Just in case you needed any more convincing that Scientology is creepy, crazy, nutty, and a little scary – an enterprising type has put an entire 10-part Scientology orientation video on YouTube.
This is my favorite so far, in which we hear how L. Ron Hubbard used his newly-found skills at Dianetics to foil the government’s mind control tactics.
Grab em fast before the jack booted lawyers from the Cult of Xenu raid the YouTube offices.
This all, of course, raises the interesting dynamic that the web – starting with blogs and text, now spreading to widely available means of publishing rich content, is a tremendous threat to closed organizations like Scientology. Long famous for their intimidation and scare tactics – towards everything from Google to Governments – that genie is slowly getting out of the bottle. Or more precisely – it’s once again out of the bottle, and no court will be able to wedge it back in.
UPDATE: Well, that didn’t take long. The creepy nutjob fanatics at the L. Ron Hubbard Memorial Insane Asylum have laid the hammer on YouTube. Never fear – they’ll be back sometime soon.
Good grief, man. Jealousy, bitterness, incoherence. None of which are particularly becoming. Anarchy? You mean…like..um, Wikipedia? What in the world were those people thinking with the notion that if you let the public participate and lead the process you might actually create an authoritative reference point?
Kind of like open source software and the communities that organize around the principles of collaborative work towards large goals. The only major obstacle to such endeavors are manipulators and charlatans. Like people who would try to abuse, say, a software community by trying to insert themselves just enough into the development cycle to later lay a claim to the fruits of EVERYONE’s labor. Wonder who would do that?
A week ago today I thought sangria on Sunday night would be a great idea.
It wasn’t.
Well, they went and got hitched. Tom and Tiff, that is. A perfect couple. No really, they are. Anyone who spends thirty seven seconds with the two of them realizes that they are they ones for each other. And a very nice wedding day it was. Beautiful weather, nice ceremony, a reception filled with friends old and new – couldn’t have been better. Congratulations, you two.
The OnTap guys are chatting about Greenpeace, nuclear energy, the works. Geraghty writes, in part:
“We can’t have nuclear energy, because Jane Fonda made a scary movie about it in the 1970s.”
Well, sort of. Again, to repeat the title…in fairness…it wasn’t just a movie that drove the panic. Most people don’t exactly remember what happened while that movie was at the box office. Rather pedestrian by itself when released on March 16, 1979 – the “message” (certainly the relatively far-fetched plot) of the China Syndrome got a whole heck of a lot of traction just 12 days later.
March 28, 1979.
Three Mile Island.
Then again, if life were the Simpsons and Mr. Burns was a movie producer – I’d *totally* buy that he rigged the whole thing.
Glenn has a (what is it? post? mini-column) piece over at GlennReynolds.com characterizing Google at, or past, its peak. I’m not sure – but it seems to me purely at a personal level – Google isn’t producing as many must-have products these days. Again, it’s entirely possible that my own interests and preferences have changed or become far more diffuse – but there’s no doubt that in my own mind – the absolute reliance I used to have on Google has been chipped away. Some based on trust, some not.