smith record these days? It’d hardly be the move that turns his career around.
Will’s poor film choices over the last 10 years coupled with rumours he was giving money to Scientology and forcing his children upon the general public all contributed to his current position which is of a once well-liked actor now on the downslope of his career and becoming increasingly crazy. What’s next for Will? Who cares, just get him out of my face!
Jaden Smith
Jaden hasn’t had the longest career (he’s 15) which makes his unpopularity with the general public such an accomplishment. In just a handful of crappy films he’s managed to foster no goodwill and somehow make people hate a spoilt, rich kid (the kind of kid everyone always loves!).
He wasn’t expected to be interesting in his dad’s dull film The Pursuit of Happyness and he fulfilled that expectation perfectly. He was the obnoxious son of Jennifer Connelly in 2008’s The Day the Earth Stood Still and was the ridiculously named Dre Parker in 2010’s The Karate Kid where he played a weeny who kicks other kids. Stupidly named characters are something of a trend for Jaden who played Kitai Raige in After Earth, widely panned as one of 2013’s worst films, and an absolute snoozer of a flick as Jaden runs away from CGI monsters in a one-sie, utilising his single acting expression – confusion.
He hasn’t helped his reputation by dating a Kardashian, a family most people view as puerile trash at best, nor by recording a string of lazy, badly written, uninspired “rap” (sample lyrics from his song “Hello”: “Huh, Hello / Eh, hello / How you doing there? Hello, / Like hello, / Like hello / My name is Jaden and I am a young fellow / I like to keep it mellow”). That and his arrogant personality which is born out of being raised in a super-privileged family don’t endear him to most people.
What would make people like him would be if he were to quit acting, finish school, and disappear gracefully.
(You might think it’s wrong of me to omit women from this list but that I’d be ok with hitting a 15 year old – of course I’d get another 15 year old to punch Jaden rather than do it myself. I’d talk him through it like Will does to Jaden in After Earth)
Read more at ONTD: http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/79557199.html#cutid1#ixzz2YzDmuFGM
Tom Cruise Leah Remini Scientology and Hypocrisy
Reuters has reported on the departure this week of actress Leah Remini from the Church of Scientology. The history of Scientology and its relationships with celebrities like Remini, Tom Cruise, John Travolta and others, as well as its vast financial holdings, are testaments to the fundamental hypocrisy of the Church.
Remini is best known for her role as Carrie Heffernan in the CBS comedy “King of Queens.” While she did not comment on the reasons for the parting of the ways, the New York Post said the actress chose to leave after being subjected to years of “interrogations” and “thought modification” after questioning the leadership of David Miscavige.
Miscavige became the head of the church in 1987. He refocused the Church’s efforts on attracting celebrities, their name-recognition and their prosperity.
The history and current practices of Scientology are carefully chronicled by Lawrence Wright, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, in Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Unbelief.
Scientology has gained many adherents among movie and television stars and musicians, including Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Chick Corea, Kirstie Alley, Karen Black, Beck and Will Smith. And it has persistently treated its celebrities well.
Scientology has Celebrity Centres in Hollywodd and other major citiesHollywood Hollywood and other major cities, through whose doors many of the wealthy and famous have passed.
One is John Travolta. His interest in Scientology and rising stardom merited him special attention. He was pampered and feted and continues to be. In return he has been one of the most faithful and outspoken adherents of the Church
Travolta had worked for years to get a film made that was based on Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth, and spent a considerable amount of his own money to produce it. It was released in 2000, and was a box-office disaster.
The most famous example of star membership is, of course, Tom Cruise. Like Travolta, he was provided with his own private entrance to Scientology centers, and assigned top-level “auditors.” Cruise was brought to Gold Base, a top-secret hub of Scientology operations, as its sole occupant at the time Cruise was preparing to make Days of Thunder. Miscavige provided him with a chef and a high-end gym. When Cruise and his then-wife Nicole Kidman expressed their fantasy of running through a field of wildflowers, Miscavige ordered employees to create a meadow in the desert, which was quickly torn up when the couple expressed their dissatisfaction with it.
After Cruise ended his three-year relationship with Penélope Cruz, he complained to Miscavige that no one had found him a girlfriend. Miscavige arranged for a hundred young actresses to be auditioned and videotaped. They were not told why they were being interviewed.
Cruise was awarded the “Freedom Medal of Valor” by Miscavige in 2004 for his efforts in promoting the Church.
Before the advent of Remini, Travolta and Cruise, the life of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, is a case history of the church’s hypocrisy and lies.
Hubbard created Scientology in 1952. He famously told Robert Heinlein, one of the deans of science fiction, that the best way to make money was to start a religion.
Hubbard was a writer of pulp science fiction who could write a story as fast as he could type, which was incredibly fast, so it has been claimed. He was not only widely published in fiction but authored a number of nonfiction works. He maintained that he had written scripts for
Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s, although he received no credits in any film.
Hubbard graduated from the School of Military Government in 1945 and was ordered to Monterrey, California to join what would ultimately become the invasion of the south of Japan. The Battle of Okinawa cost the highest number of American causalities in the Pacific Theater. Hubbard had been admitted to an Oakland Hospital, complaining of stomach pains.
In his autobiography, which forms the first part of his book on Dianetics, Hubbard claimed that as a result of the war he had been blinded by injuries to his optic nerves and lame from trauma to his hips, and was a helpless cripple. He cured himself by techniques he would later incorporate into the principles of Dianetics and Scientology.
Hubbard claimed without evidence to be a nuclear physicist, and asserted that he had led expeditions to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, although no records of these forays have ever been found to validate them. In the mid-1940s he collaborated on a “sex magick” book entitledBabalon Working, which was a manual for summoning elementals, especially Thelema, the supreme Thelemite goddess. The Thelemite theology had been created in the early twentieth century by Aleister Crowley. Thelema represented the ideals of will, choice, inclination, desire and pleasure.
Hubbard claimed that he had written The book, which caused everyone who read it to go mad or commit suicide. Though he had confided in friends about writing it, The book was never found, but it acquired mythology status among his followers.
Before Scientology there was Dianetics, the “modern cure of mental health.”
Dianetics taught that the mind had two parts. One was the analytical mind, the center of awareness and the storehouse of all past experiences and perceptions. The reactive mind is the repository of all painful and destructive emotions, and the cause of nightmares, insecurity and fear. Each recorded traumatic experience is comparable to a cell in the body and is called an “engram.” Hubbard devised a process of “auditing” that summoned these engrams to the surface, where they could be “cleansed.”
Though the American Psychological Association determined that Hubbard’s claims concerning the miraculous effects of Dianetics’ principles were unsupported by empirical evidence, the public’s response to Hubbard’s book, Dianetics: the Modern Cure for Mental Health was overwhelming. By 1975, it had sold more than two million copies throughout the world.
Dianetics soon became Scientology. The first church of Scientology opened in New Jersey in 1953. The central principle of Scientology is that the true self of man, called a “thetan,” is an immortal, omniscient and omnipotent deity trapped in a human body. Hubbard designed an “e-meter” that would reveal a person’s innermost thoughts and help to restore her original nature and capacities.
The church’s publications declare that because Hubbard had a perfect understanding of human nature, his technology of attaining spiritual freedom and discovering oneself as an immortal being works 100 percent of the time, when properly applied.
Another of the practices of Scientology is a reputed “cure” for drug addiction, a program called the “Purification Rundown.” It is a three-week program comprised of spending eight hours a day in a sauna and consuming massive amounts of vitamins. The medical profession denounced it, though Hubbard thought he deserved a Nobel Prize for it.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Hubbard was a self-appointed “Commodore” on his fleet of ships ordained the Sea Organization (or Sea Org). Sea Org employees signed one-billion-year pledges to demonstrate their commitment.
Hubbard’s sojourn on the sea came to an end when Britain, Spain, Greece and Portugal closed their ports to him. Australia revoked Scientology’s status as a religion. The High Court of France convicted him, in absentia, of fraud. The U.S. named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in an international scheme of infiltration, theft and theft. Hubbard had come to believe that he was the victim of government suppression, not without reason. The FBI and Interpol had files on him, and the IRS revoked Scientology’s tax exemption as a religion. The Food and Drug Administration took enforcement action in regard to the pills the Scientology marketed as “radiation cures.”
Hubbard went into seclusion on his ranch near Creston, California, where he died in 1986.
The Sea Org continues as the basis for the third tier of membership, consisting of between 3,000 and 5,000 employees, referred to as “clergy.” The other tiers include public Scientologists (first) and celebrity members (second).
Scientology continues to thrive after Hubbard’s death under the leadership of David Miscavige.
Scientology leadership, particularly Miscavige, is privy to luxurious living. He enjoys a $150,000 stereo system, a private screening room, a tanning bed, a tennis court, numerous cars and motorcycles, a wardrobe that fills a room. Two full-time chefs work all day preparing meals, and full-time stewards serve them. Food expenses for Miscavige and guests range between $3,000 to $20,000 per week.
Sea Org members live at Gold Base, the place where Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman had stayed in a bungalow with a private rose garden. Sea Org members are paid $50 a week. When they are fined for infractions, the pay can be reduced to 13 or 14 dollars. They are fed meals costing about 75 cents per person. Their lifetime clothing allotment is two pants, two shirts, and a pair of shoes. Anything else they must pay for themselves on their sub-subsistence wages.
They are isolated from family and friends. Few have access to computers. Their personal phone calls are restricted, and even those are monitored. Their mail is inspected, their bank records scrutinized. Those judged to be traitorous are imprisoned in “the Hole,” a double-wide trailer in which up to 40 or 50 people are housed, eating leftovers and being bathed by a cold-water hose. Beatings and forced divorces are also utilized to preserve loyalty. (See “Eyes Wide Shut,” a review of Wright’s book, in the New York Times, January 10, 2013.)
Scientology claims 8 million followers worldwide and reputedly adds 4.4 million new members each year. It has $1 billion in liquid assets, and 12 million square feet of property. Its real estate in the Hollywood area is valued at $400 million.
Leah Remini’s departure is another example of prominent figures breaking with the Church of Scientology. The church’s coercive practices and hypocrisy belie the asseverations of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, that Scientology is the gateway to self-discovery and spiritual freedom.
By: Tom Ukinski
Video: Suri Cruise Called A “Brat” By Autograph Hunter As Katie Holmes Is Called A “Bitch”
Good Lord.There’s video circulating online taken earlier this week which shows one of those nutso professional autograph hunters (one bashed Andy Murray in the eye the other day in their haste to get something signed that they could then sell on ebay) yelling abuse at Suri Cruise after Katie refused to sign something on their way into their waiting SUV.
As Katie smiles and waves at the cameras, Suri, 7, yells at the swarm of paparazzi and autograph hunters as they surround them:
“We’re trying to get in the car… stop it!”
“Get out of the way!”
In the background, one of the autograph hunters warns: “Come on Katie, don’t disappoint your fans” whilst pushing a pen at her but as she sweeps by him he tuts “ah that bitch” and as they hop into the car he starts yelling, “Bye, Suri, you little brat!”
As the autograph hunter’s reprimanded by one of the paps, he says by way of explanation, “But she’s rich man, she’s a little brat kid man, a little brat”.
This is before the car door’s even shut.
What’s most disgusting is that Katie’s trying against all odds to give Suri a normal life post-Tom Cruise.
But now she’s going to have no choice but to call in a gang of hired security to keep creeps like this out of her and Suri’s way.
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