England's England

100 tests to see if you’ve discovered a cult

Here are a fascinating 100 tests you can make about any organisation or ‘collective thought’ process you support or believe in, to determine whether or not it’s exhibiting the signs of being a cult.  The more of the tests that seem to apply to whatever you are testing, the stronger the cult actually is.  Getting 100 is a bit extreme, because that includes test 100 which is where the organisation or ‘collective thought’ process you are following all kill themselves.  I hope you aren’t part of anything that does that.

This test can be applied to anything from Scientology, through to Catholicism, Islam, and, surprisingly, ‘collective thought’ movements such as the climate change/global warming lobbyists, or back down to small clubs and societies.  Some might suggest it even covers such entities as Radio Caroline!

If you have a good few hours to spare, please take a read of the well researched and well presented site The Orange Papers.  The section you need starts here and you will need to click through to many other pages to read the entire 100: http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-cult_q0.html

If you haven’t got time to do much more than speed read, here are the 100 tests:

1. The Guru is always right.

2. You are always wrong.

3. No Exit.

4. No Graduates.

5. Cult-speak.

6. Group-think, Suppression of Dissent, and Enforced Conformity in Thinking

7. Irrationality.

8. Suspension of disbelief.

9. Denigration of competing sects, cults, religions…

10. Personal attacks on critics.

11. Insistence that the cult is THE ONLY WAY.

12. The cult and its members are special.

13. Induction of guilt, and the use of guilt to manipulate cult members.

14. Unquestionable Dogma, Sacred Science, and Infallible Ideology.

15. Indoctrination of members.

16. Appeals to “holy” or “wise” authorities.

17. Instant Community.

18. Instant Intimacy.

19. Surrender To The Cult.

20. Giggly wonderfulness and starry-eyed faith.

21. Personal testimonies of earlier converts.

22. The cult is self-absorbed.

23. Dual Purposes, Hidden Agendas, and Ulterior Motives.

24. Aggressive Recruiting.

25. Deceptive Recruiting.

26. No Humor.

27. You Can’t Tell The Truth.

28. Cloning — You become a clone of the cult leader or other elder cult members.

29. You must change your beliefs to conform to the group’s beliefs.

30. The End Justifies The Means.

31. Dishonesty, Deceit, Denial, Falsification, and Rewriting History.

32. Different Levels of Truth.

33. Newcomers can’t think right.

34. The Cult Implants Phobias.

35. The Cult is Money-Grubbing.

36. Confession Sessions.

37. A System of Punishments and Rewards.

38. An Impossible Superhuman Model of Perfection.

39. Mentoring.

40. Intrusiveness.

41. Disturbed Guru, Mentally Ill Leader.

42. Disturbed Members, Mentally Ill Followers.

43. Create a sense of powerlessness, covert fear, guilt, and dependency.

44. Dispensed existence

45. Ideology Over Experience, Observation, and Logic

46. Keep them unaware that there is an agenda to change them

47. Thought-Stopping Language. Thought-terminating clichés and slogans.

48. Mystical Manipulation

49. The guru or the group demands ultra-loyalty and total committment.

50. Demands for Total Faith and Total Trust

51. Members Get No Respect. They Get Abused.

52. Inconsistency. Contradictory Messages

53. Hierarchical, Authoritarian Power Structure, and Social Castes

54. Front groups, masquerading recruiters, hidden promoters, and disguised propagandists

55. Belief equals truth

56. Use of double-binds

57. The cult leader is not held accountable for his actions.

58. Everybody else needs the guru to boss him around, but nobody bosses the guru around.

59. The guru criticizes everybody else, but nobody criticizes the guru.

60. Dispensed truth and social definition of reality

61. The Guru Is Extra-Special.

62. Flexible, shifting morality

63. Separatism

64. Inability to tolerate criticism

65. A Charismatic Leader

66. Calls to Obliterate Self

67. Don’t Trust Your Own Mind.

68. Don’t Feel Your Own Feelings.

69. The cult takes over the individual’s decision-making process.

70. You Owe The Group.

71. We Have The Panacea.

72. Progressive Indoctrination and Progressive Commitments

73. Magical, Mystical, Unexplainable Workings

74. Trance-Inducing Practices

75. New Identity — Redefinition of Self — Revision of Personal History

76. Membership Rivalry

77. True Believers

78. Scapegoating and Excommunication

79. Promised Powers or Knowledge

80. It’s a con. You don’t get the promised goodies.

81. Hypocrisy

82. Denial of the truth. Reversal of reality. Rationalization and Denial.

83. Seeing Through Tinted Lenses

84. You can’t make it without the cult.

85. Enemy-making and Devaluing the Outsider

86. The cult wants to own you.

87. Channelling or other occult, unchallengeable, sources of information.

88. They Make You Dependent On The Group.

89. Demands For Compliance With The Group

90. Newcomers Need Fixing.

91. Use of the Cognitive Dissonance Technique.

92. Grandiose existence. Bombastic, Grandiose Claims.

93. Black And White Thinking

94. The use of heavy-duty mind control and rapid conversion techniques.

95. Threats of bodily harm or death to someone who leaves the cult.

96. Threats of bodily harm or death to someone who criticizes the cult.

97. Appropriation of all of the members’ worldly wealth.

98. Making cult members work long hours for free.

99. Total immersion and total isolation.

100. Mass suicide.

Did Sky News kill Raoul Moat?

Who killed Raoul Moat?  He pulled the trigger, yes, but was he actually killed by the media?  Did Sky News contribute to his death?

Raoul Moat’s death is a satisfactory outcome as far as I’m concerned.  Regardless of whatever the mitigating circumstances might be that the chattering classes will dine out on forever, he was a man who took a cool and calculated decision to hunt down and kill in cold blood his ex-girlfriend’s new partner. He made the choice to attempt to murder his ex-girlfriend, fate leaving her alive but severely wounded.  He later decided to try to kill a random policeman.  Fate again just about kept him alive, despite Moat wanting him dead.  If Moat had had his way three people would now be dead, maybe even more.

Yet, suddenly we are supposed to feel sorry for him because he then committed suicide?  Give me a break.  We should rejoice in the £35,000 a year plus that we’ll be saving for the next how ever many years he would have been in prison until he was let out yet again (To do it all over again?)!  

Prison obviously doesn’t work as a deterrent or a punishment - Jaime Bulger’s smiling murderer is testament to that - and its only purpose seems now to be to slightly slow down the number of victims those inside are able to create during the woefully short period they are there.  It temporarily reduces the victim count, that’s all it does. 

Anyway, that aside, it is apparently humane to try to bring such a stand-off situation to an end without the loss of life of the murderer.

When finally he was cornered and playing the stand-off game with the police, instead of being allowed to be ‘talked down’ or allowed to feel safe in order to become confident with the negotiator, he was spooked by noises behind him.  Constantly asking who was behind him and constantly being reassured that nobody was behind him, the whole game of gaining his trust and confidence was compromised by members of the media.

Desperate for pictures of what they hoped would be the shoot-out with lots and lots of graphic blood scenes that they could carefully pixelate out and broadcast on a loop for the next few days, Sky News sent in one of their reporters.  Ignoring police pleas to keep behind an exclusion zone to allow them to do their job with Moat, they clumsily and noisily crept over gardens and undergrowth complete with camera and microphone, clicking away on their Blackberrys, all of which spooked the madman and made a lie of reassurances that nobody was behind him and that he was safe.

Eventually the police had to go scrambling in to tell the Sky News crew to “Fuck right off”, which reluctantly they did.  They later reported what terrible injustice had befallen them as if they had been grossly wronged, and made no attempts at apologising for putting at risk the lives of the negotiating officers, or Moat himself.  

It wasn’t just Sky News of course, there were other ‘media’ types stumbling about in the dark behind Moat.  All were contributing to spooking Moat and not allowing him to calm down.

At no time did they consider that they may have contributed to his death.  The media never admits to such an involvement, never takes responsibility, never apologises.  

Instead, having heard that Moat was now dead and realising they hadn’t had the glorious trophy of being able to play the moment of death over and over again, they stamped their feet and blamed the nasty policemen who had been distracted from their job of dealing with Moat and forced to find and move the intrusive media away from the scene.  The media hated this exclusion and needed to kick back and punish somebody.

What could they do to punish these nasty police?  They immediately hounded blood relatives - Moat’s brother and uncle - looking for outrage.  Yes, they got their outrage.  And the relatives’ outrage was against the police, exactly who the media wanted to punish through other people’s outrage for denying them their ‘money shot’. 

Suddenly, according to the media, the dead Moat was now the victim and the police had done something wrong, and the relatives were outraged for not being allowed to do the police’s job of ‘talking down’ Moat, and it was everybody’s fault except the media’s who were now giving Moat’s relatives their 15 minutes of fame.  Disgusting.

The media is no stranger to causing death - look at what they did to Princess Diana - but you’d think that they’d maybe spend a few moments of reflection on how they helped kill Moat.  As usual, they won’t, and we’ll get no apology and no lessons learned.   

Urban regeneration? No! These need termination.

Hmmm. That looks very dangerous, somebody could fall into that and break their legs, I mused as I passed an open hole from which the large metal grating of a roadside drain had been prised. A few steps further on I discovered what it had been used for as the bullet-proof reinforced heavy glass front of a cash machine had showered the street with flakes of itself as it had been subjected to a repeated pounding. A bit further on they had systematically smashed the windows of parked cars. All of this no doubt a bit of a laugh on a Friday afternoon on leaving school.

The bit I don’t understand is why these kids are allowed to terrorise and vandalise the neighbourhood without a thing being done to stop them. Locals live in fear of being turned on and having their homes and property repeatedly targeted if they dare challenge or speak out. Even if they do say something, nothing happens and the police seem powerless.

This, for the 2010s, is how 10 year olds control and terrorise their community in Breckfield, Liverpool.

Fear of Mono

Around and about radio enthusiast sites and mass debating pits I notice there continues this horror and fear of mono.

Why are (radio anorak type) people so scared of mono?

Just because you can broadcast in stereo on FM it doesn’t mean you have to, does it? If your programme content doesn’t actually need to be in stereo because it’s just voices, mainly on the phone or ‘down the line’, then what’s wrong with broadcasting in mono?

Nothing.

And yet, there’s a mass suicide and panic by foaming anoraks herding themselves up to the top of multi-storey car-parks ready to throw themselves off because a station has dared to switch to mono. Case in point: LBC 97.3 in London, a radio station that is speech only and plays no music whatsoever, and so has no need to be in stereo.

The owners of LBC are talking about providing similar stations in other areas (such as Manchester) and only broadcasting in mono on FM. Again, there are anoraks acting like rabid dogs over this announcement. I don’t get it. Why does this upset anoraks so much? Foaming at the mouth they are.

I remember decades ago anoraks calling a London pirate I was on berating the fact that we were in mono whilst most other pirates of the day were in stereo. This annoyed the engineer so much that he fitted a tone generator in line to light the stereo lights in the whinging anoraks’ receivers. We were still actually and completely in mono, nothing had changed, but the foaming anoraks were suddenly happy and stopped whinging because their stereo light was on. Indeed, one said we were much clearer and a far better listen. Pathetic.

I don’t get this need to waste bandwidth unnecessarily. If the programme content doesn’t need stereo, then don’t be in stereo. If the programme content is designed to be consumed in places where it doesn’t need to be high quality, then let it be low quality.

Yet, all the time, these foaming anoraks are giving themselves coronaries because stations aren’t wasting bandwidth just to please them and their obscure unnecessary quality demands.

Shouldn’t they actually listen to and try to enjoy the content of the radio stations instead of worrying about matters technical that no ordinary listener cares two hoots about?

Major weather warning?

By this time next Monday we should all know about a number of major events on Planet Earth.

Apparently it’s 85% confirmed that this coming weekend the planet should be receiving a number of major solar burst influences to which the planet will respond as it usually does by reacting with events like Earthquakes, Volcanic Eruptions, Floods, Storms and Major Tornadoes. There should be a couple of notable major events, plus around the UK there should be a weather reaction.

So, we can expect a 1 in 20 year weather event this weekend somewhere across the UK or Ireland or very nearby, in other words something like a sudden localised catastrophic deluge or flood or extreme wind event.

No doubt it’ll be marketed by the media and the Met Office as part of MAN MADE climate change, and the usual fear mongering will point to carbon emissions or other stuff we are supposed to have done that will have caused it.

Meanwhile, what won’t be relayed to the public will be how the whole event was predicted by studying and understanding the sun’s influence on this planet, or how the Met Office, whose computer models ignore the sun’s influence on our weather, completely missed the future event and so endangered life by not warning of it.

So, this time next week we’ll be sitting here saying it was rubbish and nothing happened, or we’ll be nearer to accepting that weather and climate is controlled by the sun.

Which will it be?

David Irving and the Christian couple’s £10,000

A few years ago there were two pieces of news that happened within a month of each other that I found confusing.

Firstly was a ‘victory’ by some Christians. They were given a payout of £10,000 from the police for the way they were dealt with when the local council tried to stop them putting their ‘anti-gay’ literature next to some ‘pro-gay’ literature and accused them of being homophobic. Now, this apparently boiled down to being a victory for free speech and the freedom to express oneself as one sees fit.

Next was the news of the return to the UK of David Irving, a ‘Holocaust denier’. He had just spend a period in jail for daring to speak freely and express himself and his views about the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. Ok, ok, yes, it’s a bit more complex than that.

However, what it’s not is the freedom to speak freely and express himself. I don’t really get the difference here: It seems that depending on the subject and the ‘target’ of your dispute, you are either allowed to hold a view or you are not.

One could argue that it appears that followers of religions born of the Middle East are given privileges over those who free-think or research ‘truth’.

The Christian couple wanted to spread the view that homosexuality is morally wrong. Their view is an opinion propagated by the organisers of their religion. Despite it having a victim – ie, anybody who finds themselves to be homosexual is ‘committing a moral sin’ – it appears to be ok for their brand of Christianity to push that point of view.

Now, I have my own views about homosexuality and why it exists, but where a person is homosexual I strongly agree that they should be allowed to be homosexual without anybody telling them they are sinful or acting in an intimidating fashion.  We don’t attack people for being heterosexual, so why attack people for being homosexual. Frankly, it’s nobody’s business what your sexuality is.

Yet, this Christian couple are allowed to propagate their anti-gay belief, and are paid £10,000 out of public funds as an apology for being initially challenged about it.

On the other hand, David Irving has produced some fairly damning original documentation that there is now what he calls a ‘Holocaust Industry’ with a purpose of deliberately over-exaggerating the actual truth about the World War Two death camps, and yet because he challenges one of the basic tenants of another religious group – the Jews – he spends a year in jail.

Of course, even one victim of genocide is one victim too many, but what are the actual facts? Again it’s one of those subjects over which loonies from either side can pull or push me to side with their beliefs. I mean, even the ‘we never landed on the moon’ brigade have compelling arguments until you actually properly deconstruct them. So, how am I supposed to learn what really happened during the War?

But I do want to hear what people have to say. Having them muted or jailed for not toeing a particular line is very scary. Religion is very good at that – almost as good at that as it is with changing and re-writing history in the first place. Maybe it’s that simple fact that makes me stop and consider what Irving is trying to tell the world, although reading through his website I’m not really any the wiser. His evidence appears quite watertight on first look, but then so does the ‘we didn’t land on the moon’ stuff.

Ok, I’ve no idea if what he’s saying is right or wrong. But, what I do know is wrong is the need for a religious group to persecute him for saying it. Just as it is also wrong for a religious group to persecute people because of the sexual orientation they’ve been dealt in life.

Yet, these two Middle Eastern religious groups seem to have rights above normal free-thinking morality. That just can’t be right, can it?

Muslim children excluded from school music lessons

People are allowed to get away with so many unacceptable and bad things under the disguise of it being a religious practice.  

We all know how the Catholic paedophile rings operated by pretending that they were providing pastoral care and a religion when really they were just a huge network of homosexual kiddie-fiddlers disguised as caring god-botherers.  

We all know how men are able to breed their daughters as slaves to be sold but this is disguised as being the ‘Islamic’ way of finding a husband for a daughter.  

We all know how religions are used to ‘excuse’ genital abuse and mutilation, especially the Jewish and Muslim ones.

But, why or how is music ‘evil’?  Yes, music.

Religion has a strange relationship with music.  It probably always has.  The strange scary Christians in America to this day bark out their warnings of how listening to rock ‘n’ roll puts the listener directly in league with the devil. But why do they say that?

Sixty years ago the Rolling Stones and the Beatles had their records burned by mad Christians.  Fifty years ago Christian zealots warned of satanic messages if Black Sabbath (whoops, bad name as far as the religious are concerned) records were played backwards.

And this century, a large number of Muslim schoolgirls (and some schoolboys) are not allowed to attend music lessons.  They will be punished if they do.   Even the simple concept of the handling of a recorder or a violin and learning how to produce solemn classical music is forbidden.  The Islamic extremists feel that music is a bad thing, and so their child abuse is to bring their children up away from the beauty that music can be.

There are many enlightened followers of Islam who see that music has its place, yet a growing number are forbidding their children from music lessons despite these being part of the national curriculum.  Ofstead and everybody from the political-correctness-gone-mad camp will of course totally ignore this and pretend it’s not happening, so it is a hidden abuse.

Compare and contrast what would happen if I randomly decided that Mathematics is evil.  (Well, I’m not far off from the truth, am I?)  

Supposing I forbade my children from attending Maths lessons despite Maths being part of the national curriculum.  What would happen to me?  Quite rightly I’d be warned and told I couldn’t do this, and if it got into the press I’d be (quite rightly) labelled as a nutter and child abuser.

Yet nobody bats an eyelid when Muslim children are forced by their fathers to exclude themselves from music lessons.  Isn’t it time we got real and turned round to those with these primitive and barbaric ‘traditions’ and forced them to stop their child abuse and move into this Millennium. We don’t want them abusing their children by trying to keep everything as it was in the unenlightened tribal times of a few Millenniums ago?  They need to learn to move on and get with the times.  

It’s time to stop pussy-footing around these mad people, break the endless cycle of centuries of abuse and save the children.