And as an FYI, in case you hadn’t heard, the UK’s #1 Swing Band, The Jive Aces have a bunch of their recent tunes out there on Spotify right now.
The Jives are my favorite swing band, and listening to them at work is a constant reminder to me that I need to somehow get back into swinging with my wife.
Wife Swing Dancing with the Jive Aces at the 2001 IAS Christmas Ball

Testing out the new quick post function on the WordPress Android app, with a photo of my son playing in the chapel of the DC Church of Scientology.
Just what I like to hear! 
This, from CNN:
Los Angeles, California (CNN) — A Nebraska man is expected to plead guilty next week to launching a cyber attack that shut down the Church of Scientology’s Web sites, federal prosecutors said Monday.
Brian Thomas Mettenbrink, 20, of Grand Island, Nebraska, was accused of participating in an attack orchestrated by a group that called itself "Anonymous."
The group led protests against the church in various parts of the country before announcing in January 2008 that it would launch a cyber offensive, said Robert Lopez of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.
Mettenbrink admitted in court that he downloaded software from an "Anonymous" message board and used it to launch "denial of service" attacks on Scientology Web sites.
In such attacks, hackers flood a target site with so much traffic that it is unable to handle the volume and slows to a crawl or crashes altogether. As a result, the site is then unavailable to legitimate users.
The group targeted the church after it forced Web sites to yank a leaked video of actor and church member Tom Cruise fervently making the case for Scientology.
The video was intended for attendees at a church award ceremony in 2004 where Cruise was being honored.
"We are the authorities on getting people off drugs, we are the authorities on the mind, we are the authorities on improving conditions … we can rehabilitate criminals," Cruise says in the video.
In 2008, the video was leaked online and widely ridiculed.
The church responded by threatening to sue Web sites unless they removed the clip. "Anonymous" then launched its attack.
As part of its offensive, the group asked Internet users to not only download the "denial of service" software from its message board, but also to place prank phone calls, post proprietary church documents online, and send black pages to church fax machines to waste ink.
The group posted a YouTube video that said it aimed to "expel Scientology from the Internet."
"Expect us," the video ended. The attacks targeted local and global sites of the church.
Mettenbrink is expected to plead guilty in federal court next week to a misdemeanor charge of accessing a protected computer with authorization. He agreed to serve a year in prison, Lopez said.
Mettenbrink’s is the second successful prosecution connected to the "Anonymous" attacks. Last year, Dmitriy Guzner of Verona, New Jersey, was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison for attacks on Scientology sites.
Anonymous said to “Expect Us” – guess they should have heeded the same message.
In having a look through Science of Survival (arguably one of my favourites of all of the Dianetics & Scientology Basics), it hit me again how utterly important it is for one, as an individual, to be high on the tone scale.
Now, first off, if you’re reading this and don’t know what the Tone Scale is, you should watch this video from the Scientology Video Channel. It pretty well explains the basics of this.
My point in this, though, and realization from a review of Science of Survival, is really how important it is from the aspect of one’s worth to others and to society, to be high on the tone scale.
See, the tone scale is not just an index of how happy you are. If you study the Hubbard Chart of Human Evaluation, which the Science of Survival book takes up in great detail, you’ll see that when someone is high on the tone scale, they are also much more trustworthy, much more productive, get more done, have better relationships, do what they say they’re going to do, relay communication appropriately instead of twisting it, are generally more helpful and great people to have around.
For the last 15 years of my life, I’ve been a technician and System Administrator by trade, stopping only to be a mountain biker, a white-men-can-jump evangelist, a soccer junkie, and a husband.
Now, a system administrator, really, is one who basically make stuff work and keeps stuff working – to tear it all down to a simplicity. He’s supposed to be able to figure out anything, fix anything, keep everything working all the time, and answer the most preposterous questions posed by end-users. People try to tell me tech support jokes about the “my cupholder is broken” and “I can’t find the ‘any’ key” type of thing and so forth, but I have had way worse stories first-hand.
But taking just a simple system administrator function, and plot such a person on the tone scale. If you had someone who was at 1.1 (covert hostility) on the tone scale as your system administrator, per the Hubbard Chart of Human Evaluation, you would have an utter disaster on your hands. You’d have someone who used their administrator access to run a porno web server on company equipment, someone who would say they fixed something and actually didn’t, someone who would get a beep in the middle of the night that a server was down and then have no faintest responsibility to actually get up and handle it, and someone who would covertly be setting the entire system up to fail in a catestrophic atomic meltdown while saying he was achieving the ultimate in redundancy.
Given a worthwhile cause he’s supporting, a system administrator could be facilitating the communications and speed of interaction of an entire organization, quadrupling their productivity and making them all able to work trouble free in total harmony and coordination.
However, only someone who was an opposite of the aforementioned 1.1 would be able to achieve such a thing.
Impinged-upon constantly as a Sys Admin is by broken machinery, frustrated users, budget constraints, and the crap that’s all over the Internet, it’s easy to get enturbulated and plummet down the tone scale.
That’s precisely why it’s important for even the System Administrator – as detached as it may seem from study in a religious field — to get himself a study of the Scientology Basics, and then sit down and get enough Dianetics Auditing to raise himself up the tone scale to a place where he can achieve the purpose of his job.
Witness:
Striker was the squadron leader. He brought us in real low. But he couldn’t handle it.
Prosecutor:
Buddy couldn’t handle it? Was Buddy one of your crew?
Witness:
Right. Buddy was the bombardier. But it was Striker who couldn’t handle it, and he went to pieces.
Prosecutor:
*Andy* went to pieces?
Witness:
No. Andy was the navigator. He was all right. Buddy went to pieces. It was awful how he came unglued.
Prosecutor:
*Howie* came unglued?
Witness:
Oh, no. Howie was a rock, the best tailgunner in the outfit. Buddy came unglued.
Prosecutor:
And he bailed out?
Witness:
No. Andy hung tough. Buddy bailed out. How he survived, it was a miracle.
Prosecutor:
Then Howie survived?
Witness:
No, ‘fraid not. We lost Howie the next day.
Ever have trouble being duplicated?
Scientology is
all about being able to communicate. A lot of people every day think
they’re communicating, but they’re really just talking, moving their
lips around, not really saying anything that people understand.
Honestly, the single most important thing in any job is the ability to
communicate an interact with others. If one can’t communicate, he’s
pretty dead — no matter what technical knowledge he might have about
his job. I’ve been to a trillion different job training classes,
seminars, read a ton of books, etc — but the single most important
skill I’d say I have in my job is the ability to communicate. And that’s something I learned at a Scientology church (in Portland, Oregon, actually — right down the street from where I worked at WebTrends.)
I would heavily recommend that anyone, regardless of your religion, study up on L. Ron Hubbard‘s technology of communication. You can do this on the Scientology Handbook website, or you can just order the full book at the Scientology Volunteer Minister site.
References:
technorati tags:scientology, communication, portland
Blogged with Flock
Just wanted to share my view of the new Church of Scientology of Berlin, which I got from my newly-updated copy of Google Earth.
Announced by Mr. David Miscavige at the Church of Scientology New Year’s Celebration, and with grand opening held just today, the church is huge for Scientologists in Germany, being right near the major social services and government centers of Germany.
- Grand Opening of Scientology Berlin on ScientologyToday
- David Miscavige
- Scientology Germany
