Nov 28, 2015

The Return of Werner Erhard, Father of Self-Help

Peter Haldemannov
New York Times
November 28, 2015

The silver-haired man dressed like a waiter (dark vest, dark slacks) paced the aisle between rows of desks in a Toronto conference room. “If you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to have to have a very loose relationship with this thing you call ‘I’ or ‘me,’” he shouted. “Maybe that whole thing in me around which the universe revolves isn’t so central!”

He paused to wipe his brow with a wad of paper towels. An assistant stood by with a microphone, but he waved her off. “Maybe life is not about the self but about self-transcendence! You got a problem with that?”

No one in the room had a problem with that. The desks were occupied by 27 name-tagged academics from around the world. And in the course of the day, a number of them would take the mike to pose what their instructor referred to as “yeah buts, how ’bouts or what ifs” in response to his pronouncements — but no one had a problem with them.

In some ways, the three-day workshop, “Creating Class Leaders,” recalled an EST training session. As with that cultural touchstone of the 1970s, there was “sharing” and applause. There were confrontations and hugs. Gnomic declarations hovered in the air like mist: “We need to distinguish distinction”; “There’s no seeing, there’s only the seer”; “There isn’t any is.”

But the event was much more civilized than EST. There were bathroom breaks. No one was called an expletive by the teacher.

This is significant because the teacher was none other than the creator of EST, Werner Erhard.

Pound another nail into the coffin for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that there are no second acts in American lives.

“I am committed to the opposite of that idea,” Mr. Erhard said a few weeks after the leadership class in Toronto. “I don’t think there’s a person who walked out of that room who isn’t a second act.” To say nothing of their instructor, who, at age 80, may be more of a third or fourth act.

There was a time, boys and girls — the Me Decade, Tom Wolfe called it — when Mom and Dad wore mood rings, attended encounter groups and in general engaged in a tireless amount of navel gazing. If the so-called human potential movement had a single avatar, it was Werner Erhard.

EST (Latin for “is” and an acronym for Erhard Seminars Training) was equal parts Zen Buddhism and Dale Carnegie. Aspiring “ESTies” flocked to hotel ballrooms across the country for combative training sessions during which they forwent meal and bathroom breaks to take responsibility for their lives and “get it” by discovering there was nothing to get.

Diana Ross, Joe Namath, Yoko Ono, Jerry Rubin and several hundred thousand other seekers got it. Newsweek anointed Mr. Erhard “a celebrity guru who retails enlightenment.” There were doubters. To New Times magazine, he was “the king of the brain snatchers.”

The criticism intensified as EST grew. It was labeled a cult that practiced mind control (verbal abuse, sleep deprivation), a racket that exploited its followers (heavy recruiting, endless “graduate seminars”).

Much was made of Mr. Erhard’s tangled Don Draperish past: his days as a car salesman in Philadelphia, his dabbling in Mind Dynamics and Scientology, his desertion of his first wife and their four children to reinvent himself on the West Coast.

Even his name was fake, lifted from an Esquire article he read on the plane to California. (“The Men Who Made the New Germany” included references to Ludwig Erhard, the minister of economics, and Werner Heisenberg, the atomic scientist.) Mr. Erhard was born Jack Rosenberg.

In 1985, he repackaged EST as the Forum, a kinder, gentler iteration of the training that was also more success-oriented. “In the ’80s, people started to think a little bit, and it was possible to use a less-confrontational style,” he said. But tax disputes, company lawsuits and an ugly divorce from his second wife kept Mr. Erhard in the news media cross hairs.

The flameout came in 1991. In March of that year, at the same time that I.R.S. officials were publicly accusing him of tax fraud, “60 Minutes” broadcast a report on Mr. Erhard that depicted him as an abusive father and husband who had sexually molested two daughters from his second marriage. Shortly before that show was televised, he sold the Forum to a group of employees, gave his Great Dane to a friend and fled the country.

“My reputation was destroyed by ‘60 Minutes,’” Mr. Erhard shouted between sips of Dragon Well Supreme green tea and a fistful of the pills he takes for various ailments. (He has no indoor voice — a professional hazard, perhaps.)

He had taken a suite at the London NYC hotel, where he had traveled with his Dutch-born third wife, Gonneke Spits, from Toronto to see friends, do a little business and visit his favorite chiropractor and tailor. He was also in the city to meet with a reporter — virtually the only press he has done in more than two decades.

“It was clear that I had to remove myself from the work, or the work was going to get very damaged,” Mr. Erhard said of his self-imposed exile.

But it was the Church of Scientology that actually drove him out of the country. According to Mr. Erhard, the “60 Minutes” allegations were the culmination of a smear campaign organized by Scientology officials to get back at him for poaching clients and ideas.

“There’s no question that I was declared fair game by L. Ron Hubbard,” he said. “In the doctrines of Scientology, that meant they could destroy me financially, socially or reputationally.”

This was a long time before the book (and the movie) “Going Clear” exposed some of the shadier practices of Scientology. But a 1991 article in The Los Angeles Times described how the church had indeed targeted Mr. Erhard as a “suppressive person,” hiring at least three private investigators to dig up dirt on him and pass it on to the news media. One of them, Alan Clow, said he shared his findings with “60 Minutes.”

As for the I.R.S., Mr. Erhard sued the agency (winning $200,000 in damages) for falsely claiming he had evaded taxes.

The daughter who had accused him of abuse later recanted, admitting she had lied to receive an advance on a book. And an article in The Believer stated that the “60 Minutes” segment was riddled with so many discrepancies that CBS deleted it from its public archives.

After leaving the country, Mr. Erhard settled in a friend’s apartment in Tokyo, with, he said, no more than “a pocketful of cash” to his name.

He had kept the business rights to the Forum in Japan, and for several years, under the rubric of “mastery,” he conducted seminars for professionals coping with Japan’s financial crisis of the early 1990s. He also did some consulting work for Landmark, the Forum’s successor, run by his brother Harry Rosenberg.

In 1996, Mr. Erhard came down with a mysterious debilitating illness. A friend referred him to his doctor in the Cayman Islands, who ultimately diagnosed the Epstein-Barr virus. Mr. Erhard recovered on Grand Cayman, where he and Ms. Spits (a former EST executive) bought a villa in George Town, which remains their home base when they are not traveling.

For several years before his latest professional reincarnation, Mr. Erhard consulted for businesses and government agencies like the Russian adult-education program the Znaniye Society and a nonprofit organization supporting clergy in Ireland.

Enter the Harvard economist Michael Jensen. Dr. Jensen, who is famous in financial circles for championing the concepts of shareholder value and executive stock options, had taken a Landmark course in Boston at the suggestion of his daughter, who mended a rocky relationship with Dr. Jensen after taking the course herself.

“I became convinced we should work to get this kind of transformational material into the academies,” he said, adding that he considers Mr. Erhard “one of the great intellectuals of the century.”

In 2004, with the help of a Landmark official, Dr. Jensen developed an experiential course on integrity in leadership at the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester. The class was offered there for five years, with Mr. Erhard signing on as an instructor during its third year. It has since been taught at several universities around the world as well as at the United States Air Force Academy.

As far as its philosophical underpinnings go, Mr. Erhard struggled a bit to describe the course without resorting to its Delphic phraseology (“ontological pedagogy,” “action as a correlate of the occurring”).

Sitting in front of a bank of computers in his hotel room, he read excerpts from the 1,000-page textbook he is working on, such as: “As linguistic abstractions, leader and leadership create leader and leadership as realms of possibility in which, when you are being a leader, all possible ways of being are available to you.”

Briefly, the course, which owes ideological debts to the Forum and to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, takes an experience-based, rather than knowledge-based, approach to its subject. Students master principles like integrity and authenticity in order to leave the class acting as leaders instead of merely knowing about leadership.

Its promoters believe the course has broader applications both within and outside of academia. “They should take it to government,” said Paul Fireman, the former chairman and C.E.O. of Reebok, who has consulted with Mr. Erhard on his recent work. (Mr. Fireman says that Reebok’s stock price jumped “from the $6 or $7 range to the $25 to $30 range” after he introduced his employees to the Landmark training.)

Landmark, for which Mr. Erhard continues to help develop new programs, is far more mainstream than EST ever became. Currently, according to Harry Rosenberg, 130,000 people a year participate in its offerings, which are available on every continent except Antarctica. It has a stronger corporate presence than EST or the Forum; in addition to Reebok, clients include Microsoft, NASA and Lululemon.

Still, Mr. Erhard’s emphasis on personal responsibility, on being rather than knowing, is embedded in the Landmark workshops. “All of the Landmark programs are based on the ideas and methodology that Werner developed,” Mr. Rosenberg said. “The basic intent has not changed.”

In fact, Mr. Erhard casts a fairly long shadow in the culture at large. His influence, wrote Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times, “extends far beyond the couple of million people who have done his courses: there is hardly a self-help book or a management training programme that does not borrow some of his principles.”

Whether that’s a good thing or not probably depends on one’s attitude toward such books and programs.

“Erhard made palatable the notion that the end justifies the means,” said Steve Salerno, the author of “Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless.” “Which is partly responsible for the climate of what I call happyism. If your happiness is all that matters, anybody who stands in the way becomes detritus in the ruthless pursuit of individual perfection.”

Criticism of this sort does not faze Mr. Erhard. Certainly, he’s weathered worse.

In his ninth decade, he is consumed with his latest mission, putting in 10-hour days lecturing and teaching three courses a year in addition to completing the textbook.

His recent health challenges include a battle with septicemia that left him having to learn to walk again (a timer in his suite reminded him to stroll around every half-hour), but he still works six days a week.

While he writes, he listens to music: Renée Fleming, the Serbian composer Stevan Mokranjac, Sérgio Mendes. “You’re going to get a kick out of this,” he said, scrolling through the playlist on one of his computers. “Gonneke! Where’s ‘Brasileiro’ on here?”

His wife, a stylish platinum-haired woman whom Mr. Erhard leans on to negotiate the more mundane demands of life, helped him find the album by Mr. Mendes in question. The surdo-drum thumping of a batucada band filled the room.

In their downtime, the couple likes to travel. Tokyo, Amsterdam and London are favorite places, along with Hawaii and the West Coast, where Mr. Erhard’s seven children live. He now enjoys a very strong relationship with four of them, he said, and a good relationship with the other three.

He also has 11 grandchildren, and one of his current preoccupations is the numbing effects of digital technology on millennials. Warming to the subject, he read aloud another passage, this one from a dense Heidegger essay calling for a “comportment toward technology which expresses yes and at the same time no.”

”The cost to this generation is enormous,” Mr. Erhard said. “They are losing access to their humanity.”

Maintaining access to his own humanity may be Mr. Erhard’s biggest project. Floating around the screen of another computer was the word “impeccability,” a reminder, he said, “to deal with whatever I touch with care.” If he learned his lesson the hard way, maybe there is no easy way.

“Here’s how it is for me,” Mr. Erhard said, leaning in, giving his vocal cords a break. “When my integrity is lacking, I am clear that I just got to be a bit smaller as a person. And the thing you have to remember about integrity is it’s a mountain with no top.”

The clock chimed. He stood and stretched. Time for another few laps around the room.

A version of this article appears in print on November 29, 2015, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: Werner Erhard.i

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/fashion/the-return-of-werner-erhard-father-of-self-help.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0

Nov 26, 2015

Witch burning rebels stoke Central African Republic violence

REUTERS
By Tom Esslemont
Nov 26, 2015

BANGUI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Rebels in Central African Republic have kidnapped, burnt and buried alive "witches" in public ceremonies, exploiting widely held superstitions to control areas in the war-torn country, according to a leaked United Nations report.

The report by U.N. human rights officers, seen exclusively by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, contains graphic photographs of victims tied to wooden stakes being lowered towards a fire as well as the charred torsos of those subjected to the ritual.

The torture took place between December 2014 and early 2015 under instruction from leaders of the mainly Christian "anti-balaka" militia that has been fighting Muslim Seleka rebels across the country for more than two years, said the report.

Central African Republic was plunged into sectarian violence when Muslim rebels briefly seized power in the largely Christian country in March 2013, with escalating violence on both sides creating lawlessness nationwide outside the capital Bangui.

Internationally-backed presidential and parliamentary elections are due to be held on Dec. 27 after repeated delays to replace a transitional government but there are widespread concerns of more bloodshed in the run-up.

While belief in witchcraft is common throughout Africa, U.N. researchers said it appeared Christian rebels had used these superstitions to intimidate, extort money and exert authority over lawless areas.

"Sorcery is firmly entrenched in (Central African Republic) and ... the absence of state authority creates a breeding ground for a sort of popular justice twisted by anti-balakas to its benefit," said the researchers.

The report, produced by a team working for the U.N.'s stabilisation mission known as MINUSCA, said 13 attacks against victims aged between 45 and 70 are said to have taken place near Baoro in Nana-Mambere, one of 14 prefectures in the country.

Nana-Mambere in the country's south west has been ravaged by violent clashes between rival rebel groups with U.N. peacekeeping forces unable to restore calm.

The report identifies three leaders of the anti-balaka faction in Nana-Mambere present during the alleged torture sessions but attempts by the Thomson Reuters Foundation to reach them did not elicit a response.

"FASTENED LIKE A CHICKEN"

In one incident, a local Christian clergyman, who had scars across his body, said he tried to intervene as he witnessed a man being buried alive after being condemned as a witch for apparently admitting to killing 150 people.

"The clergyman was threatened at knifepoint for trying to intervene in matters that did not concern the church," an eyewitness was quoted as saying in the report.

Victims were ordered, sometimes at gunpoint, to pay between 20,000 and 50,000 Central African Francs ($30 to $80) in bribes to avoid being tied up or burned. Nearly two thirds of people in CAR live on less than $1.90 a day, according to World Bank data.

"Anti-balakas are extorting huge sums from their victims, in exchange for their freedom," the U.N. document said.

Witchcraft is still punishable by law in Central African Republic and jail terms are commonly handed out as punishments with some reports saying half of the country's jails are taken up with those accused of witchcraft.

In September 2010, the High Court in the capital Bangui found four people, including two children aged 10 and 13, guilty of witchcraft and charlatanism, Amnesty International reported.

The recent violence has left the main jail in Bangui almost completely empty but just outside the capital at Bimbo women's prison, five of 18 inmates are held on charges of witchcraft.

"I was accused of killing my husband through witchcraft," said Christelle Ouamanga, 26, in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation from the cell she shares with five others.

Ouamanga, nursing her seven-month-old son Dieupuissant in jail, denies murder but said her husband's family accused her of sorcery after his death that she blames on lung disease.

Father Aurelio Gazzera, a missionary working with Catholic charity Caritas in western Central African Republic, said the concept of witchcraft was "aggravated during moments of crisis" such as the ongoing violence.

"Punishment (of those deemed witches) is used as a means by an armed group to impose its authority," said Gazzera, whose charity is one of the few to operate in Nana-Mambere, around 300 km (200 miles) northwest of the capital.

Interim justice minister Dominique Saïd Panguéndgi, who like all members of the transitional administration is barred from running in the upcoming elections, said judicial reform regarding witchcraft had been slow and not deemed a priority.

"Witchcraft is a question of belief, so we need to train magistrates," he said in his office in Bangui. "But at least the debate (about witchcraft) has begun."

(Reporting By Tom Esslemont, Editing by Ros Russell and Belinda Goldsmith; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)
http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFKBN0TF0MQ20151126?sp=true

Nov 24, 2015

Kabbalah Centre Follower Wins $177,000 in Sexual Misconduct Suit

Reuters
November 24, 2015

Los Angeles — A woman who brought a sexual misconduct suit against the former co-director of the Kabbalah Centre, a spiritual group whose brand of Jewish mysticism has drawn many celebrity devotees, was awarded $177,500 in damages by a jury on Tuesday.

The Los Angeles County Superior Court jury found Yehuda Berg, 43, known in Hollywood as "a rabbi to the stars," liable for inflicting emotional distress on a former follower, Jena Scaccetti, according to her lawyer, Alain Bonavida.

The center has attracted such stars as Madonna, Lindsay Lohan, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher among its followers, who are often identified by red-string wrist bracelets worn as a talisman.

The case marked the latest controversy faced over the years by the Kabbalah Centre, a non-profit organization founded in 1965 by Berg's late father, Philip, a rabbi who espoused teachings rooted in metaphysical principles of Jewish belief.

Scaccetti accused Berg, who is married, of inviting her to an apartment and giving her alcohol and pain pills before groping her legs as he tried to overpower her.
Berg acknowledged in trial testimony that he offered Scaccetti a drink and some Vicodin, saying she had complained of painful kidney stones, and that he touched her leg to see if "anything intimate" might happen.

He denied forcing himself on her.

The jury awarded Scaccetti $135,000 in compensatory and punitive damages from Berg and also found that the center supervised him negligently, Bonavida said.

Scaccetti was awarded another $42,500 to be paid by the organization, he said.

Attorneys for Berg and the Kabbalah Centre could not be reached for comment late on Tuesday.

Critics in mainstream Judaism accuse the Kabbalah movement of corrupting the ancient, esoteric mystic traditions of the faith by taking them out of context and repackaging them with a popular new-age bent.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-kabbalah/kabbalah-center-follower-wins-177000-in-sexual-misconduct-suit-idUSKBN0TE0CM20151125

Nov 22, 2015

The dark side of alternative health treatments

Samantha Selinger-Morris
Daily Life
November 22, 2015

Why are some of us taking advice from "wellness" gurus instead of medically trained professionals?

Sarah Mathieson* just wanted the best chance to fall pregnant. So, she did what so many of us do. She researched her options, then visited a naturopath, who prescribed five bottles of supplements. And then, having developed joint pain, she went back ... and the naturopath prescribed another 16 bottles.

Dr Kerryn Phelps, a supporter of evidence-based complementary therapies and a former president of both the Australian Medical Association and the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association, treated Mathieson. "She came to see me saying she was feeling worse, terrible, achy, unwell." It turned out that Mathieson had ingested "toxic levels" of certain micronutrients.

Mathieson was one of the luckier ones. After stopping all of the supplements and taking a standard pre-pregnancy multivitamin, she went on to have a healthy pregnancy. But she is an example of a disturbing trend that Phelps sees in her practice: educated people – mostly women – falling victim to unqualified alternative health practitioners, many of whom they find online.

"They're inquisitive, looking for answers, not happy with 'Take this and go away' as an answer," says Phelps, who was motivated to write a book, Ultimate Wellness, in part because of her experiences with such patients. "They're prepared to invest time and energy and intellectual capital into their healthcare. But the question is, where are they getting their information from? In some cases, they're getting it from good websites on the net. And [in] some cases, from rubbish websites and unqualified practitioners."

Lately, alternative therapies have made front-page news. Jess Ainscough, the former journalist behind the globally popular blog The Wellness Warrior, died of cancer in February at the age of 30 after practising – and championing – a cancer-fighting regimen consisting largely of fruits, vegetables and coffee enemas.

And self-proclaimed Chinese healer Hongchi Xiao, who promotes his services on Facebook, made headlines in April when a diabetic seven-year-old Sydney boy, Aiden Fenton, died after attending one of Xiao's "slapping therapy" workshops. (Patients are slapped, often to the point of bruising, to "unblock poisons".)

Why are some of us taking advice from "wellness" gurus instead of medically trained professionals? Especially when so many of these gurus give advice that is, at the very least, highly suspect?

Dr Sue Ieraci, an emergency physician and executive member of Friends of Science in Medicine, a body that opposes scientifically unproven alternative health treatments, thinks many online wellness gurus garner huge followings because they make people feel powerful.

"It's not PC in our postmodernist society to get your simple answers from [medical] professionals, because that's paternalistic and 'giving in to the man'," says Ieraci. She says the online health gurus "make you feel empowered, because you're going against orthodoxy".

People who are struggling with illnesses that don't have a cure are particularly vulnerable. Like the followers of Kerri Rivera, an American woman who advocates, online and in her book Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism, the use of bleach enemas to "recover" children from autism. She believes that chlorine dioxide, an industrial bleaching agent, destroys the parasites that "cause" the condition. There is no medical basis for her beliefs and the FDA in the United States warns that it has the potential to cause nausea, severe vomiting and life threatening drops in blood pressure.

"People who are really struggling with those behavioural difficulties, it must be really challenging, so they're looking for someone to validate their struggle and give them something to blame," says Ieraci of the parents who follow gurus like Rivera.

"If you look at a lot of those sites, they're very good at courting them, saying how brave they are, and that they're the only people who don't believe the 'sheepol' – that's people who are sheep because they believe what they've heard [from mainstream medicine]."

Two years ago, a 55-year-old Brisbane man burnt a potentially fatal hole the size of a golf ball into the side of his head after he used a corrosive herbal treatment known as "black salve" – a paste often made from bloodroot and zinc chloride that is marketed as being able to "draw out" cancer – that is sold online as an alternative cancer remedy.

Phelps, who has treated patients who have used black salve, says "they're telling people what they want to hear, that they don't have to go through chemo or radiotherapy. And, to be honest, who wouldn't be terrified by the prospect of chemotherapy or radiotherapy?"

Dr Robert Walters, a Hobart GP, says Australia's medical culture is partly to blame for the current trend.

"Alternative practitioners ... often give the patient more time," says Walters, who has treated patients whose health has been made worse by seeing unqualified health practitioners. "This is where the medical profession has probably got to look at itself a little bit, because we're so busy, rushed, consultations are so short.

"If we spent more time explaining medicine – and medicine's not really a mystery, it's basically plumbing, you know – if you can explain disease process, explain what you need to worry about and what you don't need to worry about, and just spend a little bit of extra time with your patients, then I don't think they'll go looking for magic cures elsewhere with witchcraft."

Compounding these issues is the fact that alternative practitioners are largely unregulated. Chinese medicine practitioners, osteopaths and chiropractors are the only alternative health therapists required to be registered with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). The rest are accountable to no one particular body.

There are government departments and agencies, both state and federal, that can handle complaints, including the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). But red tape and a lack of resources – in 2013-14 the ACCC fielded 202,363 complaints (not all health-related), with just 27 prosecutions – means they are difficult to shut down.

It took authorities six years to stop Homeopathy Plus!, a company based on the NSW Central Coast, from selling a homeopathic whooping cough "vaccine". In October, the company and its director, Frances Sheffield, were banned from selling the products for five years by the Federal Court and ordered to pay fines totalling $138,000.

But this came after years of various orders and requests by the ACCC and the TGA. In one instance, Sheffield refused to publish a retraction regarding the claims she made on her website about the homeopathic vaccine, stating that she was not "advertising" but rather "providing evidence" about the company's homeopathic treatments.

Sheffield still features a section on her website called "Reversing Autism", with testimonies from parents who describe how their children's autism was cured with homeopathy. ("Melissa went from zero words to almost 50 in one day!" one parent writes.)

But people cannot be prosecuted for stating a scientifically unproven belief. "It's a little like trying to regulate religion, in a sense," says Adelaide-based lawyer Mal Byrne.

"Part of the difficulty is, how do you regulate something that's so vague?"

Byrne would know. Fourteen of his clients sued South Australian homeopath Monika Milka three years ago for allegedly infecting them with bacteria and permanently scarring them after she treated them with "biomesotherapy". This involved injecting saline solution and other substances under their skin. One client opted for the treatment to remedy arthritic pain. Others did so to boost a "general feeling of wellness". What they got instead were shame and isolation.

"You know, they were embarrassed," says Byrne. "A lot of them had to cover [their scarred skin]." Some clients needed antibiotics for years to eradicate the infection and were afraid to touch their children in case they infected them.

Milka denied the claims in court through her lawyer. She later settled with all 14 out of court but continues to work as a homeopath. In October, she published a claim on her Facebook page that her "Wellness Tonic" rid her late mother of cancer after chemotherapy failed to do so. This, says Byrne, is a "flagrant breach" of both the South Australian Code of Conduct for Unregistered Health Practitioners and laws regarding misleading and deceptive business conduct. (Authorities are now reviewing her Facebook page.)

So how can we determine which alternative health treatment – and practitioner – is safe and which isn't, particularly when some alternative health treatments that sound wacky have solid scientific backing?

For instance, the use of fecal microbial transplants – when a healthy person's stool is inserted into a sick person's colon – was lauded in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2013 after a study proved the therapy's effectiveness at fighting the bacteria Clostridium difficile. (Infection with the bacteria causes symptoms similar to Crohn's disease, and kills 15,000 people a year in the US alone.)

And, although controversial, some laboratory studies have shown that combining high doses of intravenous vitamin C with chemotherapy improved the effectiveness of chemotherapy in the treatment of some cancers.

Alarm bells should ring, says Phelps, if a non-medical practitioner discourages you from continuing care with your GP or medical specialist. People should also seek medical advice about any alternative therapy that carries even the slightest risk, taking particular care with the manipulation of bones and muscles and anything that is to be swallowed or that will pierce the skin.

We should also consider whether, in some situations, it might be emotional support we are seeking, says Dr Sarah McKay, a Sydney-based neuroscientist and mother of two who has studied online wellness gurus.

Noting that they often provide this role, she asks, "Who doesn't want a bit of mothering, a bit of TLC?" •

*Name has been changed.

http://m.dailylife.com.au/health-and-fitness/dl-wellbeing/the-dark-side-of-alternative-health-treatments-20151120-gl3v2w.html

Nov 19, 2015

Special Event on psychological issues affecting former and current members of the Jehovah's Witnesses

The International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) is considering a one or two-day special event on psychological issues affecting former and current members of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

The tentative target date is late March or early April 2016.

The location will be Philadelphia.  

In order to plan this event effectively, we are asking the ICSA network for ideas about topics and possible speakers. 


We are purposely structuring this survey so that the responses are open, for we do not want to "force-choice" you into our preconceived notions.

Please understand that we will receive many suggestions and that some of these will be contradictory.  Hence, it is impossible for us to heed all of your suggestions.  However, we will seriously study the responses that you provide.

Thank you.

After Getting on Psychics' Shit List, I Went to Their Psychic Fair Anyway

Jackie Hong
VICE
November 11, 2015

psychics
Of all the weird things I've written, the one where I asked psychics to connect with my non-existent dead sister provoked the strongest reactions. While I received some supportive messages, a lot of people also decided I was a horrible person, my favourite being the woman who sent me a 436-word rant about how "your heart mind [sic] is closed and your intentions are impure and your eye are blind and your ears are deaf."

I think I'm doing OK for being blind and deaf with impure intentions, but it hurts when someone says my heart mind is closed. Also, as I was researching my original story, I realized there was a lot more to the psychic world than talking to the dearly departed—there are an astounding number of methods for tapping into the past, present, and future via natural talents, cards, pendulums, and other props, for example. Since I'd only seen a narrow slice of the psychic profession, I was curious to experience more of it first-hand. Would other psychics be as janky as the four I went to last time? Are some parts of the psychic world more legit than others? What's a psychic channelling, anyway?

Conveniently enough, the annual GTA Psychic Fair, a three-day event celebrating all things metaphysical and otherworldly at the International Centre in Mississauga, was right around the corner. The centre also happened to be hosting an antique car show and Croc warehouse sale when I went on Halloween Day but I waltzed passed those to Hall 6, where I shelled out a $15 entrance fee in hopes of broadening my psychic horizons.

One psychic who "connected" with my sister for that original article said she'd warn every psychic in Toronto about me. Either she has a stunted professional network or belongs to the forgive-and-forget camp, because I gained entry and strolled amongst dozens psychics for hours without being hassled.

As I did my first round of the tables, about three-quarters of which were occupied, I was bombarded with pamphlets offering everything from psychic surgery to all-natural, non-cancer-causing deodorant. Posters were tacked to the backs of the empty booths and covered topics like alien abduction (symptoms include memory loss and sperm extraction) and the powers of crystal skulls. The few dozen people in the crowd seemed to be primarily middle-aged women, but the psychics were a fairly even split gender-wise, and I was surprised at how many accepted credit card payments. Everyone had qualifications that ranged from being born with a veil of skin over their eyes to certificates from schools across the continent. Everyone was probably violating copyright law when it came to the graphics and photos on their banners.

Unsure where to start, I attended a talk on on how to pick a psychic. The half-hour was mostly occupied by a woman with an irritating, nasal voice asking the speaker how to tell dead relatives beaming advice into her head from her own thoughts, but I managed to glean that the best psychic for me would be someone I had a good connection with.

I decided I had a decent connection with the guy at the front offering a future, biorhythms, palm analysis, love scope, and tarot package for $10. Not only was it the cheapest thing available, but it also incorporated technology—by scanning my right hand and inputting my name and birthday into his computer, the man could cross-reference my details with a database of readings made by hundreds of psychics and spit out readings. It told me, amongst other things: I should guard against being distant in my relationships; that I'm "often lured to faraway places" (I have a pretty bad case of wanderlust, I guess); that I "can be fetishy or kinky" (sure); and that there will be failure in my future (well, shit) but a high chance of recovery (phew). Although some points seemed to align with my life, the statements and predictions seemed vague enough that could probably apply to anyone. The package was entertaining, but not exactly life-changing. Though I'd probably do it again in the future for shits and giggles.

Time for another talk—this one was on spirit guides, where I learned that dead people are literally everywhere watching us all the time, even when we're on the toilet or fucking.

Back to wandering. At one table, a steady stream of people forked over $40 for aura photos. Auras look oddly like multicolour smears drawn around someone's face in Microsoft Paint. I opted for a $15 palm reading done by "the world's oldest machine" instead and got a map of my hand and a reading ("valid for a period of approximatly [sic] 3 months") printed on continuous form paper. A disclaimer at the top warned that "the science of Palmistry is arbitrary," but I'm tentatively excited—highlights include "a big business deal is about to unfold...to your advantage $$quot; and making "marvelous new contacts." I'll also apparently be hit by a wave of dick and/or pussy soon, because "your sexually energy is mounting and romance is about to bloom again in your life" and I can "allow sexuality to the maximum."

The reading also said I'm an "astute wheeler dealer." Not sure what that means. Same deal with the first package though—highly entertaining, but nothing that blew me away.

Enough with the machines, though—it was time for some human interaction. Most people were charging between $60 to $95 for 30-minute sessions, but I found a woman offering psychic channellings for $20. Psychic channelling, the man fielding the crowd explained, didn't look into the future—it focused on the present and what you needed to know. Sounded good.

I put my name on the waitlist, then did another round of tables and read a poster about the links between the Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy assassinations. When I came back, I took a seat across from an affable middle-aged woman and she ran over what was about to happen: She would connect to "The Council," an otherworldly group with supreme knowledge and insight, and I'd get to ask one question.

The channelling began. She sat eyes closed and silent for a few minutes, pursing her lips and exhaling sharply. When she spoke, the words came out slowly, devoid of emotion and in cryptic sentences—long story short, I have a bright future and a lot of good challenges ahead. About 15 minutes in, I was prompted to ask my question. I asked what challenge I should focus on. The Council said on making a choice about what path to follow.

The woman's eyes suddenly popped open and she began speaking in her normal, peppy voice. The Council had shown her a vision of me standing in front of a map of the world, but with North America crossed out—a sign that perhaps I should be, or want to be, somewhere else. The Council added that even though I followed a line of education didn't mean I couldn't or shouldn't try out a new path.

This was my first "oh shit" moment of the day, because I'd been thinking over what I want to do with my life and boiled it down to two options—continuing pursuing journalism in Toronto, which I've been grinding at since starting university in 2011, or, moving to Japan to teach English.

Did she mention travel and adventure because, really, who in their 20s doesn't want those things? Or is there really something to The Council? I have to admit, being told I should be grateful that I'm in a position to be making choices, and to be choosing between two good options at that, was comforting. I could understand why people do channellings—at the very least, it's a mini therapy session that leaves you with some peace and clarity of mind.

I strolled around the tables for the millionth time. A poster with three photos on it informed me that what looked like dust specks lit up by camera flash were, in fact, ghosts.

Further on, a sign offering a rune casting readings caught my eye—that, and the guy wearing a conical wooden hat and a cape sitting behind the table. I wasn't sure if it was for Halloween or his normal garb, but the scene reminded of my preteen love for RuneScape and that was enough of a good connection for me.

I sat down across from Cape Man. He shuffled what looked like a deck of oversized YuGiOh cards, then made three piles of two cards each. The runes were in the corners of each card while vividly-coloured drawings of fantasy creatures and settings sprawled across the faces—fire-breathing dragons, armour-clad men drinking in a firelit homestead, green fairies with giant tits, that sort of thing.

He did this twice, with both casting reading about the same. The first pile was my past, and it looked rough—a death in the family or financial problems, perhaps? (Nope.)

Next, my present: I'm cautious as a result of my past, but the lessons I've learned will benefit me (I hope so). My love life is pretty dead at the moment (true), but it's because I feel like there isn't anyone good enough (maybe?). I should open up to the romantic options available and take chances I'd normally brush off (cute friends, holla at me).

Finally, my future: Like both machine readings earlier, this one said my finances are set to improve, and I'll also be travelling with a friend. In a bit of a downer, I won't find a soulmate anytime soon but I'll still be happy with my romantic life.

I also got to ask the runes a question and went with Japan vs. journalism thing, although I just said I was contemplating two career paths. Cape Man laid out two rows of cards, told me to assign a path to each row and then started interpreting, which is when I got my second "oh shit" moment of the day.

Path 1, which I assigned to Japan, would be an excellent financial move, will put me in a position of power and make me an adult. Path 2, journalism, won't work out so well financially and I'll feel like a child, but I won't be a "corporate stooge." Loosely accurate on both counts, I guess. Rune casting seemed to fall between the machine readings and psychic channelling - gets you thinking a bit, but leaning more towards machines when it comes to accuracy and entertainment value.

But the weirdest part, and what broke me that day, happened as I was getting up to leave. Cape Man asked if I was "gifted." I said I didn't think so. He said that I am, in fact, an empath—someone who can pick up on and channel other people's emotions, energies and physical feelings. He could tell because empaths are like the "red-head children of the psychic world" and encouraged me to develop my gift by looking up stuff online.

Up until then, I could deal with whatever the fair had thrown at me. Fortune-telling machines, talking to angels and dead people, wish-granting rocks, getting probed by aliens? Fine. And I'd found all of the one-on-one experiences I had at least a little enjoyable and insightful, even.

But after being called impure, a trickster, and an otherwise awful human being after writing about how psychics lied to me, I've been a goddamn psychic this whole time? I've had powers I don't really believe in all along, while believers gave me shit for not opening my heart enough? Is this karma? Some sort of sick cosmic joke, a form of divine retribution? What do I do now?

It was too much. Mind overloaded, energy drained, and wallet emptied, I made a beeline for the exit.

Let Jackie Hong channel your feelings on Twitter.

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/after-getting-on-psychics-shit-list-i-went-to-their-psychic-fair-anyway

Court Rules Against Church of Scientology in Bizarre Case

John Council
November 17, 2015

Sometimes bizarre facts make for even stranger law.

And that's certainly the case for a recent Texas appellate court ruling that the Church of Scientology doesn't have a constitutional right to harass a woman by stalking her, sending her a sex toy at work and publishing allegations that she'd had a secret sex-change operation.

The background to the case, Church of Scientology International v. Rathbun, is as follows. Monique Rathbun is married to Marty Rathbun, a former member and official in the Church of Scientology. Rathbun alleges that the church relentlessly harassed her and her husband for three years, forcing them to move to a wooded lot outside of San Antonio. And after the Rathbuns moved, in 2013 she found a high-tech surveillance camera mounted to a tree aimed at their new property.

Rathburn filed a lawsuit against the church in a Comal County district court, alleging invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Rathbun, who has never been a member of the church, alleged, among other things, that Scientology operatives followed her as she drove to and from work; told her parents that her life was at risk as long as she was married to Marty Rathbun; sent a sex toy to her at her workplace; and published allegations on Scientology websites, including that she was a "sexual pervert" and a "man who has had a secret sex-change operation."

In response to her petition, the church filed a motion to dismiss Rathbun's claims under the Texas Citizens Participation Act [TCPA], also known as the Texas anti-SLAPP statute. The TCPA allows the trial court to dismiss tort suits filed against defendants who speak out on matters of public concern and in some cases allows them to recover their attorney fees.

The church argued that Rathbun's lawsuit was related to their rights of free speech, association and right to petition found in the First Amendment. Specifically they allege that Marty Rathbun engaged in the independent practice of Scientology outside of the church, which is forbidden. They also allege that the filming of the couple by the church's so-called Squirrel Busters, to document abuses of church doctrine, fell within the TCPA's definition of the exercise of free speech, right to petition or right of association.

After an extensive hearing, the trial court denied the church's motion to dismiss Rathbun's lawsuit and awarded her attorney fees. The church appealed the decision to Austin's Third Court of Appeals.
And in a Nov. 6 decision, the Third Court upheld the trial court's decision, dismissing the church's TCPA motion. The court found that the church failed to demonstrate how Rathbun's lawsuit implicates their First Amendment rights.

"Other than argue that the 'protest and film production' endeavors of the 'Squirrel Busters' are protected rights of free speech and thus within the scope of the TCPA, the Scientology defendants do not directly address the specific conduct Rathbun complains of, which includes following her while she went to and from work, shopping, out to dinner with friends, and walking her dog," wrote Justice Scott Field.

"Moreover, other than deny having done so, the Scientology defendants do not address Rathbun's allegations that they sent a sex toy to her at work and sent flowers with a 'romantic' message from her to a female co-worker."

The court also found that the record did not support the church's contention that Rathbun was a public figure who actively participated in a public controversy.

"The mere fact that she is married to Marty Rathbun and shares a residence with him does not automatically place her in the category of people who have been found to be public figures by virtue of their relationship to famous people," Field wrote.

However, the court reversed the trial court's order awarding Rathbun attorney fees, rejecting her contention that the church's TCPA motion was filed for the sole purpose of delaying the litigation of her tort case.

Leslie Hyman, a partner in San Antonio's Pulman, Cappuccio, Pullen, Benson & Jones who represents Rathbun on appeal, is pleased with the decision. She notes that the Third Court took nearly a year to decide the case and did a thorough job of examining the church's TCPA motion.
"One of the things I was concerned about was the argument [the church was] making that as long as you filmed yourself doing stuff, that made what you were doing protected by the First Amendment. That would suggest that if I had somebody with a camera phone filming me, I could smash your car," Hyman said.

"It comes back to what we were complaining about. We were not complaining about protected speech or protected assembly or protected petitioning," Hyman said. "We were complaining about her being followed to and from work, followed to restaurants and while shopping, and followed while walking the dog."

Tom Leatherbury, a partner in Vinson & Elkins who represents the church on appeal, did not return a call for comment.

Elliott Cappuccio, who represents Rathbun before the trial court, said that her case is the third one that his firm has handled against the church.

"When you talk about bizarre, you have no idea," Cappuccio said.

"They had suffered 300 days of the church renting homes next to theirs," Cappuccio said of the Rathbuns. "They would watch and see when her husband left town and bother her. Imagine they do that so long that you have to move. And then you move to another property, and there are surveillance cameras pointing your way. Imagine thinking you're never going to get away from these people.

"My client wants her day before a jury," Cappuccio said. "And we want a Texas jury to tell the church that this type of behavior is not going to be tolerated."

Nov 18, 2015

Aravindan Balakrishnan: Court hears Maoist cult leader 'raped female followers and imprisoned daughter for 30 years'

Paul Peachey
The Independent
November 12, 2015

The 75-year-old ruled over a band of women supporters in his south London communist collective 

 
Aravindan Balakrishnan
Aravindan Balakrishnan

A charismatic Maoist revolutionary raped female followers and imprisoned his own daughter for 30 years after brainwashing them into believing he was an all-powerful and all-seeing leader, a court heard today.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 75, ruled over a dwindling band of women supporters in his south London communist collective using threats and violence as he pursued his goal of overthrowing the “fascist state”, jurors were told.

His daughter – whose mother was another member of the collective - was beaten, bullied and rarely left the house with Mr Balakrishnan using her fear of the outside world to terrify her into submission, Southwark Crown Court heard.

She never went to school, played with a friend or saw a doctor during her childhood and the power that he held over her meant that she could not leave for the first three decades of her life, said Rosina Cottage QC, counsel for the prosecution. By the time that she left, she was ill with diabetes.

“She was hidden from the outside world, and it kept from her, except as a tool with which to terrify her into subjugation,” said Ms Cottage, opening the case for the prosecution.

“Her freedom of movement was restrained to the extent that even though she could have left physically, the power that the defendant exercised over her meant that she could never leave.”

Mr Balakrishnan, a charismatic and energetic speaker, was the organiser of a communist group in the 1970s based in Brixton, known as the Workers Institute, the court heard.

He is accused of raping and indecently assaulting two women members of the group, including one who was allegedly attacked seven times over a period of about 12 years from 1980.

“This case concerns the brutal and calculated manipulation by one man to subjugate women under his control,” said Ms Cottage. He bent them to his will using mental and physical dominance, violence and sexual degradation, she said.

The two victims of rape stayed in the collective too frightened to leave and hating to stay, said Ms Cottage. “They were forced into sexual acts over which they had no choice and were deliberately degrading and humiliating. He seemed to exult in his power over them.”

His following waned over the years and his collective was left with about six women after his domineering behaviour drove away members, the court heard. One that remained was his wife Chandra, but “she and the others had all been so dominated and brain-washed to the extent that they believed that he was all powerful and all-seeing”, said Ms Cottage.

The atmosphere in the collective was controlled by him and his moods, with every woman living a life of fear, violence, isolation and confinement, the court heard.

Mr Balakrishnan, of Latymer Road, Enfield, is also charged with child cruelty and false imprisonment of his own daughter. He denies the charges against him.

The case continues

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/maoist-cult-leader-raped-female-followers-and-imprisoned-daughter-for-30-years-a6731431.html

Wary of Mainstream Medicine, Immigrants Seek Remedies From Home

RICHARD SCHIFFMAN
New York Times
November 13, 2015

On a recent afternoon, Ina Vandebroek was poking around the shelves of La 21 Division Botanica on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Its narrow aisles were crammed with thousands of votive candles, herbal potions and brightly colored plaster statues of saints.

Dr. Vandebroek, a Belgian-born ethnobotanist, paused to gaze at herb-infused oils. The vials had names like Amor Prohibido (“Forbidden Love”), for those in search of adventure, and Conquistador, for the timid — both of them big sellers. Bendicion de Dinero Al Hogar (“A Blessing for Money in the House”), which comes in a spray, is also popular. But Dr. Vandebroek was not there to jump-start a flagging love life or curry the favor of spirits. La 21 Division is a regular stop for her, a mile or so from her laboratory at the New York Botanical Garden, where she is the assistant curator of economic botany.

She is conducting a multiyear study of the folk remedies sold in New York’s botanicas, more than 100 emporiums that offer products for all that ails the body, mind and soul to a clientele mainly consisting of Latino and Caribbean immigrants. She is compiling guides in English and Spanish describing the plants and their uses. Her goal is to promote “culturally effective and sensitive health care” for a community that is chronically underserved by mainstream medicine.

“I came to NYC in 2005 and expected immigrants from the Caribbean to use very few plants for health care because most of the medicinal plants they know from their home countries don’t grow here,” she said in an email. Instead, she was amazed to find that Dominicans in New York, for example, use more than 200 plant species for medicinal purposes.

The guide, to be published next year by the Botanical Garden, will include precautions on potential side effects and toxicity. Dr. Vandebroek hopes that people will take the guide with them when they visit their doctors to help initiate a dialogue, and alert them to possible adverse interactions with pharmaceutical drugs.

Dr. Vandebroek has conducted field work in the Caribbean and consulted with local experts like Eliseo Trinidad, the owner of La 21 Division. Mr. Trinidad, 63, slim and youthful, attributed his health (and the fact that he does not have a single gray hair on his head) to his lifelong use of herbs. “People know a lot more about natural healing today than when I started the business 20 years ago,” he said. “Our sales of plant products have tripled.”

Mr. Trinidad, who was born in the Dominican Republic, pointed to packets containing dried herbs from Peru: There was horse tail (Equisetum giganteum) for bladder problems; palo de Brazil (Caesalpinia brasiliensis) for cleansing the kidney; and anamu (Petiveria alliacea) for fevers and arthritis. He said the botanica business is highly seasonal. With winter approaching, remedies containing bitter orange, lemongrass and guanabana, which are thought to ward off colds, are selling well.

In a narrow refrigerated room at the back of the shop, Dr. Vandebroek took down from a shelf a bag of plant stems with floppy banana-shaped leaves attached, flown in fresh from the Dominican Republic. “Insulina,” she said, adding that the plant (Costus igneus), closely related to ginger, is used by people with diabetes to lower blood glucose levels. But does it work? One study involving rodents said yes; another study said no. And insulina has not yet been tested on human subjects. As with so many other plant-based medicines, questions remain about insulina’s effectiveness.

Scientific uncertainty, however, need not depress sales: According to the World Health Organization, 80 percent of people in the developing world use medicinal plants as part of their own care.

“A lot of medical research still needs to be done,” said Dr. Vandebroek, adding that until the 19th century, physicians were generally botanists as well. According to a 2012 study published by the National Institutes of Health, nearly half of all new drugs approved for use in the past 30 years were developed from natural sources, mainly plants.

Traditional knowledge of plants often fades as people move to cities. But the opposite is happening in New York’s immigrant communities, where the latest wave of people from Mexico and Central America and Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans have been comparing notes on using herbs and foods as medicines.

“You go to a Latino grocery store,” Dr. Vandebroek said, “and you overhear someone on the checkout line talking about, say, cucumber being good for hypertension.”

But she added, “People are sometimes afraid to talk to doctors about their use of plants.” Beyond the language barrier for Spanish-speaking patients, there is the perception that medical professionals frown upon herbal remedies.

Dr. Vandebroek asked botanica users if they believe there are conditions that doctors do not understand or cannot cure. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Caribbean therapies often target maladies that have no equivalents in conventional medical diagnosis, she said, like empacho (gastrointestinal blockage).

Dr. Vandebroek said many Dominicans believed that drugs merely hid the pain of disease but did not cure it. Herbs were thought to expel the root causes of illness.

Michele Dominguez, a 33-year-old Bronx resident who has worked at La 21 Division Botanica for five years, said many people came because of money problems. “They tell us, ‘What can I use when I go to the casino?’ We tell them, ‘O.K., you can’t just take an herb or burn a candle and get money. You need to pray, you need to cleanse your body, your spirit of negative auras, of anything that may be blocking you.’”

Eline Trinidad, a 32-year-old nurse from Orlando, Fla., who was visiting her family in the Bronx (and who is not related to the botanica’s owner), has made such cleansing a part of her routine. When she is feeling stressed, she boils medicinal plants and bathes in the water.

Ms. Trinidad saw no contradiction between her use of herbs and her career in mainstream medicine. “I believe the two systems can work hand in hand,” she said. “But not all doctors understand.”

With the help of a $130,000 grant from the Cigna Foundation, the Botanical Garden offers training for doctors to help them better understand their patients’ cultural beliefs. So far, 740 medical students and practicing physicians have gone to the garden’s tropical conservatory to learn about medicinal plants and to participate in role-playing exercises. “It is all about promoting increased trust between health care providers and their patients,” Dr. Vandebroek said.

Issues of trust and culture are not the only things that have made some immigrants leery of mainstream medicine. Doctors’ visits are expensive, and herbs, selling for a few dollars a bag, are cheaper than prescription drugs.

According to a study by the Commonwealth Fund, 43 percent of Hispanics in the United States do not have a primary personal care physician or health provider. More than one-third lack health insurance, nearly double the rate for blacks and triple that for white Americans.

High costs and cultural differences have created a troubling disconnect between many Hispanics and the health care system. It is a rift that Dr. Roger Chirurgi, program director for the emergency medicine residency for the New York Medical College at Metropolitan Hospital Center in Manhattan, would like to heal.

“There’s a lot of people who we’ll see at repeat visits, and they’ve never taken their medicine,” Dr. Chirurgi said. “That’s why I’ve been taking my residents to the Botanical Garden for the past three years, to try to become more culturally sensitive and to be able to break through that barrier.”

Dr. Chirurgi now routinely asks patients if they are using herbals when he takes their medical history. He worries about the dangers of unregulated remedies that lack dosage guidelines and scientific evidence of their efficacy. “I want to make sure that they are safe, and don’t interact with the drug that I am prescribing,” he said. Still, he conceded that herbals may be helpful, if only as placebos. “If you believe that something will work,” he said, “it may actually work in some cases.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 15, 2015, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Seeking Remedies From Home .

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/nyregion/wary-of-mainstream-medicine-immigrants-seek-remedies-from-home.html?_r=0

Court Rules Against Church of Scientology in Bizarre Case

John Council
Texas Lawyer
November 17, 2015

Sometimes bizarre facts make for even stranger law.

And that's certainly the case for a recent Texas appellate court ruling that the Church of Scientology doesn't have a constitutional right to harass a woman by stalking her, sending her a sex toy at work and publishing allegations that she'd had a secret sex-change operation.

The background to the case, Church of Scientology International v. Rathbun, is as follows. Monique Rathbun is married to Marty Rathbun, a former member and official in the Church of Scientology. Rathbun alleges that the church relentlessly harassed her and her husband for three years, forcing them to move to a wooded lot outside of San Antonio. And after the Rathbuns moved, in 2013 she found a high-tech surveillance camera mounted to a tree aimed at their new property.

Rathburn filed a lawsuit against the church in a Comal County district court, alleging invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Rathbun, who has never been a member of the church, alleged, among other things, that Scientology operatives followed her as she drove to and from work; told her parents that her life was at risk as long as she was married to Marty Rathbun; sent a sex toy to her at her workplace; and published allegations on Scientology websites, including that she was a "sexual pervert" and a "man who has had a secret sex-change operation."

In response to her petition, the church filed a motion to dismiss Rathbun's claims under the Texas Citizens Participation Act [TCPA], also known as the Texas anti-SLAPP statute. The TCPA allows the trial court to dismiss tort suits filed against defendants who speak out on matters of public concern and in some cases allows them to recover their attorney fees.

The church argued that Rathbun's lawsuit was related to their rights of free speech, association and right to petition found in the First Amendment. Specifically they allege that Marty Rathbun engaged in the independent practice of Scientology outside of the church, which is forbidden. They also allege that the filming of the couple by the church's so-called Squirrel Busters, to document abuses of church doctrine, fell within the TCPA's definition of the exercise of free speech, right to petition or right of association.

After an extensive hearing, the trial court denied the church's motion to dismiss Rathbun's lawsuit and awarded her attorney fees. The church appealed the decision to Austin's Third Court of Appeals.

And in a Nov. 6 decision, the Third Court upheld the trial court's decision, dismissing the church's TCPA motion. The court found that the church failed to demonstrate how Rathbun's lawsuit implicates their First Amendment rights.

"Other than argue that the 'protest and film production' endeavors of the 'Squirrel Busters' are protected rights of free speech and thus within the scope of the TCPA, the Scientology defendants do not directly address the specific conduct Rathbun complains of, which includes following her while she went to and from work, shopping, out to dinner with friends, and walking her dog," wrote Justice Scott Field.

"Moreover, other than deny having done so, the Scientology defendants do not address Rathbun's allegations that they sent a sex toy to her at work and sent flowers with a 'romantic' message from her to a female co-worker."

The court also found that the record did not support the church's contention that Rathbun was a public figure who actively participated in a public controversy.

"The mere fact that she is married to Marty Rathbun and shares a residence with him does not automatically place her in the category of people who have been found to be public figures by virtue of their relationship to famous people," Field wrote.

However, the court reversed the trial court's order awarding Rathbun attorney fees, rejecting her contention that the church's TCPA motion was filed for the sole purpose of delaying the litigation of her tort case.

Leslie Hyman, a partner in San Antonio's Pulman, Cappuccio, Pullen, Benson & Jones who represents Rathbun on appeal, is pleased with the decision. She notes that the Third Court took nearly a year to decide the case and did a thorough job of examining the church's TCPA motion.

"One of the things I was concerned about was the argument [the church was] making that as long as you filmed yourself doing stuff, that made what you were doing protected by the First Amendment. That would suggest that if I had somebody with a camera phone filming me, I could smash your car," Hyman said.

"It comes back to what we were complaining about. We were not complaining about protected speech or protected assembly or protected petitioning," Hyman said. "We were complaining about her being followed to and from work, followed to restaurants and while shopping, and followed while walking the dog."

Tom Leatherbury, a partner in Vinson & Elkins who represents the church on appeal, did not return a call for comment.

Elliott Cappuccio, who represents Rathbun before the trial court, said that her case is the third one that his firm has handled against the church.

"When you talk about bizarre, you have no idea," Cappuccio said.

"They had suffered 300 days of the church renting homes next to theirs," Cappuccio said of the Rathbuns. "They would watch and see when her husband left town and bother her. Imagine they do that so long that you have to move. And then you move to another property, and there are surveillance cameras pointing your way. Imagine thinking you're never going to get away from these people.

"My client wants her day before a jury," Cappuccio said. "And we want a Texas jury to tell the church that this type of behavior is not going to be tolerated."

http://www.texaslawyer.com/id=1202742697960/Court-Rules-Against-Church-of-Scientology-in-Bizarre-Case?mcode=1202615604418&curindex=0&curpage=1

Ben Carson's Church: We're Glad He's Not Here

Gideon Resnick
The Daily Beast
November 18, 2015

Ben Carson
Ben Carson
The candidate has stopped making his regular church visits and the Seventh-day Adventists, who believe the End of Times is coming, are happy for him to keep his distance.

Ben Carson doesn’t have a lot of time to go to Saturday services at the Spencerville Seventh-day Adventist Church anymore but his fellow Seventh-day Adventists are fine with the glare of the presidential race being far away.

Carson has made his faith a central part of his campaign for president and credits it for his extraordinary accomplishments over the course of his life.

However, there is trepidation among many of the church’s thought leaders about their association with a candidate for political office. And some simply view his controversy-prone bid for the White House as a lose-lose for the church’s public image.

There are nearly 1.2 million Seventh-day Adventists in the United States. Followers abide by many elements of Evangelical Protestant doctrine but emphasize the importance of the Saturday Sabbath, promote religious liberty, focus on diet and health, and want to preserve conservative values like same-sex marriage. They are also firm believers in the eventual Second Coming of Jesus Christ and that those who don’t accept him linger in eternal sleep rather than go to hell. Some of the more controversial elements of the faith stem from the writings of co-founder and 19th-century prophet Ellen White, who saw in a vision that the U.S. government would unite with apostate Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church to suppress the Saturday Sabbath and imprison those who practiced it.

Spencerville, where Carson belongs, is a mainstream Adventist church by most standards according to theologian Jonathan K. Paulien which means not all of White’s writings are taken as gospel.

Located in Silver Spring, about 45 minutes by car from the Capitol, the church’s aesthetic is an amalgamation of old and new. The ceiling has sloping panelled wood meeting at a triangular point above the pews, drawing attention to the central focus of the area of worship: a massive organ bathed in the light of a towering stained-glass window behind it.

The window depicts a passage in the book of Revelation, representing a central tenet of the Adventist faith. Three angels carry messages to be delivered to the world, including “a book containing the everlasting gospel,” the church’s website reads, a call to bring men and women out of apostasy and a reminder for people to focus on the commandments of God rather than seeking righteousness simply through human effort alone.

“Welcome to worship at Spencerville Church,” this past Saturday’s service began. “We’re happy to see you all.”

A choir decked in purple robes sang the “Hymn of Praise No. 300,” according to the program, welcoming newly-appointed Pastor Chad Stuart to the pulpit with ringing repetitions of “Hallelujah.”

Stuart, whose blond shock of hair is reminiscent of 98 Degrees-era boy bands, has been with the church for a year.

His first words on Saturday, facing pews which slanted diagonally inwards toward the center, were focused on the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday.

“Be consistent in prayer,” Stuart asked the congregation on behalf of those suffering. The events, according to his faith, add to a mounting feeling that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is nearing. Without positing a guess as to when this ultimate salvation for Adventists would be, Stuart said in an interview with the Daily Beast that the world’s ongoing tumult makes it all the more clear that those who accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior will find an ultimate place with him in heaven at some point in the future.

“As things grow more and more troublesome, there’s a greater and greater - we believe - indicator of the nearness of the Lord’s return,” Stuart said careful to not distinguish the attacks in Paris as the sole sign of the imminent salvation. “We are attentive to the fact that no one knows the day or the hour but it seems that the world is in greater chaos as we go along. Unsolvable chaos in some ways.”

This is one of the central Adventist tenets with which Carson agrees, drawing skepticism from mainstream media.

He once told Sharyl Attkisson you could guess that we are getting closer to” the biblical End Times.” In an apparent effort to maintain his grip on evangelicals, Donald Trump, attempted to make it an issue, telling a crowd in Florida "I'm Presbyterian. Boy, that's down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don't know about. I just don't know about."

And while the approach of the end of days may seem like an odd idea to some, especially when tethered to calamitous world events like the Paris terrorist attack, 41 percent of Americans said they believe that Christ will return by 2050, according to a 2010 Pew Research Center poll. Carson has an 87 percent approval rating with white born-again evangelicals.

The conundrum Ben Carson presents to Seventh-day Adventists is not about how he expresses his faith. But that inherently, they are cautious about mixing their politics with religion.

“I think there’s a feeling among some of the more professional Adventists that this isn’t a win-win, it’s a lose lose for the church,” David Trim, the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s archivist told the Daily Beast.

“I’ll be honest with you, I’m a little more centrist in my political views than him and I find some of the things he says really rather troubling or just doesn’t make any sense. The feeling is ‘will we be tarred with a brush because of what he says?’” Trim said. “Or even if he turns out to be - even if he were a more unifying figure than he is - would the position that he has to adopt to be elected be such that he’d have to compromise his principles and then the church wouldn’t be happy with that either. It’s kind of like can this really end well for us?”

Trim, who is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has written extensively on the history of his faith, said the question for some is whether an Adventist should be getting involved in politics at all.

In May, the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s North American Division released a statement saying there would be no formal endorsement of Carson’s candidacy.

“The Adventist Church has a longstanding position of not supporting or opposing any candidate for elected office,” the statement read. “This position is based both on our historical position of separation of church and state and the applicable federal law relating to the church’s tax-exempt status.”

This message rang loud and clear even at Spencerville. Daniel Weber, the director of Communication for the Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America, would not permit interviews with church attendees about their knowledge of Carson. Pastor Stuart expressed a similar lack of desire to discuss politics and Carson’s campaign did not provide a comment for this article.

“There’s the perception that things go badly for religion whenever religion and the state unite,” Jon Paulien, Dean of the School of Religion at Loma Linda University told the Daily Beast. He is a prominent Seventh-day Adventist theologian and author who runs a site called “The Battle for Armageddon.”

Paulien thinks Carson’s rise offers a chance to explain Seventh-day Adventism to more people.

“Adventists I’m aware of are in two camps. The one camp, probably the larger camp, is delighted that a Seventh-day Adventist is taking on such a prominent role,” Paulien said. “It gives us a chance to state our case to a wider public that maybe didn’t know us before. I think a lot of Adventists are very happy about that.”

Others, he said, who may be more liberal “are horrified by some of the things he’s said or at least been reported to have said.”

Paulien also said that the skepticism Seventh-day Adventists have in regards to the political process has made some wary of “Ben Carson getting into bed with evangelical politicians.”

“We have a history of being advocates for religious liberty because we suffered from it in our early days,” Trim said. “Adventists were imprisoned for keeping Saturday a Sabbath for working on Sunday. Adventists have always been a bit more skeptical about the American myth of religious tolerance than many American Protestants would be.”

Carson doesn’t have to worry about being imprisoned for working on a Sunday, but his schedule may be different than others in a potential administration.

Even now on a given Saturday, Carson is far from the confines of Spencerville, where attendees are given envelopes for tithe offerings during service. But he carries the faith with him everywhere, even proposing tithes as a model for federal tax plans. And his story of devout redemption, a transition from angry teen to willing subject of God, was told in a somewhat different iteration in the sermon this past Saturday.

Pastor Stuart spent almost thirty minutes humorously delivering a series of anecdotes that were meant to be allegories about letting Jesus Christ take over one’s life. In one, he says he spent an entire day of his youth trying to figure out why he smelled bad, only to discover that he had put on a musty undershirt before leaving the house in the morning. This silly tale turned into rationale for forsaking what is bad in one’s life by accepting the Lord.

“If we allow these things to linger,” Stuart said to the congregation. “Even what is good will eventually become corrupt.”

And if people don’t give themselves up for Jesus, Stuart says they are destined to spend an eternity in the grave. He explained that modern Adventists don’t believe in eternal hell but rather an eternal kind of sleep.

“At the Second Coming of Christ, the trumpet of God and the voice of the archangel looks down and the dead in Christ will rise first,” Stuart told me. “At that point people will go up to heaven. We don’t believe in a god that tortures people for all eternity.”

This is a departure from the work of White, who referenced hell in many of her writings.

According to Trim, many modern Adventists really only adhere to White’s writing about the benefits of drinking water and emphasis on healthy practices. And Carson’s campaign has denied in the past that he believes that her foretold prophecy will take place.

In recent interviews, Carson has cautiously embraced his faith, so as to keep appealing to his base, while dispelling the more outlandish preconceived notions about it.

"I think there's a wide variety of interpretations of that,” Carson told the AP in response to a question about White’s particular End Times scenario. “There's a lot of persecution of Christians going on already in other parts of world. And some people assume that's going to happen every place. I'm not sure that's an appropriate assumption.”

What is an appropriate assumption is that Carson and his church’s emphasis on giving oneself to Jesus to guarantee a spot in heaven when End Times near, is central to the Seventh-day Adventist faith and the candidate’s own biography.

“I don’t have the power to overcome the sinful state within me,” Pastor Stuart told me. “I have to rely upon the grace and the work of the Lord.”

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart ... and he will direct your path,” Carson said, quoting the Bible’s Book of Proverbs at a recent address at Liberty University.

“I have clung to that through all kind of adversity in my life. I cling to it now because so many in the media want to bring me down because I represent something they can’t stand.”

Even as Carson ventures far from Spencerville Church and its congregation of suit-wearing adults and bible iPhone app-toting kids, the doctrine of the faith doesn’t venture far from him.

And as Seventh-day Adventists observe with mixed emotions, for better or worse, his faith is paying off.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/18/ben-carson-s-church-we-re-glad-he-s-not-here.html

Yesterday's Crimes: Peoples Temple Hit Squads and Jonestown's Last Victims

Bob Calhoun
SF Weekly
November 12, 2015 

 
Peoples Temple

It’s November 18, 1978.

The tape is running. Reverend Jim Jones is rambling into a microphone, dictating a suicide note on behalf of nearly a thousand people. Death is all around him, in the air and on the ground; death that he commanded. People are drinking grape Flavor Aid from a vat. It’s laced with potassium cyanide.

Before Jones, standing on a pavilion in front of his wailing congregation, shoots himself in the head, he issues a warning to a “Deanna Mertle.”

“The people in San Francisco will not be idle,” he says. “Now, would they? They’ll not take our death in vain.”

The following day, 913 people — many of them children — are found dead in the cleared-out patch of Guyana jungle called Jonestown.

In 1974, Deana Mertle and her husband Elmer left Peoples Temple, the paranoid church that Rev. Jones controlled like his personal banana republic in San Francisco’s Fillmore District. The couple had been forced to watch their 16-year-old daughter Linda get whacked 75 times with a 2-foot-long “spanking board” after hugging a friend that Jones branded a “traitor” to the church. It was the last straw; the Mertles abandoned their flock and changed their names to Jeannie and Al Mills, hoping to make a fresh start.

In the months after they left the Temple, the Mills family was subjected to scare tactics from Jones and his followers. Threatening notes were left on their doorstep. Jones’ personal bodyguards stalked them. Peoples Temple members even set off a bomb in the Bank of America branch where the Mills kept a safe deposit box — or at least the Temple took credit for the bombing in another note left on the Mills’ front porch.

"We saw you two near the bank last night," the note read. "We know where you keep your belongings."

Jeannie and Al fought back. They established the Human Freedom Center to help other ex-Peoples Temple members readjust to society and put political pressure on Jones through the Concerned Relatives organization. They also went on record in New West magazine’s exposé of the abuses happening inside their former church.

Their efforts led San Mateo Congressman Leo Ryan to make his ill-fated “fact-finding” mission to Guyana in 1978, which ultimately unleashed the Jonestown apocalypse after Ryan was killed by Peoples Temple members. Jones blamed Mertle/Mills for Ryan’s visit in what is now referred to as the “Death Tape.”

Although Jones died in the jungle 4,500 miles away, the Mills didn’t feel safe. The couple grew nervous as the one-year anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre approached. “The people in San Francisco” that Jones spoke of were just across the Bay from the Mills’ Berkeley home. Were any of them still loyal to Jones? Would they still kill for him? There was every reason to believe they would, considering the fanaticism that played out in Guyana.

In the citywide chaos following the assassinations of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone on Nov. 27, 1978, rumors swirled that a Peoples Temple hit squad was responsible. Jonestown had happened just nine days earlier. It seemed plausible that Temple mercenaries were behind the City Hall shootings before aggrieved ex-supervisor Dan White emerged as the culprit. Peoples Temple hit squads were a haunting Bay Area urban legend throughout the late 1970s.

November 18, 1979, Jonestown's tragic one-year anniversary, came and went without incident. The Mills family breathed a sigh of relief. They finally appeared to be safe from the horrors of their past.

But their respite was short-lived.

To be continued next week...

"Yesterday's Crimes" revisits strange, lurid, eerie, and often forgotten crimes from San Francisco's past.

www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2015/11/12/yesterdays-crimes-peoples-temple-hit-squads-and-jonestowns-last-victims

Congresswoman Left for Dead at Jonestown Recalls the Massacre, 37 Years Later

Rebecca Gale
Roll Call
November 18, 2015

 
Rep. Jackie Speier
Rep. Jackie Speier
Rep. Jackie Speier knows exactly how it feels to be left for dead.

On Nov. 18, 1978, she was shot five times on a remote airstrip in Guyana, South America. Her boss, Rep. Leo J. Ryan and four others lay dead nearby, killed by gunfire as they tried to escape Jonestown, the commune built by cult leader Jim Jones.

Nearly 40 years later, Speier still remembers why she decided to get on a plane to go down on the ill-fated congressional trip.

“Back in 1978, there were not many women in high-ranking positions in Congress,” said Speier, who was legislative counsel for Ryan at the time. “I felt if I didn’t go, it would be a step back for women holding these high positions. I thought, ‘I can’t not go.’”

So she went, accompanying Ryan and 23 other people to Guyana, on the northeastern coast of South America, attempting to visit Jim Jones and nearly 1,000 followers he’d amassed.

By the end of the trip, Ryan was dead — the first and only congressman to be assassinated in office — along with three journalists and one cult defector. Speier and nine others had been shot and left for dead at a remote airstrip; they waited 22 hours for help to arrive.

Immediately following the shootings, Jones and more than 900 of his followers died from self-inflicted cyanide poisoning in what was seen as a mass suicide at the time, but is now widely considered a mass murder.

The Ryan congressional delegation had no military escort. The State Department had given neither a warning nor protection.

Speier has occupied Ryan’s former seat in Congress since 2008. In an interview with CQ Roll Call, she noted that while much has changed, some fundamental questions about Jonestown remain unanswered.

The Consummate Staffer

Speier believes to this day that nothing would have deterred Ryan from going to Jonestown.

“He was a congressman accustomed to going into battle,” she said. Ryan believed in living the experience. Early in his political career, he taught school in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and later spent a week living on death row at the maximum security Folsom State Prison to learn more about inmates’ lives.

“He really felt there was nothing to worry about,” Speier said. “He was a congressman — as if he had some kind of a protective shield.”

Ryan was a member of the International Relations Committee, and had initially recruited a congressional colleague to make the trip alongside him. But the member backed out as the date approached.

Ryan’s travel plan was known by the committee’s chairman, Clement J. Zablocki, D-Wis. But according to the Dec. 7, 1978, edition of Roll Call, it was not considered an official inquiry because, under congressional guidelines, at least two congressmen must be involved in an investigation.

The trip was rooted in constituent service for Ryan. Jones’ Peoples Temple was based in San Francisco and had recruited people from Ryan’s nearby district, based in San Mateo.

As a staffer, Speier spent time listening to stories from constituents worried about their loved ones who had gone to Guyana and not been heard from again. She also heard from people who had left Jonestown, and told stories about Jones’ violent side and the arms and ammunition he was amassing.

Working with the State Department ahead of the trip, however, no one advised Speier of the potential danger.

“The State Department was really flat-footed,” Speier said. “They were more interested in making sure the prime minister, [Forbes Burnham], who was Marxist, was kept happy.”

Still, Speier had an inkling of the risks involved based on the stories she’d heard.

She was in the process of buying her first home, a condo in Arlington, Va., and she included language in her signing papers saying if she did not return from Guyana alive, the contract would be void.

“I didn’t want my parents to be saddled with this piece of real estate across the country,” the Californian said.

When the group arrived in Georgetown, Guyana, Speier said they waited two days for permission from Jim Jones to visit. She recalled Jones’ wife taking them on a tour.

“As the evening went on and they had entertainment, we were in the corner interviewing people. There was a long list of family members who wanted us to check on their children,” she said.

And then a note was passed to Don Harris, one of the reporters from NBC News who was on the trip. People wanted to leave.

“Don comes over, hands us the note. My heart sank,” Speier said. “Everything those defectors said is true. Then more people wanted to leave and the whole thing exploded. It was such a tinderbox of emotions and tension. It became clear that one plane wasn’t going to be enough. The congressman decided he was going to stay behind, [and take] the next airlift out. It was so emotionally raw.”

Speier described Jones as “agitated.” Larry Layton — one of Jones’ top operatives, whose sister Debbie, had defected — claimed he wanted to leave too, but Speier found him untrustworthy.

“He had a yellow poncho on, it had just rained. I just knew there was something wrong,” she said. “We get to the airstrip, I started loading passengers on both planes. I turned to Ryan and said, ‘I don’t want Layton on our plane.'”

Ryan suggested Layton fly on the other plane. As Speier started to board passengers, a young Guyanese child ran on the plane. She recalled trying to coax him off.

That was what she was doing when a tractor trailer drove on to the airstrip and people started shooting.

“People ran into the bush,” she said. “I followed Ryan under the plane and hid under one of the wheels.”

Speier and others were shot at point-blank range. Ryan and four others, including Harris, were dead. The survivors waited, supporting one another through the night.

Recovery

Speier had a long recovery ahead. Shot five times, she spent two months in the hospital and had 10 surgeries, all with 24 hour protection from the U.S. Marshals Service — because of threats to her life.

“It was the most incredible welcome,” when she returned home to San Francisco. “I thought to myself, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life a victim of Guyana. I want to be a survivor.”

Candidates, including a co-worker of Speier’s, were lining up for the special election to replace Ryan.

“On that Monday, the very last day, I decided to run to carry out his legacy,” Speier said. She didn’t win, coming in fourth.

The following year, she ran for the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, beating a 20-year incumbent, then later served in the California Assembly. “I never had any intention of returning to Washington,” she said.

But Congress called to her again after the death of Rep. Tom Lantos, who held Ryan’s San Mateo-based seat for 27 years. She was elected to fill Lantos’ seat in a special election in April 2008.

Jonestown had ceased to define her. “I had spent 24 years in elected office; I had moved beyond being a survivor. It’s part of my life story, but it’s a small part of my life story,” she said.

Holding the Government Accountable

Today, members of Congress travel with military attaches on congressional delegations. But Speier thinks more can be done to ensure nothing like Jonestown ever happens again.

“The State Department had a black eye at the end of that tragedy. Nine hundred American citizens lost their lives. They were not suicides, they were murder,” Speier said. “It wasn’t that they weren’t tipped off that there were problems; they were.”

Speier cited the case of Debbie Layton, who had sneaked away from Jonestown and went to the embassy before going back to the United States. “But they never followed up with the allegations, which she had made public about what was going on,” she said.

Speier is now a member of the Intelligence Committee and has asked to see secret government files related to Jonestown. “There was some that had suggested that the CIA was somehow involved and they didn’t want that to be exposed. Now that I’m on the Intelligence Committee, I actually recently asked to see the documentation. It does not appear that that was the case. And I don’t know. But it does seem like it was mishandled on a number of levels.”

Speier feels more can be done to scrutinize organizations, particularly religious ones, that are engaged in illegal activities. She came back to D.C. in 1979 to give her account of Jonestown in an unofficial congressional hearing organized by Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan.

The State Department, including Ambassador James Burke, who had been in Guyana at the time of the massacre, had been scheduled to appear in front of the renamed House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Latin American Subcommittee in November 1981 as part of an inquiry into the performance of State Department officials in connection with the Jonestown events.

Hours before the hearing was to begin, it was abruptly canceled.

“I heard later that the chairman of the full committee, Zablocki, had decided he didn’t want to pursue this matter,” Burke said, describing the situation for the Foreign Affairs Oral History Project in a 1989 interview. No further action was taken on the matter and Zablocki died in 1983.

For Speier, this part of history still has lessons left to teach.

“I do think the State Department could benefit from doing a case study, much like Harvard does in the business school, on what should be different. If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you’re compelled to repeat them. This should never ever happen again.”

http://www3.blogs.rollcall.com/218/jonestown-murders-jackie-speier-37-years/?dcz