Thomas Coyote Baxter

Well finally migrated every last bit of my old blog over to my spanking new WordPress install and it’s a total joy to use. Installed all my plugins, put up some links and just need google to respider it all and we’ll be back in business. I want some serious good discussions on here so get yer asses on here. Until I get my computer built and back into Liberty City I’m gonna be doing very little apart from work

Okay right I must just either be pretty stupid or the government is but I cannot comprehend the logic behind pumping billions of pounds into the crumbling UK economy.

Traders were shocked yesterday when share prices rose slightly. Shocking! considering Gordon Brown has just piled in 37 billion pounds. I’d expect a short-term rise for that, wouldn’t you. The problem with piling this kind of cash into an economy on the verge of destruction is that people are only looking at the very small picture.

We’re bailing out banks just now and that is only a small part of the greater problem. Banks are the lifeblood of economy for sure but let’s not forget that there are foundations of society in all different sectors. Housing companies are going bankrupt left, right and center because of the credit crisis so no more houses are being built. People are panicking all over the place which is unavoidable so houses are being sold. The housing market is crashing and I’ve stated for years that this was unavoidable but with no mortgages being granted and no houses being built, it’s only a matter of time before there is no market.

The cost of fuel is through the roof, the cost of living is extremely high and redundancy has never been higher. Our trade with the US is going to take a serious nosedive soon when the dollar and the pound exchange rate is 1=1 (this looks set to happen in my eyes) or even worse, it could even see 1 pound being worth just 50 cents.

I don’t understand why the government doesn’t raise capital to subsidise the economy from routes which I see as being clearly obvious. For example, why not tax gambling? It’s one of the few growth industries in Britain and would fill a gaping hole in society’s funding!

This is more of a late-night rant than a serious discussion so I ain’t gonna waste my time lookin into everything but I just fear that very shortly all our banks will have to be owned by an overseas company like Citibank, E-Trade or Chase just to ensure there’s a certain level of stability in our economy.

All I can say is guys, the cheap credit’s come, your time is up. The building’s on fire, so head for the fucking water.

Right I know I’ve been very anti- Scientology recently and someone recently asked me if I’d like to join the church of Scientology which I declined. The church fascinates me and I have a lot of respect for L. Ron Hubbard. I also have a lot of anger towards the man though but a lot of that can be contributed to the fact he was clearly going mad on drugs, and mad in general. In this mini-essay I’m going to explain why I believe L. Ron has managed to get right to the very heart of mental health and how the church has taken it too far.
I only read Dianetics recently, the book which Scientology is based on, and I have to admit it is one of the most influential books I’ve ever read. Now I know I haven’t read many books, and read works only by people I find extraordinary (i.e Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe). L. Ron Hubbard I do find extraordinary. How can one man exert so much power over so many people despite proving himself to be nothing more than an imaginative story-teller, proven time and time again to be a two-faced liar is fascinating. Anyway, the book explains how traumatic events in your life get stored in your ‘reactive mind’ which is a memory bank that stores events that cause you distress. According to the book, we all have standard memory banks which remember the basic things that occur in your life (i.e running a bath, picking up the phone etc), an analytical mind which analyses all the information it processes, and the reactive mind which stores pain or painful memories. If a dog bites your hand while you’re holding a cat for example, your reactive mind remembers what happened when you were with the dog, the smell of the cat and the sounds you heard. That means there’s a good chance that the next time you see a dog, you will smell the cat’s scent or hear the dog barking as the engram has been ‘re-awoken’ in your brain. It’s common sense in many ways but the way Hubbard explains everything makes you realise how simple the mind can or could be. Another part of the book explains that the human instinct is to survive. It explains how the brain wants to eliminate these ‘reactive mind engrams’ by correcting the error when the situation presents itself again. For example, if you drop a coffee cup and it spills coffee all over your mum’s white sofa, say she smacks you on the head and calls you an idiot. That engram stores itself in your reactive mind. When you buy a cream sofa and your child spills coffee on it, your brain keys in the engram so you’re very likely to smack them on the head and call them an idiot.
To me I think the book is a brilliant piece of literature to help those with mental health problems. Myself, having such problems, gained a lot from it and even though L. Ron Hubbard probably didn’t believe much of what was written still explains the ‘reactive mind’ in a way that could fool you into believing he invented the human mind.

The problem with L. Ron is his views on everything else was warped and obviously most came through his addiction to Cocaine and Mescaline. He claims that Psychiatry is evil. I have no understanding of this particular belief as I do not believe psychiatry in any way to be evil. If people need it, let them have it. There’s certainly no sense in letting people run about stabbing their parents like 28 year old Jeremy Perkins did when his parents refused to let him see a shrink because of their faith. It may be just me but I’m positive I can see exactly what Hubbard was trying to say when this view came about. He believed, like I do, that people should be able to heal themselves. I don’t like psychiatry myself, I certainly don’t believe it to be evil but I’d rather meditate or use drugs (some legal, some not) to let my feelings and fears out. In the Scientology religion, there are those known as ‘auditors’ who counsel you and help release you of some of your burdens (it has to be added though, how the heck is this not another form of psychiatry???) and I think this practice is tremendous. If I didn’t have such a problem with the church itself I would love to become an auditor as some of the people I’ve seen finally obtain some release from these sessions astounds me. I’ve managed to obtain most of the Scientology material for auditing from an undisclosed source, however, and I intend to understand the entire practice. As for things like the E-meter (a device supposedly used to detect stress), it’s quite plain for me to see that it was just a way for Hubbard to make money, considering he was selling them for a ridiculous price compared to how much he was buying them for.

The term for someone who is clear in Scientology is a condition in which a person is free of the unwanted influence of engrams, unwanted emotions or painful traumas which are not readily available to the awareness of present time. Now I don’t know about anyone else but to me that sounds like a robot and this is completely unattainable in my opinion. I believe that if a person is able to become ‘clear’ then they are unable to create new engrams. Engrams are created by traumatic events so in order to avoid them, this means the person should cut all ties with painful relations. This is how I believe the church of Scientology doesn’t work effectively. To avoid new engrams being created so the person can become ‘clear’, the church recommends that you sever ties with anyone causing you stress. So if my mother told me she didn’t like the job I was doing, it would be creating me unnecessary stress and so the church recommends I remove her from my life. I think I’d rather have an engram there and a family in all honest, the sweet is never as sweet without the sour as they say. I think the problems with disconnection in the church stems from Hubbard’s personal problems with relationships. His several divorces and disconnection from his sons show that the Church Of Scientology could really be ‘life imitating art’ in the words of Andy Warhol?

The story of Xenu and the aliens, in my opinion, is a lot of nonsense and I’d be shocked to find that Hubbard didn’t think so too. This was clearly just a bit of fun for him to see how easily people could adapt their views to a new religion. I don’t believe he had a problem with woman or black people any more than anyone else who lived around the same time. People have to remember the views that the public had about both woman and black people in the 40s,50s, and some of the 60s.
Hubbard’s ‘Fair Game’ strategy is just the mark of an intense person. Fair game is a sort of revenge tactic. If someone speaks against the church then they “may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed”. I have thoughts like this sometimes too. If someone doesn’t get on board with you then they’re against you. Most people with an intense lifestyle (possibly Manic Depressive) feels the need to get revenge on their enemies a fair amount of the time. Obviously this is not proven but I’m just speaking from experience. Drugs can also make you a more aggressive person too.

The Church of Scientology follows Hubbard’s laws explicitly which is why it has gone too far in my opinion. I don’t necessarily blame the Scientologists for being as intense as they are because they are purely following the rules laid out by a ‘madman’. The problem is that I can clearly see what Hubbard obviously believed himself and how people have just taken his words as gospel instead of looking at them as the rantings of someone verging on the edge of sanity.

The one thing that truly sickens me about Scientology, however, is how they claim that the holocaust in World War II was caused by psychiatry. As someone following the Jewish faith I find this insulting and offensive. I think the people who were there have the right to be angry with the church who are merely speculating on an incident they know very little about. If they looked slightly closer they’d find that the holocaust was caused by a madman who managed to dupe the masses into believing his ideas were great; very like the late Ron Hubbard. How ironic.
Therefore I state once again that L. Ron Hubbard was a genius in my eyes. He was probably high on Cocaine, Mescaline and who knows what other drugs when he wrote Dianetics but to me the book does just hit the nail on the head. It has helped me open up my mind to new techniques and ideas I would have never thought of. Some of Hubbard’s auditing techniques are excellent forms of therapy which I wish I could recommend, but can’t because of the church’s secretive nature. Hubbard was going mad, no doubt about it, and I feel this showed in his later lectures and his letters to his wives yet the church still believes every word he ever wrote. There are people who I can clearly see have been helped by the church (I truly believe Kirstie Alley wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for them) but there are others which scare me (Tom Cruise just looks hypnotized by it all). There are also the cases of Lisa Mcpherson to take into account where Scientologists basically killed her by depriving her of food & water for 17 days. They say she chose to go with them when she was taken to hospital but that brings is to the biggest question of them all. If Psychiatrists should be banned, and someone states they do not need a psychiatrist or any help from the hospital, who’s there to question their sanity?