Ursula Caberta

This week, a 90-minute documentary about Scientology's intelligence-gathering wing, the Office of Special Affairs, aired on the French and German cultural channel ARTE.

Titled "Office of Special Affairs: Der Scientology-Geheimdienst" (Scientology's Secret Service), it included interviews with several people very familiar to readers of this blog: Marc Headley, Mike Rinder, Gerry Armstrong, and Tiziano Lugli. It also featured Ursula Caberta, the Hamburg politician who for years led a state-sponsored attempt to curb Scientology. We spoke to her on the telephone yesterday about the documentary. After the jump, her thoughts, as well as the documentary itself, with English subtitles.

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Last month, we noted that Lisa Marie Presley's single "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet," which she released ahead of her new album, Storm and Grace, came with lyrics that read like a kiss-off to the Church of Scientology, even using some of Scientology's jargon -- like the very telling word suppressive. (For several years there have been rumors that Presley was disillusioned with the church.)

This week, the rest of the album comes out, and we got our hands on the lyrics to the rest of the tracks. After you read the words to the song "So Long" we have a feeling you'll agree with us that there's no longer any doubt how Presley, 44, feels about Scientology.

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Scientologists don't really have a Sunday service. They like to say that they do, because they crave mainstream acceptance. But unless Xenu rested after six days and L. Ron Hubbard just forgot to mention it, there's no reason for Scientologists to treat Sunday any differently than every other day of coursework, detoxes, fundraising, and generally clearing the planet.

So here at the Voice, we've come up with a Scientology Sunday tradition of our own, and we call it Sunday Funnies! Our sources regularly send us Scientology's wacky and tacky fundraising mailers, and each week we choose a few of them to gaze upon, hoping that it inspires you to wax eloquent in our comments section. So here we go...

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Scientologists don't really have a Sunday service. They like to say that they do, because they crave mainstream acceptance. But unless Xenu rested after six days and L. Ron Hubbard just forgot to mention it, there's no reason for Scientologists to treat Sunday any differently than every other day of coursework, detoxes, fundraising, and generally clearing the planet.

So here at the Voice, we've come up with a Scientology Sunday tradition of our own, and we call it Sunday Funnies! Our sources regularly send us Scientology's wacky and tacky fundraising mailers, and each week we choose a few of them to gaze upon, hoping that it inspires you to wax eloquent in our comments section. So here we go...

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From the land of the seriously hard to believe, a major statistical report by the New York city Department of Education, which oversees our public schools, to the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights is so riddled with obvious errors as to be laughable.

The exhaustive report covers 2009-2010, but was released earlier this year. It gives overall and school by school data for the largest public school system in the country.

Consider: The Ed. bosses at Tweed Courthouse reported that of the 979,960 students in the system, there isn't a single one who receives free or reduced price lunch.

They claimed that of 1,530 schools, there are no charter or alternative schools in the city. And they say there was one student expelled for the entire year in the entire system, nor was a single student referred to law enforcement, or arrested in school.

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Scientologists don't really have a Sunday service. They like to say that they do, because they crave mainstream acceptance. But unless Xenu rested after six days and L. Ron Hubbard just forgot to mention it, there's no reason for Scientologists to treat Sunday any differently than every other day of coursework, detoxes, fundraising, and generally clearing the planet.

So here at the Voice, we've come up with a Scientology Sunday tradition of our own, and we call it Sunday Funnies! Our sources regularly send us Scientology's wacky and tacky fundraising mailers, and each week we choose a few of them to gaze upon, hoping that it inspires you to wax eloquent in our comments section. So here we go...

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Oh my, do we have a treat for you today. For several weeks now, we've been reporting on the "L. Ron Hubbard Writers and Illustrators of the Future" contest. For several years, certain writers have questioned the connection between the contest and Scientology, which owns and operates it. And recently, we dug up surprising links between the contest and shocking abuse allegedly happening at Scientology's international headquarters.

Tonight, the contest will celebrate its big annual gala. All week, Scientology has been treating a new set of winners to workshops and dinners. And it all culminates with the big party this evening. Get a load of last year's dance number (above), which we're told dramatizes the winning stories of 2011. Interpretive dance! This party is off the hook!

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Michael Zamora/The Independent

This weekend's lengthy profile of Marty Rathbun by The Independent's Guy Adams really brought back a lot of memories for us.

Last year, we brought you frequent coverage of the bizarre "Squirrel Busters" siege at Rathbun's house near Corpus Christi, Texas. For some five months, a strange spiritual showdown took place in little Ingleside on the Bay, and as it escalated, we kept waiting for major U.S. media to jump on the story.

Well, we're still waiting. But at least readers in the UK have now been treated to a thorough and entertaining telling of the tale.

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We've shuffled up our schedule a bit here in the underground bunker -- it was either that, or the cats would be dining on our corpse with the klaxons going off for weeks before we were discovered. Now that things are a bit more relaxed, we can take in the past week with a Sunday morning warm beverage and only a hint of tying one on last night.

The most fun we had this past week, of course, was sharing with you a few key segments from this year's big L. Ron Hubbard Birthday Event. There were so many great moments. But clearly, the most stunning utterance of the night came from LRH official biographer Dan Sherman, who said that in late 1945, Hubbard personally stopped Richard Nixon and a gang of atomic scientists from overthrowing the U.S. government with nuclear weapons.

So taken aback were we by that claim, we contacted the Richard Nixon Foundation, and yes, we got a reply!

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Scientologists don't really have a Sunday service. They like to say that they do, because they crave mainstream acceptance. But unless Xenu rested after six days and L. Ron Hubbard just forgot to mention it, there's no reason for Scientologists to treat Sunday any differently than every other day of coursework, detoxes, fundraising, and generally clearing the planet.

So here at the Voice, we've come up with a Scientology Sunday tradition of our own, and we call it Sunday Funnies! Our sources regularly send us Scientology's wacky and tacky fundraising mailers, and each week we choose a few of them to gaze upon, hoping that it inspires you to wax eloquent in our comments section. So here we go...

More >>