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Scientology: A growing cult reaches dangerously into the mind (Nov, 1968)
I think that this was one of the first really critical articles about Scientology.
Scientology: A growing cult reaches dangerously into the mind
The lights in the hall go dim, leaving the bronzed bust of the Founder (spotlighted) at center stage. From the loudspeakers comes L. Ron Hubbard's voice, deep and professorial. It is a tape called "Some Aspects of Help, Part I," a basic lecture in Scientology that Hubbard recorded nearly 10 years ago.
No one in the intensely respectful Los Angeles audience of 500—some of whom paid as much as $16 to get in—thought it odd to be sitting there listening to the disembodied voice. Among believers, Scientology and its Founder are beyond frivolous question: Scientology is the Truth, it is the path to "a civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war . . ." and "for the first time in all ages there is something that . . . delivers the answers to the eternal questions and delivers immortality as well."
So much of a credo might be regarded as harmless— practically indistinguishable from any number of minority schemes for the improvement of Man. But Scientology is scary—because of its size and growth, and because of the potentially disastrous techniques it so casually makes use of. To attain the Truth, a surrenders himself to "auditing," a crude form of psychoanalysis. In the best medical circumstances this is a delicate procedure, but in Scientology it is undertaken by an "auditor" who is simply another Scientologist in training, who uses an "E-meter," which resembles a lie detector. A government report, made to the parliament of the state of Victoria in Australia three years ago, called Scientology "the world's largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy." As author Alan Levy found out by personal experience (pages 100B-114), the auditing experience can be shattering.
How many souls have become hooked on Scientology is impossible to say precisely. Worldwide membership —England, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the U.S.—is probably between two and three million. In the U.S. (offices in Washington, New York, Los Angeles and seven other cities), the figure may now be more than several hundred thousand. What is astonishing— and frightening—is the rate of growth in the U.S.: membership has probably tripled or quadrupled in the past three years.
Recruits to Scientology are most often young, intelligent and idealistic. They become fanatics on the subject, impervious to argument, quick to cut themselves off from doubters. Many young people have been instructed by their Scientology organizations ("orgs," they are called) to "disconnect" from their families. "Disconnect" means exactly that: sever all relations. Such estrangements can be deep and lasting, leaving heartsick parents no longer able to speak rationally with their children.
Scientology is expensive. To reach the first meaningful stage costs the beginner $650 in tuition. To become an Operating Thetan, Class VIII – the highest present classification—can raise the all-in cost (books, tuition, equipment, board and lodging at Scientology centers during advanced training) to as much as $15,000. The high costs have the effect of turning many young Scientologists into permanent parts of the apparatus. To finance their own advanced studies they take low-paying jobs within the org—and in the end find themselves alienated from life outside of Scientology.
Scientology is nominally a religion, and the figure of Hubbard has taken on religious implications. The Nebraska-born author of the 1950 best-seller Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health is now adored and remote. The literature hints at persecution. In 1963 agents of the Food and Drug Administration raided Scientology's Washington headquarters and seized a number of E-meters. Scientologists still speak of the raid on the "church." Scientology has been banned from the state of Victoria in Australia. In England, where Hubbard established the world headquarters of Scientology at Saint Hill, the government has looked with increasing disfavor on Scientology. Asserting that Scientology is "socially harmful," the government recently barred from entry a number of would-be participants in a world Scientology congress. Hubbard himself departed from England in the summer of 1966 and now lives on a 320-foot converted passenger ferry called the Royal Scot Man, cruising mostly between ports in the Mediterranean. There, although he claims to have given up his official ties with Saint Hill, he continues to train and send out super-Scientologists to all parts of the world.
An exploring writer becomes personally involved
'A TRUE-LIFE NIGHTMARE' by ALAN LEVY
CLEAR is the name of a button on an adding machine. When you push it, all hidden answers clear and the machine can be used for a proper computation.
"So long as the button is not pressed, the machine adds all old answers to all new efforts to compute and wrong answers result."
This message, blown up in a wall-mounted advertising display case at a busy mid-Manhattan subway exit, was a pitch for Scientology—a curious cult about which my store of information was very limited: People I knew seemed to know people who were taking it up. Scientology had overtones of psychiatry. It promised to make a better person of you. And, in some way, it involved a device that worked like a lie detector. That was all I knew… I read on—and, as I did, the language of the ad seemed to take an odd and threatening spin: "People who have old fixed answers reacting when they try to think get wrong answers to their current problems. Such old answers are not cleared. Rollo is still solving the tantrums of his mother who has been dead for years. Mary-belle is still running away from the tramp who attacked her when she was 10 years old. So Rollo stays home as the solution to the women of the world. And Mary-belle runs madly about as a solution to all the uncouth men she sees. Their friends think they're a bit odd. Their doctors prescribe pills. And we clear the answers which won't let them live."
I began to wonder how, and thus, without the faintest idea of what I was getting into, I embarked upon an adventure in mind-bending that took me from a ballroom in Manhattan to a 100-year-old brownstone off Fitzroy Square in London to a 30-room Georgian manor house in Sussex that could have passed for SMERSH headquarters. The last was, actually, the home of a Nebraska-born prophet named L." Ron Hubbard, who in the 1950s invented a best-selling, but soon discredited, "science" of mental health called Dianetics and who then resurfaced with the far more sinister "religion" he calls Scientology.
I have Hubbard to thank for a true-life nightmare that gnawed at my family relationships and saddled me with a burden of guilt I've not yet been able to shed. Scientology does indeed use a machine similar to a lie detector, and the most menacing moments on my odyssey toward CLEAR had come when—inextricably plugged into the electroencephaloneuromentimograph, or "Hubbard Mark V E-meter" for short—I explored some nooks and crannies of my own psyche that I wish to God had never been unearthed.
I did not confront the electronic heart of Scientology—the E-meter —until I had invested three evenings listening to introductory lectures. The Church of Scientology of New York occupied the Grand Ballroom of the Martinique, a tackily renovated hotel near the new Madison Square Garden. Ablaze with light and encircled by mirrors, this ballroom-church had an aura of crystal clarity. So did the giant studio portraits of Scientology's founder—a stern but fatherly type with steely eyes and an out-sized chronometer on his wrist— that lined the walls and were for sale at $5.50 apiece. The dance floor had been cut up into offices, cubicles, displays, bulletin boards, bookstore, a stand selling picture postcards of Saint Hill Manor in Sussex, and reception desks— all staffed round-the-clock by a couple of dozen "Pre-CLEARs" working shifts to pay their own fees for being "audited," as Scientology processing is called.
Every one of these people—male and female, mostly young, and a few middle-aged—had a peculiar smile that was sublimely sincere, but seemed to exist independently of the face it was affixed to. They didn't walk amidst the hotel's potted palms, they floated. Across their eyes hung a beatific film that I wanted to snap my fingers at. Only now and then, when they spoke about Scientology, could I perceive a flashing silver glint behind the film—an evangelical commitment, perhaps. Otherwise, the personal data I offered—that I lived in Greenwich Village; that I had a wife and two kids; that I worked in "publicity" (a half-truth which would offend only a journalism professor)—all evoked ethereal acknowledgements of "Perfect!" or "Beautiful!"
This same enviable inner serenity bloomed unblushingly from one of my introductory lecturers, a soft-spoken and radiantly pretty young woman in her late 20s named Mishka O'Connor. Her style was personal and conversational: "I'm married to a stained-glass artist who just went CLEAR at Saint Hill. He's been home a month now and he's making four times as much money as he used to— and not working as hard." Mishka had gone to Saint Hill with her husband, "But I had to come home before I could finish my processing. My husband's trying to build up his business so I can go back for CLEAR. Then he'll sell the business so we can both go into Scientology professionally. And I'm sure we will, because it's amazing how resourceful you become. . . . My husband knows exactly who and what he is. He can be emotionally stable or volatile as he so chooses!" Mishka took a deep breath and concluded fervently: "He's beautiful!"
The lectures—which immersed me in Scientology's basic tenets and jargon, while spelling out the eight distinct levels one must pass on the route to CLEAR— were free. The sample "audit" with an E-meter cost me $5. It lasted two hours and gave me much more than I had bargained for.
The E-meter was an unimposingly compact box resting on a plain table in the middle of a bare, windowless cubicle behind the ballroom. The machine, apparently battery-powered, was equipped with a gauge and a moving needle, several control knobs and wires leading to two unadorned tins.
"Why, they look like beer cans!" I exclaimed to my "auditor," a sallow middle-aged man with features as austere as his auditing cell.
"As a matter of fact," he said, suddenly twinkling, "they were V-8 juice cans."
"And it works like a lie detector?" I said dubiously.
"Well, we call it a truth detector."
I found his answers modestly disarming. Now he had me remove my watch and wedding ring to "prevent interference by outside metals." When I gripped the cans and sat facing him, he turned the box so that only he could see the needle.
"I'm going to ask you each question twice," he said. "Once just to ascertain that you understand it. . . . Then, when we're both sure you do, I'll ask it again. This time, you can answer or you don't have to. The E-meter will show how you react."
Did I have a criminal record? Was I addicted to drugs? Had I, as instructed, abstained from drugs and drink for the past 24 hours? "Hmmm. The needle shows a 'read' on that."
Well was about to take an aspirin last night—but then I remembered."
"Good. Let me ask the question again. . . . Now you're clean."
Did I have a good night's sleep? How did I evaluate my relationship with my wife?
What would I like from Scientology?
I hadn't expected such a question. "To work harder, work better, do better work, do different work—to write plays—to be more relaxed, and a better husband and father."
"Good. Now what would Scientology have to do to convince you it worked?"
To my own surprise, I snapped back: "I'd have to write a successful play within a year."
"Thank you," he said. "But I still get some 'charge' on that. Is there something more you want to say about this question?"
"Yes' I confessed. "I'm starting to feel terribly vulnerable. It's as if I've just been asked what price I'd take for selling my soul to the devil." My auditor nodded sagely and unsmilingly but said nothing, so I rambled on: "Besides, my answer was unfair to Scientology. I mean, none of you is David Merrick."
"O.K. . . . Now it shows you're clean."
A "read" on "Do you have too much of anything?" finally disappeared after I admitted to "happiness I may be tampering with here."
And then: "Are you connected with a suppressive person?"
My auditor winced. "The needle almost went off the machine," he announced. Then he produced a battered copy of the 36-page Scientology Abridged Dictionary, put it in front of me and asked: "Do you know what 'suppressive' means?"
As I had guessed, a suppressive person was someone out to destroy or damage Scientology. Because I knew that Scientology had a reputation for secretiveness, I had not mentioned that I planned to write an article about my experiences. While my auditor reread the definition to me, the names of my agent and the editor with whom I had discussed the possibility of the story irresistibly paraded up and down in my head. Eventually my auditor said: "Suppose you pick up the cans and tell me who you've been thinking of."
Repressing the two names in a truth-detector interrogation was an awesome struggle. Simultaneously I had an equally strong impulse to shout my own name— denouncing myself as a suppressive infiltrator. With schizoid detachment, I wondered which of the three names would cross my lips first.
To my absolute astonishment, the name I spoke was my wife's. Well, yes, we had bickered over the time I was spending on Scientology. Improvising desperately, I explained that my wife wasn't really suppressive so much as concerned. When I was all talked out, my auditor put the "suppressive person" question to me again. This lime the E-meter said I was "clean."
Nevertheless, he stood up.
"You'll have to excuse me," he said. "Whenever we've had any kind of 'read' on questions like this, we have to call in the Examiner-in-Charge." In less than a minute a thick-set girl in black sweater and skirt, with thick dark hair and a trace of mustache, stamped into the cubicle. She tested me on the E-meter with the same question.
"Why do I get a little 'read' on it still?" she asked.
"Maybe," I replied, "because I'm shook up by having my auditor yanked away from me like this."
"We can't be too careful," she explained without warmth.
The next time around, I was "clean" with her, too, but I still didn't get my auditor back. I was sent to Reception to stew for 15 minutes and then go before the Ethics Officer, who turned out to be an effete young man decked out in a blue turtleneck sweater and Ben Franklin glasses. His attack was different but also frightening. He had a printed checklist of 20 "potentially suppressive acts" that my wife might have committed: Was she opening or withholding my mail? Garbling phone messages? Listening in on phone calls? Denigrating my ambitions?
With tin cans in hand, I was able to acquit or excuse her on all counts. The Ethics Officer pronounced my case "not serious— just a minor break in what we call the Affinity-Reality-Communication Triangle."
The "A-R-C Triangle" is an important bit of Scientological jargon. It means, approximately, that to Communicate successfully with someone you must feel some Affinity for him and you both must be talking about the same thing— Reality. I knew exactly where the break had come but the Ethics Officer, happily, didn't. With one last "suppressive person" check on the E-meter, he returned me to auditing.
The rest of the session was anticlimactic. Even probing questions didn't bother me. While waiting for the Ethics Officer, I had worked out a way to beat the E-meter when I needed to.
The needle seemed to record emotional stress and, since I am good with memory tricks and concentration games, I drilled my mind to focus on the Esther Williams-Kathryn Grayson-Jose Iturbi-Jimmy Durante-Lauritz Melchior musical films of my boyhood as soon as a tough question hit in. I was able to drift dreamily past the roughest shoals on a cloud of M-C-M escapism—giving away only as much as I wanted to give.
"That's it," said my auditor. "How do you feel?"
"Impressed," I said, quite honestly.
"Good. Now don't be alarmed, but I'm going to call in the Examiner one last time. She has to make sure you're ready to go back to the outside world."
The frightening girl in black asked just one question: "What gains do you feel you've made from this session?"
"I know a bit more about myself," I said, which was true but a considerable understatement.
The question put to me by the Registrar when the Examiner had gone was blunt enough: Did I plan to go on and make a real start toward CLEAR? By this time I had the distinct impression that pressing deeper into Scientology would be less than a joy-ride. Nevertheless, I said that I thought I would, and the Registrar reminded me that auditing "through Grade IV" was available right at New York headquarters. It would cost $650.
I told him that my plans were to be in London for the summer. "Perfect!" he said without missing a beat. "We can refer you to the London Org and take a commission. Their fees won't be much different from ours and you'll only be an hour away from Saint Hill, which is like the center of the universe. You can go right on out there after your Grade IV release."
In the weeks before leaving for England, I learned a few things about Lafayette Ronald Hubbard and where Scientology had come from. Elron (as his flock speaks of him) was born in 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska, the son of a U.S. Navy commander, and, at 14, while on a tour of the Far East with his father, "studied . . . with lama priests." This turned out to be a distinct high point in Elron's education. He never graduated from college—although he has on occasion claimed a degree. During the '30s, he traveled in Central America and made a career for himself as a prolific ("15 million published words") and popular writer of science fiction (Final Blackout), westerns (Buckskin Brigades), and screenplays for a 15- episode serial. In World War II, he served as a U.S. Navy officer. Elron claims today that he and his experiences formed the basis for the postwar novel, play and movie Mister Roberts.
Meanwhile, from his boyhood onward, Hubbard had been formulating a set of at least 200 "self-evident truths. … I saw miracles in India and China done by holy men, but long association with them convinced me that they did not know entirely how they did it. I set out to find out from nuclear philosophy."
This distillation of applied wisdom first emerged in 1950 as a 435-page book called Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Introduced first in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, Dianetics was hailed by Hubbard himself as "a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his invention of the wheel and the arch." Sloppily but colorfully written, and propelled mainly by word of mouth, Dianetics sold 100,000 copies in the first three months and more than 1.5 million to date. It went right to the top of the bestseller charts. With 500,000 believers at its zenith, Dianetics became —for a time—a household word. It was, in effect, a jiffy mind-straightening scheme for the do-it-yourselfer to practice in his own parlor.
"The basic discovery of Dianetics," one of my introductory lecturers explained, "was the Engram, a word Hubbard borrowed from biology, where an Engram is the permanent impression left on protoplasm as the result of a stimulus. But to the Scientologist an Engram is a picture image that is imprinted on a cell—like a microgroove on a record—by an experience involving partial unconsciousness and some pain. It's an area Freud explored but dropped when he went on to other things. Fortunately for us, Elron Hubbard picked it up and went on with it."
Engrams beset man right from the beginning. "Birth is a pretty aberrative affair," Elron wrote in Dianetics. By taking one client back to birth through drug hypnosis, he was able to diagnose that "his asthma had been caused by the doctor's enthusiasm in yanking him off the table just when he was fighting for his first breath." Engrams can be incurred prenatally: "Mama sneezes, baby gets knocked unconscious. . . . Papa becomes passionate and baby has the sensation of being put in a running washing machine. Mama gets hysterical, baby gets an Engram. Papa hits Mama, baby gets an Engram. . . ." And, finally, Hubbard's "Non-Germ Theory of Disease" holds that many of man's ills are Engramic, including arthritis, dermatitis, allergies, asthma, some coronary difficulties, eye trouble, bursitis, ulcers, sinusitis, migraine headaches, and even tuberculosis and cancer, as well as the common cold. The human being, the lecturer had explained, actually has two minds: the Analytical, which is like a perfect computer, and the Reactive, which takes care of situations like dodging an approaching taxi. As a result of all stimuli it receives, the Reactive mind is one mass of Engrams, feeding the otherwise perfect Analytical mind incorrect data. The idea is to erase—to CLEAR— these Engrams. In Dianetics, the process took too long. So, in the lecturer's words, "Elron Hubbard asked himself: Why don't we use a lie detector to find out what really happens behind all these hangups and inhibitions? He experimented with the idea, refined it—and so today we have the E-meter."
The evolution from Dianetics to Scientology coincided with some messy upheavals in Hubbard's personal life. Prominent psychiatrists, including the late Dr. William Menninger, denounced Dianetic Auditing as potentially dangerous. The Manhattan endocrinologist who wrote the laudatory foreword to Dianetics broke with Hubbard, charging that Hubbard was heading toward "absolutism and authoritarianism" while some of his patients were going mad. And Hubbard—after a messy court case that involved the abduction of his own child—shed his second wife (who during divorce procedures termed him "hopelessly insane") in 1951 and later married Mary Sue Whipp of the Wichita Dianetics Foundation. He took Mary Sue first to Phoenix and then to England, where she bore him the first of four children. They settled in baronial splendor at Saint Hill, the 57-acre estate Elron acquired from the Maharajah of Jaipur.
Hubbard left behind him, in the U.S., Scientology centers in 10 cities. By designating his theory as a religion—a move he himself has termed "an historic breakthrough into the realm of the Human Spirit"—Hubbard freed Scientology from a number of legal strictures. Regulations covering what may be said or done in the name of religion are considerably looser than those covering science or medicine.
"It took Elron Hubbard 15 years to find the first person who could go CLEAR," the lecturer had said. "In February 1966 at Saint Hill, the first CLEAR was born: a South African medical student named John McMaster. Then all the technology fell into place, and the processing has now been worked out. They're turning out 15 or 20 CLEARs a week at Saint Hill.
"Now we can help a person free himself from his Engrams and the other things that are keeping him from being an optimum human being. It takes maybe 60 hours of auditing plus a course in Dianetic training. The road to CLEAR is very fast now."
In the jet 40,000 feet over the North Atlantic, I wrote in my notebook: "Hubbard and disciples clearly believe in what he says." Then I added: "P.S.—so do all dedicated salesmen."
The Hubbard Scientology Organization (Org) in London occupied a venerable four-story building on Fitzroy Street, just around the corner from Britain's tallest skyscraper, the new 40-story Post Office Tower. After checking in and paying my fees (in advance, naturally), I met my auditor. David Dunlop was a taciturn Scotsman in his late 20s who, the Registrar had confided to me, "works very well with Americans." He wore the same neat gray suit every day throughout my processing. The schedule he proposed to get me up to Grade IV—a kind of intermediate plateau beyond which lay three further levels before CLEAR—was definitely businesslike: we would start at 9 every weekday morning, take an hour out for lunch and go on until 5 p.m.
"Now we can get cracking," David said when I showed him my bursar's receipt. "Cracking" was an apt word; in a matter of minutes, we were probing a fragile item of my mental luggage that I thought I'd left behind.
We began with what David called "Straight-Wire Release"— an exercise designed to strengthen my memory and "mend past breaks in the Affinity-Reality-Communication Triangle." This exercise and the one after it, I was surprised to learn, both rated below the Zero Grade. Then, if I could handle Zero—which David said would bring my reactive mind up to snuff—we could try for Grade I.
I gripped the cans and David monitored his E-meter while he posed the same three problems over and over.
"Recall a communication," said David.
"Just before I boarded my plane, I phoned my wife from the airport," I responded, going on to tell him the whole trivial farewell in detail.
"Good. Now recall something real."
I described the ticky-tacky interior of my transatlantic jet.
"Okay. Recall an emotion."
My father had died four months earlier. The button pushed by the word "emotion" triggered a description of my surprisingly passive reaction to his death.
"Fine. Now recall a communication."
I described the letter that had reached me, eight months before, with the fatal diagnosis.
"Okay. Recall something real."
"Now recall an emotion," said David. He was making notes on a pad mounted to a clipboard.
"The letter came just as we were pulling out of a trailer camp in Kentucky. We'd been on vacation. I remember thinking that, if we'd only left a few minutes earlier, I wouldn't have gotten the letter and he wouldn't have cancer. Which is silly, of course."
"Good. Now recall a communication."
"A book called The American Way of Death."
"Okay. Recall something real."
"My awareness, even before the diagnosis, that my father's end was near. I'd bought the book three years earlier, but hadn't read it. And yet I took it along and read it on that particular vacation. I must have been preparing. . ."
Now I was in deep. I had to work at propelling my train of thought toward "safer" problems. Over several dozen go-rounds, I went from my relations with my father in his lifetime … to the sterility of living one's life to achieve objectives set by others … to three drafts of my first adult venture into playwriting.
Recall a communication: "A trusted adviser's opinion that it needs at least two more drafts before I can show it to David Merrick. But there's another play I want to start writing. Yet, if I don't stick to what I'm doing, one thing at a time, I'll just be creating a trunkful of uncompleted plays."
Recall something real: "Well the next play has been coming so clear in my mind for the past three months that it's much more real than the play I've written three times." At this point, I was so wrought-up that David had to remind me to keep both hands on the tin cans.
Recall an emotion: "Anticipation!" I was shouting and I could feel a glow begin to envelope me. "Do you know, David, that anticipating something can be much more exciting and rewarding than the smooth, logical process of everything going as it should go?"
David's answer was: "Very good. You can put down the cans now." He told me, as I already suspected, that I had just achieved Straight-Wire Release.
"You mean," I said knowledgeably, "my needle is still."
"Oh, no. When the needle is still, it just means you're clean on a particular question that I'm asking. But when the needle is floating freely and easily, instead of jumping, it means that you've achieved release on the whole subject."
On my next sub-Zero level, "Secondary Release," the repetitive questions were Recall a loss and Recall a misemotion. Almost instantly, I was enmeshed once again in the loss of my father and the alarming lack of grief I seemed to feel. I found myself brooding into the E-meter about why my own father's death didn't seem to affect me as much as those of President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. I started out with some glib pop sociology about our mobile age with its rapid dissolution of family bonds and how people we see on the screen are more real to us than our own kin. But the answer lay closer to home and deeper within. I wound up describing, with appalling accuracy that still makes me squirm, the gradual filminess that aging casts over a man.
My father was 79 when he drew his last breath. But it struck me with hammer force that I had actually been watching him die from at least the age of 65 onward.
As soon as I said this, David informed me that I had now been released from "moments of loss and misemotion."
I felt good then—very good— in my new self-knowledge. Later would come the weight of guilt.
"Communications Release" (Grade Zero) was a variation of the word-association games I used to like to play at parties. The two alternating queries were "What are you willing to tell me about? What are you willing to tell me about it?" I caromed from sex to words to drama to movies to expatriation to deadlines to friendship to danger and almost a hundred other subjects before I finally found myself explaining and justifying a complicated future plan that wouldn't be of interest to anyone outside my immediate family—except perhaps someone probing me for vulnerability. The psychiatrist I consulted months afterward told me that "free association and repetition are two quick ways to induce regression in a patient. He starts to lose normal ego control."
After each Release I had to go through an elaborate bureaucratic minuet. The first step was always Tech Services, where whoever was on duty would interview me and, whenever I seemed unresponsive, peer at me with great concern and ask if I was all right.
If a day's auditing ended in mid-grade, David wouldn't let me go out on the street without first focusing my attention on each of five or six objects (the doorknob, for example) in the otherwise barren auditing room. It felt like being awakened from a dream.
Grade I was concerned with "problems." David would ask me, "What is the problem?" and, when I'd named it, "What solutions have you?" We started out with money and wound up—not long after the E-meter had revealed some bypassed charge on the problem of comeuppance—by uncovering the notion of suicide which, I discovered, lurked in the back of my mind as an ultimate solution to the insoluble. The more I talked about it, the more I knew I could never do it. Presto! Problems Release!
I came away relieved, but I wondered then what kind of hornet's nest a less sensitive auditor might stir up in the mind of a person with different hangups. I suspected that, however well-intentioned they might be, Scientology's auditors were simply people who had studied Scientology, were devoted to the subject and had themselves attained one or more levels toward CLEAR. Beyond that, I doubted they had special qualifications to be fooling around in a comparative stranger's psyche.
Grade II involved Overts ("harmful or contrasurvival acts") and Withholds ("undisclosed contrasurvival acts") and was called the "Relief Release." David would repeat the same two questions, "What have you done?" and "What haven't you said?" I spilled out incident after incident until I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that what I'd done was to "make life—every aspect of it, even every trivial conversation—a constant battle, a kind of Indian handwrestle to get the better of someone. It's all hit-or-flop, success-or-failure, make-or-break with me. . . . David, I think I may have achieved a Release here!"
"You have," said David.
Grade III, or "Freedom Release," required me to recall a past break with someone in the Affinity-Reality-Communication Triangle. In retrospect, it determined my future as a Scientologist. Straining to keep my traumas legitimate, I suddenly jarred open a Pandora's box within me.
Somehow, I was reliving an argument from early in my marriage. I had been blathering about how well I was doing and how great I was, and my wife had made a face. I shot back then almost jokingly: "Don't you love me any more?"
"I love you," she had replied, choosing her words carefully, "but I'm not sure that I like you at this very moment." Her words had for a brief time devastated me.
David wanted to know when this had happened.
I thought for a moment and said: "In 1958. We were living in Louisville and had just come back from a winter trip to New Orleans, so I'd say early 1958. And it was Sunday morning—I remember that distinctly."
"Good. Let's get a fix on the date. Was it January? February?"
"March, I'd think."
"It was March," said David, consulting the E-meter. "Now the date? First to 10th? Eleventh to 20th? I've got a read on 11th to 20th."
"Wouldn't it be easier," I said, "to consult a 1958 calendar? There are only four or five Sundays in March."
"There's no need for that. And keep your hands on the E-meter," David said sharply. "The E-meter will find out for us. Was it the 11th to 15th? Sixteenth? Seventeenth? Eighteenth? Nineteenth? Twentieth? That's funny, I get reads on the 15th, the 17th and the 18th."
"I think I know," I said. "When you said '15th' the Ides of March went through my head. And the 17th is St. Patrick's Day, which anybody who grew up in New York remembers. But I don't know about the 18th."
"Then it's probably the 18th," said David.
We rechecked March 15th to 20th on the E-meter. This time the only "read" was on the 18th.
"Before we go on," I said, "can't we get a calendar and check whether March 18, 1958 was a Sunday?"
"No," said David. "This is the session. And don't let go of the cans!"
With that, he rummaged in a drawer until he found a 23-part checklist which took me over my 1958 domestic spat. I was too disturbed by the fresh memory of the incident and David's harshness even to answer Yes or No to most of the items. But David reported that the omniscient E-meter had shown the "greatest read" on "Was a past refusal of reality restimulated?"
"Of course it was," I said fiercely. "The Reality being rejected was me!"
This was the Release, but by now my hands were clenched around the E-meter cans and David had to remind me to let go.
"Are you all right," he asked, "or have we overrun your Freedom Release?"
Ability Release," my farewell to auditing in London, seemed tame by comparison—even though it began with the memory of stepping on a dancing partner's toes and ended still more violently with me crawling beneath live machine-gun fire at Fort Dix. In both instances, I was made aware that my clumsiness, or "wrong computations," had hurt or endangered others—particularly a sergeant who had crawled out to hurry me along the infiltration course.
In fact, even while the London Registrar was packeting my bulging folder for my transfer to Saint Hill —the only place in the world where one could take the final levels to CLEAR—I realized that, during the whole process, I had been made to feel achingly ashamed of myself—for my remote flirtation with suicide; for the battle I'd made out of life; for walking into a swing at the age of 4; and, above all, for standing by, feeling no pain and offering no help, during the first dozen years I watched my father age and die.
Here, there was guilt within guilt: I worried that the next time I saw my mother, I might give her an inkling of this terrible truth I'd unearthed. A tug of war was going on in my mind. One pull seemed to say: "Listen! Everybody gets old. He spent eight months dying, not 14 years. There wasn't a thing you could do that you didn't do. And you didn't grieve because it was a merciful end and you had eight months' warning." The other, slightly stronger, pull seemed to be saying: "Only Scientology can save you—can relieve your guilt!" My journalistic involvement had led me this far— on an inbound voyage of self discovery that was starting to tear me apart.
Something else was happening to me while I killed time in London until my appointment at Saint Hill: I, who averaged three or four minor headaches a year, was having three or four blinding headaches a day. They recurred whenever I tried to ponder the Sunday, March 18, 1958 quarrel with my wife. It was as if there were something basic either in the incident itself or in the uncovering of it that my Reactive Mind didn't want my Analytical Mind to find out. Struggling in vain to apply the standard journalistic questions—Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? —to the revelations of Sunday, March 18, 1958, I simply could not get beyond when? Invariably, a headache would intercept and abort my span of attention.
You can amass all the evidence in the world to convince a man that a drug or a practice or a doctrine or a cigarette is bad for him, but when he's halfway hooked by it he has to find out for himself. This was my case as I rode the British Railways from London 30 miles to East Crinstead and took a cab to Saint Hill Manor. I craved release from Scientology and the blinding headaches my new self-knowledge had brought me. And yet I needed to know more about the significance of the events of Sunday, March 18, 1958. I suspected that both could be found only at Saint Hill.
My cab turned off the main road onto a country lane that climbed through rolling hillsides speckled with scooters and kiddie cars, sandboxes and swings, and a dozen children feeding a donkey. It was all sunny, open and innocent—until an army of trees loomed up to flank and darken the road. As we neared the sprawling, gloomy-looking manor house, the road ended and my driver said: "This is as far as I can take you. Reception's in the first shed." The mansion was marked: "OFF LIMITS."
My release from Scientology came that morning and that afternoon in a series of revelatory incidents.
The Registrar had my papers all ready for me to sign. But my contract for Grades V through VII called upon me to pay not the $390 New York and London had given me to understand—but $3,150! "Plus living expenses," added the Cashier, whom the Registrar had summoned in the expectation of having my signature witnessed. "The information you say you were given in London and New York is wrong. These are our rates, payable in advance. We can't have credit, can we?" And he handed me a rate card.
It was outrageous. I told him that I'd have to go back to London and maybe to New York to swing it. "Meanwhile, so my trip out here won't be a total waste, may I wander about?" Armed with the horse-headed pin I had been given for reaching Grade IV and a map showing what was on and off limits, I explored Saint Hill for the rest of that balmy day. The grounds were aswarm with butterflies, grasshoppers and people. At small folding tables behind the manor house and around the wishing well, perhaps 60 people were auditing some 60 others, E-meters between them. Scores more could be seen auditing inside various bungalows.
Toward noon, I bought a sandwich and a soda from vending machines and picnicked on the grass with what seemed like hundreds of my fellow Scientologists. A fat lady who'd packed her own hero sandwich wore a badge reading: "I AM IN POWER PROCESSES [Grade V]. PLEASE DO NOT ASK ME QUESTIONS, AUDIT ME, OR DISCUSS MY CASE WITH ME." And, shortly after 12, a bright-eyed young girl came out of an auditing shack and plunked herself down amidst benign smiles.
"Hi, Fran!" several picnickers greeted her.
"I just went CLEAR," she said softly.
All the boys and girls within earshot fell over her, cheered her, pummeled her and kissed her. Others came running over to do the same. A circle formed. There was a flurry of eager questioning, which Fran answered calmly and self-confidently in a slight Bronx accent. Then the conversation died down. Fran's friends smiled at her. She smiled back. Somebody new would pass by. Fran would murmur, "I went CLEAR!" The passersby would maul her, congratulate her, and either move on or join the circle. The smiles would come on again.
Finally, after a long, uneventful silence, Fran turned to one of the boys in the circle. With a desperate pounce, she grabbed his lapels and implored him: "So what's new?"
The emptiness of her going CLEAR touched me. I felt like answering her question with another: "So who wants it?"
Right after lunch, a little girl's resemblance to my 3-year-old daughter caught my eye. She was 5, or perhaps 6, and she wore a red dress and white stockings— her Sunday best. She was very, very tense. So was her mother—a young woman in slacks who sounded like an Australian.
"Now when you go before the Examiner," the mother was saying, "I want you to do just what we did at home this morning. When he asks if you feel you've been Released, you say 'yes' just like we did at home."
The child gave a nod, which seemed to jolt her whole rigid little frame. As she and her mother entered an auditing shack, a rate chart I'd seen—"Junior Dianetics: $10; Children's Cram Course: $5.60″—was shockingly fleshed out for me. In less than two minutes they came out. Now the mother's stride was brisk and proud. Her daughter was skipping. She had pleased her mother and now she could go play—until tomorrow, at least.
Depressed, I retreated to the inevitable Scientology bookstore, where a skinny, beady-eyed clerk remarked upon the beautiful weather: "There hasn't been a spell like this since around the time John McMaster went CLEAR. It's been this way since Sunday. . . ."
Her words triggered another of my blinding headaches and, in the moment I wondered why, the battle between my Reactive Mind and my Analytical Mind was at last joined.
"Look!" I said, almost lunging at the poor clerk. "Do you have any kind of almanac or perpetual calendar here?"
"No," she said. "Nothing like that."
"Can you call me a cab?" I said.
"The switchboard can. If you'll give me fourpence, I'll see that they place the call."
The only calendar in the bookstore was for 1967—when March 18 fell on a Saturday. In the 15 minutes while I waited for the cab, one of my minds tried to calculate backward to March 18,1958 —a trick I can ordinarily perform in two or three minutes—while the other seemed to be crying: "Stop!" By the time I'd paid the driver and dashed into the W. H. Smith & Sons bookstore of East Grinstead, I had not for the life of me been able to get back past 1960.
Smith's had an almanac. It took me less than a minute to find what had been gnawing at me about March 18, 1958. It was not guilt or my wife's love for me. It was simply that in 1958, March 18 had fallen on a Tuesday, not a Sunday.
It seems pathetic to me still, and terribly precarious, that my failure to perform so simple a journalistic chore—under other circumstances I would have automatically looked up the date— could have kept me half tied to Scientology, the deep-probing auditing sessions and the damned E-meter. It is still difficult for me to admit to myself how deeply those months affected me. A psychiatrist I consulted later in an effort to find out what had happened to me said: "You haven't been brainwashed or you wouldn't be here talking to me. But they did a remarkable job of indoctrinating you and I hope you'll get your equilibrium back."
I am sure that among the millions of words Elron has written, there are some to convince me that the Engram I unlocked in that one auditing session did happen on a Tuesday—in another life—or that March 18 did fall on a Sunday when I was in the womb. But, thankfully, it no longer matters.


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At the Artesian Mud Baths, soak in warm artesian water impregnated with clay, then pat on a milky grey mud pack and let your skin soak in the goodness from this mineral rich mud. This whole experience takes about an hour and a half and might be the most relaxing experience of your trip.
The baths are located in a unique, relaxing outdoor environment. Set within a thatched walled enclosure, the bathing area is complete with three baths and a beef wood shower, along with antique washroom accessories from a by-gone era. The stretch bath, complete with shower tree can be a unique experience for couples, day time or evening.
They now have the sunset viewing area where there are four single tubs available.
Please call in for your no obligation inspection of their facilities. The Eulo Artesian Mud Baths are the place for you to relax in luxury and revitalise your body and mind.
|Cost AUD
|Valid From
|Indicative Prices
|$70 - $75
|Price based on 1- 1.5 hours.
Note: Information on listed products and services are provided by the operator and were correct at the time of publishing. Rates are indicative based on the minimum and maximum available prices of products and services. Please visit the operator's website for further information. All prices quoted are in Australian dollars (AUD).

subset: commoncrawl


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April 19, 2013 Editorial -- Boston's bombings
Sarah Smith, KMBC and KCWE President and General Manager
The tragic bombing in Boston this past week puts a spotlight on the role each one of us plays in our collective security.
We've all heard the police urge us to call 911 if we see anything suspicious or just out of the ordinary. Yet our nature is to second guess our instincts and question making that call, which typically then leads us to decide against it.
We need to retrain ourselves to understand that we aren't bothering law enforcement. In fact, we are simply doing what they are asking of us.
By alerting the police, we are helping them do the job they have been hired to do. So while you are out and about at the many events our great city offers, do your part and be aware of your surroundings.
If you see anything that seems out of place to you or suspicious to you, call 911. Likely, it will end up being nothing, but in the rare case it is something, that one call you make could change a potentially tragic outcome and be the difference in keeping all of us safe.


text: Welcome to Monkey Business Press, a full-service letterpress and design studio in Santa Monica, California. We specialize in designing custom invitations, announcements, personal stationery and much more, just for you. Our philosophy is that each piece should be beautiful, functional and represent your personal style. You can choose from one of our existing designs or give us a call and we'll create something for you from scratch. We are also an eco-friendly studio and use only 100% tree-free cotton paper and soy based inks.


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Archive for March, 2014
App Store Update: October 1Posted on October 1, 2015Every day hundreds of new apps make their debut on the App Store, and hundreds more are updated or reduced in price. We have sifted through the noise and highlighted […]
Daily Deals: White Xbox One, Rise of The Tomb Raider, Walking Dead Four Season SetPosted on October 1, 2015The White Xbox One is Back And this time it comes with Gears of War Ultimate. This is the first time I've seen it back on sale since October of […]
Call of Duty: The Black Ops Saga in 5 MinutesPosted on October 1, 2015Before you play Black Ops 3, catch up on the twisting, insane stories of Black Ops and Black Ops 2. … Read More Here
IGN's UK Daily Deals: Max: The Curse of Brotherhood 75pPosted on October 1, 2015Max: The Curse of Brotherhood on Xbox One is an amazing 75p when you Facebook Like for 5% off discount. Dying Light: Be the Zombie Edition is £17.99 at Base. […]
Is Just Cause 3 the Most Explosive Game of all Time?Posted on October 1, 2015Two minutes of non-stop, action-packed Just Cause 3 gameplay. Hope you like explosions. … Read More Here
Need for Speed No Limits Out NowPosted on October 1, 2015Need for Speed: No Limits, the first original Need for Speed game built exclusively for mobile devices, is available today via the App Store and Google Play. Developed by Melbourne, […]
App Store Update: September 30Posted on September 30, 2015Every day hundreds of new apps make their debut on the App Store, and hundreds more are updated or reduced in price. We have sifted through the noise and highlighted […]
Daily Deals: Cards Against Humanity, Xbox One With Three Games, FireflyPosted on September 30, 2015A Rare Sale On Cards Against Humanity This is the first discount I've ever seen Amazon offer on the famous/infamous Cards Against Humanity. Even if you already own a set, […]
Looking Back at the Year the N64 Charmed Us AllPosted on September 30, 2015Welcome back to IGN's History of Awesome – a year-long look back at all the coolest and most influential games, movies, TV shows, comic books, toys, and tech that have shaped pop […]
IGN Presents The History of Awesome: 1996Posted on September 30, 2015Take a closer look at the year the Nintendo 64 charmed us all, Lara Croft made her debut, and action movies like Independence Day, The Rock, and Mission: Impossible kept […]


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Ultrasonic Cleaner - Size II
Fast and thorough
Every laboratory should have a good Ultrasonic Cleaner for quick and effective cleaning of the various instruments. The LABORETTE 17, size II with a useful capacity of 28 litres, guarantees especially gentle and damage-free cleaning of even extremely sensitive parts such as glassware, sieves or valuable micro-precision sieves. Your high-performance ultrasonic bath works quickly and thoroughly, and dissolves stubborn soiling even at inaccessible points. The LABORETTE 17 is perfectly suited for gentle cleaning of test sieves, micro-precision sieves and other sensitive parts without damaging them and for dispersing of suspensions for particle size analysis.
The ceramic oscillator generates high-energy vibrations at the base of the bath, creating a cavitation effect throughout the bath liquid. The change in pressure caused by the cavitation dissolves stubborn soiling even at the most inaccessible points.
The LABORETTE 17 is also suitable for external dispersion of suspensions for particle size analysis, and for the acceleration and improvement of process sequence of chemical reactions such as the extraction of plant substances. Two further additional functions are the degassing of liquids and the emulsifying of oily and aqueous phases.
Practical accessories
Depending on the use, for both models of the LABORETTE 17, you can order a stainless steel basket for inserting into the ultrasonic bath for the simple cleaning of glasses or small parts, as well as a stainless steel cover for covering the ultrasonic bath.
The FRITSCH Ultrasonic Cleaner is delivered inclusive sieve support and outlet tap, but without insert tray, cover and concentrated cleaning liquid. These parts must be ordered as accessories, if needed.
FRITSCH also offers a larger Ultrasonic Cleaner with 5.6 litres volume with sieve support and outlet tap.


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Web frameworks are playing a major role in the creation of today's most compelling web applications, because they automate many of the tedious tasks, allowing developers to instead focus on providing users with creative and powerful features. Java developers have been particularly fortunate in this area, having been able to take advantage of Grails, an open source framework that supercharges productivity when building Java–driven web sites. Grails is based on Groovy, which is a very popular and growing dynamic scripting language for Java developers and was inspired by Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk.
Beginning Groovy and Grails is the first introductory book on the Groovy language and its primary web framework, Grails.
This book gets you started with Groovy and Grails and culminates in the example and possible application of some real–world projects. You follow along with the development of each project, implementing and running each application while learning new features along the way.
What you'll learn
Understand the fundamentals of the open source, dynamic Groovy scripting language and the Grails web framework.
Capitalize upon Grails' well–defined framework architecture to build web applications faster than ever before.
Improve your web application with cutting–edge interface enhancements using Ajax.
Use Grails' object–relational mapping solution, GORM, to manage your data store more effectively than ever before.
Take advantage of Groovy to create reporting services, implement batch processing, and create alternative client interfaces.
Deploy and upgrade your Grails–driven applications with expertise and ease.
Discover an alternative client in Groovy as well.
Who this book is for
Java and web developers looking to learn and embrace the power and flexibility offered by the Grails framework and Groovy scripting language.


text:
Total Clutch Control
When it comes to keeping your clutch in order, we've got everything under control. Before fitting a new clutch we'll always assess the car first, just to check that the problem isn't elsewhere. Symptoms associated with a clutch often turn out to be something different such as a slipping fan belt or engine revving.
If after an assessment we find a problem with your clutch you can rely on our experienced technicians to fit one for you.
Here are a few symptoms of a burnt out clutch. If you experience any of these, please call in to see us.
- Difficulty in engaging gear
- A crunching noise
- Juddering when pulling away from a stationary position
- The engine RPM increases when the throttle pedal is depressed, but vehicle speed doesn't increase.
- A burning smell
If you have any doubts about your clutch or you have any questions, why not call in for a no-obligation clutch test? It's completely free.


text:
SANFORD, Fla. -- The Brandeis baseball team dropped its 2012 University Athletic Association opener today, falling to Emory University, 6-0. The Judges dropped to 4-4 overall on the season, 0-1 UAA, while the Eagles improved to 8-6, 1-0.
Emory rookie pitcher Connor Dillman was the story of the game, holding Brandeis to five hits and striking out 13 to tie a UAA record. The mark was set in 2004 by Dan Ruef of Case Western Reserve.
The game was scoreless through the first five innings, though Brandeis had a pair of opportunities to open the scoring in the early going that they were unable to convert. In the second, rookie 1B Kyle Brenner (Brookfield, Mass./St. Peter-Marian) led off with a single and was bunted to second, while sophomore SS Dom Schwartz (San Francisco, Calif./Lowell) opened the third with a double down the right-field line. Unfortunately for the Judges, they were unable to advance the runner any further in either case, with Dillman striking out two of the next three hitters with Schwartz in scoring position.
The Judges had one more chance to score in the sixth, when junior catcher Chris Ferro (Walpole, Mass./Walpole) doubled to center field with one away and moved to third on a groundout, but Dillman again got out of the frame with another K. He allowed just one more baserunner the rest of the way to improve to 4-1 on the season.
Brandeis grad student Pat Nicholson (Walpole, Mass./Walpole) kept EU off the board through the first four innings before the Eagles broke through in the fifth with a pair of unearned runs on an infield error and a single by senior 1B Jay Page. Emory had the bases loaded in the inning, but Nicholson stranded the runners with a strikeout of his own. In the late innings, EU sophomore catcher Jared Welch, produced a pair of big hits, a two-run double in the sixth that chased Nicholson and a two-run home run to left in the eighth off of rookie Brent Edmunds (North Hampton, N.H./Winnacunnet). Nicholson suffered the loss, going 5.2 innings and allowing four hits and four runs, two earned. He struck out three, walked five and hit three batters.
The Judges return to action Monday morning at 11 a.m. against Washington University.


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Careers in graphic design
Become a graphic designer. Become a brand designer. Become a package designer. Become a mobile app designer. Today's graphic artists are the visual masterminds behind the complex design challenges of the professional world. Join their ranks as you bring today's iconic brands to life and drive their success.
Launch your career as a professional:
- Graphic designer
- Brand designer
- Package designer
And get recruited and hired by the best of the best:
- Disney
Alumna Kate Aronowitz, former global director of design for Facebook
At SCAD, we give students the tools they need to excel in the most fast-paced workplaces, in the most prestigious roles. Alumna Kate Aronowitz (B.F.A., graphic design, 1997), global director of design for Facebook from 2009-2014, discusses what design means to her and how SCAD prepared her for her robust career.
"If you're really focused on how you want to transform someone's life with a product, design is that way to do it."Kate Aronowitz | Design director for Facebook, 2009-2014
SCAD will see you to success
SCAD students and graduates achieve their wildest dreams with the help of our dedicated career and alumni success staff. A wide array of services and resources are offered to every single SCAD student, including:
- Résumé and portfolio development
- Interview prep
- Guidance on self-promotion
- Countless networking opportunities
- Sessions with employers
Through it all, you'll be guided by an adviser who will stay with you even after graduation as you prepare for every advancing level of professional success.


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pre-Columbian art and architecture
pre-Columbian art and architecture, works of art and structures created in Central and South America before the arrival of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere. For many years the regions that are now Mexico and Guatemala and the Andean region of South America had been the cradle of indigenous civilizations whose remains bear witness to an exceptional degree of artistic advancement.
For Native American art in North America, see North American Native art .
Sections in this article:
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Latin American Art


text:
Only Natural's Grapefruit Cholesterol Fighter is a daily supplement carefully formulated with grapefruit pectin, grapefruit rind, and soluble fibers.
Grapefruit pectin's benefits may include: Grapefruit pectin for supporting healthy cholesterol levels.
Grapefruit pectin for immune function.
Grapefruit pectin for overall health.
Grapefruit pectin benefits may help maintain healthy blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
Grapefruit Cholesterol Fighter's grapefruit extract has significant levels of citrus pectin, which may be especially useful in facilitating the removal of unwanted metals and toxins, reducing radiation therapy side effects, and maintaining healthy cholesterol levels.
Grapefruit pectin and citrus pectin may also support gallstones and heart health.
Only Natural's Grapefruit Cholesterol Fighter contains grapefruit pectin and grapefruit rind, which are rich in bioflavonoids.
Citrus pectin, grapefruit pectin, and bioflavanoids may assist in maintaining healthy vascular systems and improve overall circulatory health.
Grapefruit extract may also assist in weight loss by metabolizing fats.
Caution: Consult your healthcare professional prior to use, as Grapefruit Cholesterol Fighter may not be taken in conjunction with statin drugs, unless otherwise directed by your health professional.
One Bottle Contains 100 Tablets


text:
Maine bills aim to boost lobster industry with marketing funds, tax breaks for processors
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) � Lawmakers are looking to boost Maine's troubled lobster industry with proposals to pump more money into marketing the state's signature seafood and give tax breaks to encourage more lobster processing.
The moves follow last year's chaotic lobster fishing season that saw a market glut and a crash in wholesale prices.
One bill referred to the Marine Resources Committee calls for sharply increasing surcharges on lobster fishing and other lobster-related licenses over the coming three years, with the aim of raising about $3 million a year in promotional funding. This year's marketing budget is about $380,000.
Lobsterman David Cousens, president of the Maine Lobstermen's Association, thinks fisherman for the most part will grudgingly accept higher fees because they recognize the need to better promote lobster to get prices up.


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BACKGROUND IMAGE: iSTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
- FeatureVideo will bloat e-mail systems
- FeatureSRM gets smarter
- FeatureSurvey Says: Users thirst for capacity planning tools
- FeatureRounding up remote offices
- FeatureCapacity, throughput demands grow unabated
- FeatureSnapshot: Bare metal restore used by half of storage managers
- FeaturePump up array performance
- FeatureEncryption appliances reviewed
- ArticleTop tape libraries revealed
- FeatureStorage going green
- FeatureTape security... with compromises
- FeatureCut big backups down to size
- Feature2005 was a remarkable and productive year in storage
- FeatureNo more dodging storage security
- FeatureNew demands, new opportunities
iSTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
Cut big backups down to size
Disk-based backup can help companies struggling with the inefficiencies of tape, but you may experience sticker shock at the cost of moving to disk. Data-reduction technologies can trim backup data down to size, and make the price of disk a little easier to swallow.
- James Damoulakis, GlassHouse Technologies
Cut big backups down to size
Data-reduction technologies can slash the amount of data that gets backed up, making disk-based backup a cost-effective alternative.
The world of backup is in a state of flux, although it may not appear to be at ground level. There's more innovation and a greater variety of choices than ever before. The underlying enabler for this torrent of change is the availability of low-cost, high-capacity disk. But it would be misleading to view disk-based backup as a monolithic approach.
If you've recently invested in disk-based backup--or are considering it--you may have experienced sticker shock at the overall cost of moving to disk. The benefits of disk may be apparent, but when your vendor plans a configuration for you, the amount of capacity required may surprise you. Accurately sizing a tape library and planning for growth are important tasks in tape-based architectures, but it's even more critical to get it right for disk.
Traditional backups require a significant multiple of the primary data being protected. A commonly used ratio for tape backup is 10:1, but depending on retention policies and administrative practices, this can grow to upwards of 50:1 in some dysfunctional cases. Now shift to a disk-based backup scenario and consider the impact. Realistically, you'll likely do fewer full backups and more incrementals with disk technology; with traditional compression techniques (assuming your disk-based backup product supports compression), you may "only" need storage for three to six times your primary data.
Can you afford to buy sixfold capacity for backup? Factoring in data growth rates, this is a huge problem. The power and cooling impact alone, not to mention the equipment cost, could make you reconsider. Without a means to address this issue, hard-dollar total cost of ownership analysis would continue to favor tape, and the justification of disk-based backup purchases would be based largely on risk reduction or improved service rather than on cost savings--a much tougher sell to a cost-conscious CFO.
But if backup data required dramatically less storage than primary data, the value proposition would swing heavily in favor of disk. Data-reduction technology makes that tantalizing possibility a reality. It's currently being deployed in a range of products and providing efficiencies of 10 times or more in storage utilization.
Factoring and commonality
Each time a file is modified and backed up, it's likely that most of the data in that file has been previously backed up. Backup vendors are aware of this, and while products like IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) and Symantec/ Veritas' NetBackup have options to enable subfile or block-level incremental backups, these have generally been deployed on a limited basis, largely because of the performance impact of restoring many subfiles from tape.
Other vendors have taken the concept of subfile "deltas" and added commonality factoring techniques that extend it much further. Unfortunately, it seems that each vendor has coined a different term to describe its approach, including de-duplication, commonality factoring, single-instance store, data coalescence, capacity-optimized storage, content-addressed storage (CAS), common file elimination and many others.
The goal is to improve backup performance and minimize capacity requirements by capturing only the actual changes, and then minimizing the amount of data backed up and stored. Capacity savings are achieved by recognizing redundant data and avoiding the storage of multiple copies of data.
The data coalescence process examines data at a specified unit of granularity to identify redundancies, indexes common units of data and then stores only additional unique data. Specific approaches vary based on several factors, such as the level of granularity. With a finer granularity (i.e., smaller data units), greater commonality can be discovered and, therefore, greater storage savings can be realized. Indexing at the file level, for example, eliminates storing multiple backups of the same file; but adding one word to a 1MB Word document represents a change that would require another entire file to be saved. Indexing at the subfile or block level would store only the portion of the file with changed data. But greater granularity requires more indexing, which could impact performance when accessing information.
Another consideration is the use of fixed- vs. variable-length data elements. A fixed-element approach may be fine for structured data such as databases, but with unstructured data, many commonalities may be missed. Consider the files shown in the figure "Fixed-block commonality factoring" at right. Using a fixed-length approach, no commonality would be discovered and each file would be stored as a separate set of objects.
Regardless of the level of factoring, the true benefits of a data-reduction technology are realized when aggregated across multiple servers. A single backed-up system has significant redundancy, but when many systems are backed up to a common server, there's likely to be an even greater potential for redundancy and, therefore, for data reduction. Imagine coalescing backup data down to onetenth or one-twenty-fifth of its original total size. Properly deployed, this technology can make disk cheaper than tape, turning the tape vs. disk TCO comparison on its head.
Data-reduction product options
Data-reduction products have been available from different vendors for some time. EMC Corp. put object-based CAS on the map with its Centera product, but the firm draws a sharp distinction by positioning this product for fixed-content data archiving, not backup.
In the backup realm, there are several software and hardware products using data-reduction technology. Here's a brief rundown:
- Iron Mountain Inc.'s Connected DataProtector family of products uses block-level data-reduction technologies to protect laptops and desktops, as well as Windows file servers.
- Storactive Inc.'s LiveBackup products marry two technologies--continuous data protection and data reduction-- to protect laptops and desktops. The company's LiveServ for Exchange product also applies these technologies to protect Microsoft Exchange using less space than an Exchange information store.
- Avamar Technologies Inc. is a pioneer in applying commonality factoring and CAS to backup. Its Axion family minimizes network bandwidth and storage capacity through a full range of client and server applications and appliances designed to supplant the traditional backup environment.
- Data Domain Inc.'s DD400 and DD200 appliances provide an NFS- or CIFS-accessible "capacity-optimized storage" array that can provide disk storage for traditional backup or other applications.
- Asigra Inc.'s Asigra Televaulting for Enterprises uses an agentless backup design and incorporates common file elimination techniques to minimize storage requirements. Designed to eliminate tape, this product enables highly efficient remote replication.
- Among the multitude of disk-based backup technology approaches, virtual tape libraries (VTLs) are among the most prevalent. Diligent Technologies Corp., with its ProtecTier platform, is the first VTL vendor to apply datareduction techniques to virtual tape libraries, providing data reduction of 25 times or more through its HyperFactor technology.
- Software toolkit developer Rocksoft Ltd. offers Blocklets to enable other developers to incorporate data-reduction functionality into their products. Blocklets' technology is called Data Streamlining, and it uses variable-sized, subblock-level commonality factoring to provide reductions of up to 98%.


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When you have a child with diabetes, you and your family have a lot to learn, but you don't have to go it alone. Your child's diabetes health care team can help.
Treating diabetes requires the expertise of many types of health care providers, such as doctors, certified diabetes educators, dietitians, and mental health professionals.
The diabetes health care team teaches families all about diabetes. It helps families create and use the child's treatment plan, also called the diabetes management plan.
The team adjusts insulin and other diabetes medications, develops meal plans, and makes physical activity recommendations to help control blood sugar levels.
All team members should take into account your child's schedule, skills, preferences, lifestyle, and growth and developmental needs. The team will also help you cope with the parenting challenges of having a child with a chronic illness and will help your child cope with his or her own set of challenges.
Keep in mind that you and your child are the captains of your diabetes health care team — all of the team activities center around helping you and your child manage diabetes. In many cases, the roles and responsibilities of the team members overlap. You should feel comfortable communicating with all of the team members because you'll be in contact with them often.
A pediatric endocrinologist is a doctor who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of children with diseases of the endocrine system, such as diabetes and growth disorders. But pediatricians, family practitioners, and other medical doctors also can treat kids with diabetes and manage their health care needs.
It's important to recognize that seeing a specialist like a pediatric endocrinologist doesn't replace the need for your child to continue to get general health care from a pediatrician or other primary care doctor.
You and your child should feel comfortable with the doctors you choose because your child's diabetes management plan is based on the doctor's prescribed treatment. Ask plenty of questions and make sure you understand the answers.
Doctors will ask detailed questions about how your child is feeling and will do physical examinations. They'll also teach you and your child about diabetes and, with recommendations from all the team members, make a diabetes management plan.
Besides monitoring your child for diabetes complications and other medical conditions that can happen with diabetes, the doctor will make changes to insulin schedules and write prescriptions for medicines and referrals to other specialists as needed.
Certified diabetes educators (CDEs) are nurses, dietitians, social workers, doctors, or pharmacists who help people manage their diabetes. CDEs have had special training to teach parents and kids.
CDEs will:
Registered dietitians are experts in nutrition and meal planning. They know about food and its effects on the body and blood sugar levels. Just as your child grows and develops, so must his or her meal plan, which you can talk about with the dietitian.
The dietitian will track your child's growth and recommend the right amount of calories needed each day. The dietitian also will:
A mental health professional, usually a social worker or psychologist (but sometimes a psychiatrist or counselor), can be a great resource for families dealing with diabetes, which can be overwhelming.
Mental health professionals can help parents watch for any problems at home, work, or school. They also can see how diabetes care affects the entire family, and help you find ways to improve your child's diabetes management.
Social workers can help you find outside resources (like support groups) for families dealing with diabetes. They can suggest ways for families to get necessary diabetes equipment and supplies and help them deal with insurance and financial issues.
Psychologists and psychiatrists can use behavior modification techniques to help kids if they're having trouble controlling their diabetes, are feeling angry or sad, or aren't taking responsibility for diabetes care as they mature. Psychiatrists also can prescribe medicines for emotional problems related to diabetes, such as depression.
Depending on where you live and the type of diabetes facility that you visit (whether it's a specialty diabetes clinic or pediatrician's office), you may find all members of your team in one place. Or you might visit several different offices for diabetes care. If you don't have access to a dietitian or mental health professional but would like to see one, ask the doctor to refer you to one.
Every person on the team is important to managing your child's diabetes. Making sure they all know the diabetes management plan will make your child's care as coordinated as possible.
Reviewed by: Steven Dowshen, MD
Date reviewed: August 2014
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5399 Wales Street, Vancouver Listing #: R2312534
An excellent development site located in the heart of Norquay Village Neighborhood Plan. Site falls within the Apartment Transition Zone. Excellent 29 years Vancouver special property with 5 bedrooms and 3 full bathrooms plus rental suite. The neighborhood is experiencing growth in populations, amenities & improvement of overall city infrastructure. Increasing amenities from mixed use developments near this site will provide convenience for future residences. Twon-homes and apartment projects in Norquay Village received great response from the market with signs of strong demand. The neighborhood demographic shows the demand for more apartment type housing from young professionals/families and down-sizes.
Taxes (2018): $6,231.04
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*Hours of operation are subject to change
Transportation Services provides Shuttles for Prairie View A & M University students, faculty and staff. For your convenience Shuttle Stops are located throughout the campus. Choose the route and stop that best serves your needs. The Shuttle Drivers are only allowed to stop at the designated stops. Please do not try to flag down the driver. Wait at a designated stop until the next shuttle arrives. Shuttles operate only during class times. There is no shuttle service during holidays when the university is closed.
Students needing to travel home for the holidays or return to campus, Transportation services provides shuttles to and from the Houston airports: George Bush Intercontinental Airport and William P. Hobby Airport.
Shuttles are also provided to two Greyhound Stops: 1) Unco Food Store in Prairie View, TX 2) Greyhound Bus Station in Houston, TX (downtown location only). Three Mega Bus Stops: 1) Shell Gas Station FM 1960 & Hwy 290, Houston, TX 2) Katy Mills Mall, Katy, TX 3) Mega Bus Stop at Travis St. & Pierce St. (downtown Houston, TX)
To request any of these services a Student Special Run Request Form must be submitted. Payments for these services can be made on Panthers Market Place. For questions or additional information contact Transportation Services 936-261-1140 or firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Making a Police Report
When to contact the police
If you want to make a police report, contact the police as soon as possible. Call 911. The sooner you make a report, the more likely it is that the police will be able to collect important evidence and apprehend the assailant. A prompt report can also strengthen a case for prosecution. However, even if some time has passed since you were sexually assaulted, it is never too late to make a police report or to seek help from other victim assistance agencies.
In many communities, police officers have had special training in assisting sexual assault victims. If you want to know about the police in your area, contact a counselor or an advocate at a local rape crisis center. Rape counselors and advocates are likely to know how the police in their community usually respond to sexual assault reports. Advocates can also accompany you when you make a police report.
Houston Area Resources
Fort Bend County Women's Center
Some reasons for making a police report
- To regain your sense of personal power and control: Many victims say that after a sexual assault, they are left with a feeling of powerlessness. Often, victims begin to feel better when they find ways to regain their sense of personal power and control. Making a police report is one way to do something about what happened to you. Taking action can give you a sense of empowerment.
- To document the crime that was committed against you: By making a police report, you will be creating a formal, legal record of the crime that was committed against you. Even if you are unsure at the moment whether or not you want to participate in the prosecution of your assailant, a police report is useful if you later decide that you want to do so.
- To preserve evidence of the assault: In most communities, if you make a police report within 72 hours after the assault, the police will assist you in getting a specialized medical examination. During the examination, a doctor or nurse will gather physical evidence and document the findings in a medical record. Like a police report, a medical record may provide valuable evidence if the assailant is prosecuted.
- To protect others from being sexually assaulted: Most rapists are repeat offenders. They commit a large number of crimes, and they hurt many people. Your report may help the police arrest and prosecute a sex offender, which in turn may help prevent others from being sexually assaulted.
Making a delayed report
It is never too late to make a police report or to seek help.
Many sexual assault victims do not report the crime immediately. A delayed report is better than no report at all. Many survivors who did not report their victimization immediately have found that making a late police report - days, weeks, months, or years later - helped them to feel a sense of empowerment and resolution. Since most rapists are repeat offenders, your report may also help the police identify a crime pattern or an assailant who has attacked other victims.
Remembering more details about the assault after the initial police report
If you remember more details after you make the initial police report, you can contact the police to provide them with the additional information. Immediately after the assault, you may have been too upset to remember everything that took place. Although difficulty recalling details is distressing, it is a very common reaction to a traumatic experience. Many victims recall more details in the days and weeks following the assault.


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Hi, have been searching for any copy at all of this miniseries from New zealand and have come up with nothing. I hope someone of you might have it, atleast some episodes.
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NEWARK, N.J.– The No. 15 Harvard men's volleyball team fell to 17-4 (9-5 in EIVA) on Friday night as it was tripped up by NJIT, 3-1. Senior Matt Jones and freshman DJ White combined for 28 kills to spark the Crimson offense but were unable to get the best of the Highlanders.
NJIT jumped out to a 2-0 leading in the match as it won the first two sets, 25-21, 29-27. The Crimson fought back in the third edging the Highlanders 25-23.
After NJIT staked a 4-2 lead in the fourth set, Harvard was able to even it at 4-4 off a Highlander service and attack error. The two teams continued to trade points as they played to 11 ties through the next 18 points. With the score 13-13, NJIT tallied three-straight points, helped by kills from Chris Kaepernick and Kevin Van Oss, forcing a Harvard timeout. The Break didn't halt the Highlander momentum as NJIT went on a 3-1 run to extend its lead to 19-14. White was able to turn the tide registering two kills as Harvard secured the next three points, making it 19-17, forcing the Highlanders to call a timeout. Out of the break the two teams continued to battle but NJIT was able to edge Harvard 25-22, and took the match 3-1.
Jones and White paced the Crimson offense with 20 and 18 kills respectively, while sophomore Chris Gibbons led the team with 11 digs. Junior Rob Lothman tallied 44 assists while sophomore Will Chambers had five blocks.
Harvard will wrap up its regular season tomorrow night at 7 p.m., when it takes on Rutgers-Newark.


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Abuse isn't just about bruises. Not all forms of abuse leave bruises where we can see them,Domestic Violence Quotes Images in South Africa . Although physical abuse is terrifying and needs to be addressed immediately there are other forms of abuse that can cause significant damage. One type of abuse that is very difficult for outsiders to detect is financial abuse. Marriage should be a partnership but when one spouse completely dominates the finances to the point that the other spouse has no control and no options financial abuse may be occurring.
What Are Signs of Potential Financial Abuse?
Every married couple handles their finances differently. In some cases one spouse handles the majority of the finances. They manage the accounts, pay the bills and deal with creditors. That does not by itself equal financial abuse.
Financial abuse occurs when one spouse is treated like an irresponsible child and Domestic Violence Effects On Children . They are cut off from funds and their knowledge about the couple's finances is severely limited. Some signs of financial abuse include:
•Strict Allowances. This isn't an amount that the spouses have agreed to limit themselves to but is instead a set amount that is grudgingly handed out from one spouse to the other and is all that will be given.
Documents, documents, documents. Written evidence is incredibly strong and can range from credit card bills showing that there is a credit card but that you aren't named on it to emails from your spouse that show the financial abuse.
Other witnesses can be incredibly powerful on your behalf. Financial abuse is hard for people outside the relationship to detect. So when someone credible comes in and tells the judge that it is happening and they can see it the judge will listen and Domestic Violence Essay .
Domestic Violence Quotes Images in South Africa ?
It can be difficult to describe what abuse is and this is because the word 'Abuse' can mean different things to different people. For one person it might relate to emotional pain, for another it might involve physical pain. With there being different degrees of pain and hurt within these two forms of violence.
As a general guideline: this could be behaviour that occurs here and there, without it happening often enough to cause too many problems. Or it could be experienced to such an extreme that one's life becomes unbearable.
In this analysis I am going to be looking at what I currently believe causes abusive behaviour and the type of individual that commits abusive behaviour on a regular basis.
The Dictionary.com Definition
Here, it is described as the following:
• To use wrongly or improperly; misuse: to abuse one's authority.
• To treat in a harmful, injurious, or offensive way: to abuse a horse.
• To abuse one's eyesight; to speak insultingly, harshly, and unjustly to or about; revile; malign.
• To commit sexual assault upon: Obsolete - to deceive or mislead.
My Definition
What comes to mind when I think of abusive, is compromise. When one is abused they are not being respected or treated in a humane way, they are being treated as objects. The abused person's feelings do not register to the abuser and if they are recognised, it is not enough to end the behaviour.
Empathy And Compassion
If one can't feel their own feelings, it is then a lot easier to do destructive things to another. The question is: why wouldn't the abuser have the ability to empathise or to be compassionate with another person?
It is said that the ability to empathise and to be compassionate is developed through caregivers that display the same behaviours to their children. This is also known as healthy mirroring and validation. What also happens through this process is that the child feels noticed and acknowledged, which are of paramount importance for the development of a healthy sense of self.
It could be said that because of their past, the person that displays abusive behaviour is abusing themselves just as much, if not more than they are abusing others. This is because the original abuser has been internalised. And even if the original abuser is not longer alive or around; they still have the potential to exist in the mind of the abuser or abused.
Here the voice exists like a parasite in the mind, merging with the mind and this makes it hard to notice and eliminate.
This shows that it is typically a two way relationship. With people who have been abused being more likely to be attracted to an abuser. If one has been abused in their younger years and it has not been looked at processed, the mind will then continue to associate this as what familiar and safe.
It will also mean that the abused will put up with this behaviour later in life. If this is what they have experienced as a child, one will then think that it is normal and all they deserve.
If one was abused by their own caregivers, it is only normal for them to assume that this is how people are that that the world is therefore unsafe and dangerous. And also that people can't be trusted.
To experience abuse can be extremely traumatising; with the consequences of abuse having the potential to last a life time. Time is said to be one of the greatest healers. Being around supportive people that one can feel safe around and who can listen without judgement is equally important.
This could be in the form of friends, family or a therapist. Here they will listen and acknowledge what is being said without judgement or blame. This is a process that cannot be rushed, and will happen in its own time and when one is ready to face what has happened. There is not a right or wrong time, only the time when one feels ready to undertake such an important step.
Heal Your Sexual Abuse Issues
Good self-esteem or positive identity is an asset to any person. It helps improve relationships, confidence, job performance and makes it easier to enjoy and embrace life to the fullest. When a person has been abused, their good self-esteem is threatened and often lost. Understanding how this happens and knowing practical ways to deal with it can be valuable tools in our self-help toolbox!
Each of us is born with the gift of individual person-hood. Our unique genetic make-up and DNA set us apart from all others. We have boundaries that help us to know where we stop and where others start. Inside of these boundaries and within the context of our individual person-hood, we are free to grow, to question, to risk, to explore and to experience life in our own unique way! If allowed to continue and encouraged from those closest to us, we become comfortable in our own skin (within our own boundaries) and a positive identity develops.
Abuse is an invasion of those boundaries; an attack on our individual person-hood. Abuse happens when someone stronger than ourselves overpowers us, either emotionally, physically, verbally or sexually. Even if the abuse is not "severe" in comparison to what others have experienced, the impact on our self-esteem can be severe. The boundaries between us and the perpetrator are blurred. We tend to own some or all of the blame for the abuse and thus take on what rightfully belongs to the invader. With our boundaries destroyed and our person-hood invaded, we are left vulnerable to the world around us and confused about who we really are.
A common reaction to the invasion of abuse is withdrawal. Sometimes the victim will withdraw so far that they actually dissociate from the event completely. This may be good in the long run except for the fact that the dissociation almost always involves other emotions, longings, fears and identity markers that can no longer be accessed. People who are extremely shy and introverted, people who are emotionally shut down and people who lack in social graces are often (not always) reacting to some kind of abuse. The invasion has left them afraid to feel, afraid to connect and afraid to make a mistake.
Another reaction to the invasion of abuse is an attempt to build a wall of defense. The feeling of vulnerability is countered by erecting some kind of wall that we believe will protect us. We can become very angry and keep others at arms length by our temper. We can become very controlling and thus minimize the possibility of future hurt. We can become very sarcastic or funny to deflect our real feelings. We can become an overachiever so that others will identify us by our accomplishments and not by our fears. These walls feel protective but are actually putting us in bondage. We cannot do life without our anger, control, sarcasm, humor or achievements so we are not free to be who we really are... we are forced to keep up the act... and that is exhausting.
This second reaction was my own way of dealing with childhood sexual abuse. I kept the walls firmly in place from age 11 until age 35. At that point, exhausted from trying to keep myself safe, I attempted suicide, not out of despair as much as out of exhaustion!
When we react in either of these ways to abuse, we end up losing ourselves, our true identity, our positive identity or self-esteem. There is another way. From my own experience I have learned the power of these positive and practical steps that can lead us out of brokenness and into confidence in who we really are. Consider the following:
1) Be honest about our abuse.
We cannot properly deal with all of the feelings and reactions associated with our abuse if we refuse to face what actually happened. As with any recovery program, admitting the problem is the beginning of healing.
2) Forgive those who hurt us.
Holding on to the anger, hatred, malice or even ambivalence toward our abuser only keeps us tied to them and to the abuse and its consequences. Forgiveness does not mean that you are saying it was no big deal. It is not saying that you would let them hurt you again. It is not saying that it did not happen. Forgiveness is simply a choice to release them after coming to the conclusion that there is nothing they could do that would take away what happened to us.
3) Surrender our coping mechanisms.
Just as we have to be honest about our abuse, we have to be honest about all of the ways that we have developed to try to help ourselves cope with the abuse. What walls have we erected? What masks have we put on to hide from others? What self-medicating habits have we picked up? Name these coping mechanisms and then willingly lay them down. We may need to invite a few people who are close to us into this process since we often have blind spots related to coping.
4) Embrace the truth about who we really are.
Learn to look beyond what happened to us to the person we really are on the inside. At this point, having a relationship with God is a key factor. If we have become connected with our Creator through the sacrifice of His Son Christ Jesus, we get our true identity from Him. We are His sons and daughter, regardless of our abuse, achievements, failures or coping mechanisms.
5) Join a safe community.
At this point, with walls torn down and feelings exposed, belonging to a community where we feel safe is vital. A support group, home group, counselor or accountability group can provide a place for us to grow in our new positive identity. People who know our need for healing and encouragement will be a great help in this process of rebuilding.
Commit with me not to allow past abuse in our lives to rob us of our positive identity. Choose life!