Taking the Wikileak

The Osbourne Ultimatum: Mili-band on the Run

Schmientology

For Don't Panic






Poor old L. Ron Hubbard, he must be turning in his grave at the news that Druidry has just been classed as a religion in the UK. Even the cape-wearing river spirit-botherers can get the tax breaks for Xenu’s sake! What are you Scientologists doing wrong? Look no further, consult my Olly the Octopus guide; the Holy Grail for getting your cult a religious classification.

Identify a Convincing Supreme Being

It’s an open secret that, after parting with their life savings, Scientologists earn the right to learn that evil space lord Xenu flew all the souls on earth here on DC8 aeroplanes. This simply won’t do. Try being less specific. A certain amount of immateriality and illusiveness works well. An omni-present all knowing, but somehow intangible divine presence hidden behind the conventional fabric of space-time is much harder to pick holes in.

Imbue your Scriptures with Authenticity

This is admittedly much easier to do under the auspices of a Roman dictatorship, or with an army of angry Arabic warriors to ‘persuade’ people. It doesn’t help if the author of your scripture is renowned for his fantastical works of fiction and on record as saying, "I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is".

A miracle or two would probably help; a resurrection or a plague of locusts can work wonders. Failing that, time is probably your best ally. Maybe in a thousand years no one will remember how much of a charlatan L. Ron was considered in his day.

Isolate and Incubate your Followers

Unfettered access to knowledge is the enemy of the would-be modern-day Moses. Most successful religions gently encourage a voluntary disconnect from reason with incentives like other worlds with fountains of honeyed ambrosia and limitless virgins to spoil. This tends to be more effective than blackmail and steeling teenagers from loving families at persuading governments of the purity of your intentions.

Generate a Sustainable Income from your Followers

Remember throughout all your acts of boundless kindness and altruism that you’re running a business here. The Vatican didn’t get where it is today by giving away all its wealth to those in need now did it? However, the trick to getting those tax breaks is making it look like you’re a charity, so a voluntary system of collections based on peer pressure and guilt is preferable to a compulsory pay-per insight structure.

Choose your Scapegoats Wisely

Better to rail against the exponents of different metaphysical conventions than psychologists. It’s much more difficult to argue with people who actually know what they are talking about. Try picking on someone with assertions as speculative as your own, the Jews are a popular choice.

Oh, and Avoid Appointing People who are Clearly Unhinged as Missionaries of your Faith

Getting Tom Cruise to preach Scientology is a bit like getting Michael Stipe (or me!) to sell shampoo.

A Pop at the Pope

Written for Don't Panic

Parents across Great Britain (especially those with young boys) can breath a sigh of relief this week. The leader of a well know, world wide paedophile ring has slipped out of the country. Ha! What a mockery the Catholic Church makes of itself, and common law. It still cannot get used to being held accountable for its actions. In times gone by if some one (like king Henry IV of Germany) opposed the Vatican’s expansionist megalomania, a simple excommunication would bring them to heal. Now, in spite of damning evidence of conspiracy to cover up crimes against vulnerable children for the ‘good of the Universal Church’, committed by the current pope in his time as ‘Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’, it seems as if not all that much has changed. Parliament intervened to block the campaign to get a warrant for the pope’s arrest, just as George Bush did on another occasion in America, in 2005.

Apparently the main emphasis of the pope’s state visit, aside from the odd Beatification and drinking blood with some Glaswegians, was to highlight the ‘marginalisation of religion, particularly Christianity’. Erm, excuse me mister Benedict, sir, please don’t spank me, but which other institutions enjoy the same impunity as the Catholic church, and £10million of public funding for state visits?

Not my chess club. Nor even the RSPCA, and they do some great things for dolphins. How about the 390,127 people who listed themselves as Jedi on the 2001 census form? Unlikely. Not even the Scientologists, oh how they dream of the day…

So stop winging about the march of ‘aggressive secularism’ and comparing atheists to Nazi’s (even though you know very well what being a Nazi is all about, having been a member of the Hitler Youth). It’s irrelevant, it may be that many great acts of kindness and altruism are carried out by religious organizations, but many atrocities are too, boring argument… blah blah blah. Stalin was an atheist don’t you know? Remember Mother Theresa? Whatever. Red herring. What really matters is people are less inclined to believe peddlers of anachronistic fairy stories in 21st century Britain, and less tolerant of the privileged and molly-coddled position afforded them.

I understand that the church finds itself powerless to halt the ebbing decline of congregations in the UK, and that all pyramid schemes require the base to be larger than the pinnacle, and that the pope himself must be feeling the squeeze. The trouble is that this fashionable back lash against what is being painted as Richard Dawkins and his evil band of fundamentalist atheists seems more than a little out of touch with reality. But then that is essential tenet of religion after all.

You Can't Arrest Tony Blair

Good old Naomi Campbell, Keeping diamonds that would have been used to fund a war...

For Don't Panic



Dear Naomi,

You poor wee thing. How awful that you have been caught up in this intrigue surrounding the Charles Taylor war crimes tribunal. How can you possibly expect to work for a credible jewellery firm again? I mean, this was 1997, way before that Di Caprio film came out! How were you supposed to know what a Blood Diamond was?

And it’s not your fault he came on to you is it? They all do, right? It just so happens this one was a war criminal; and they don’t look any different from the rest of us. How were you to know? I’m looking at the person sitting next to me in the café that I’m writing you this letter from now. They could be a war criminal too for all I know. I mean, unless you actually see them bossing around 10 year old African kids with AK 47’s out of their mind on meths, how are you going to know where the diamonds they try to seduce you with come from?

Only I never get chatted up by the powerful and corrupt despots of failed states, but then my cheek bones aren’t as cat-like and winsome as yours Naomi, and by the way neither are Mia Farrow’s or your old agent Carole White’s and that’s why they’ve contradicted you in court. They are spiteful and bitter women, jealous of what God and Charles Taylor gave you. And that’s been your problem all your life, hasn’t it? I can’t imagine how awful it has been to have to spend your adult life dealing with jealous journalists and twisted colleagues bent on bringing you down to their level, you know; the level where you have to be on time for things and get on with people, some of whom might even appear not to have any cheek bones at all!

But what choice did you have, with your inauspicious upbringing in the backwaters of Streatham (Even though it’s probably St. Reatham on your birth certificate)? I saw you on Oprah last month sobbing with your mother and telling us all how she was never there for you as a child, how could she possibly give you the love you needed and hold down a job?! Tough choices: that’s what love and family are about. So we can forgive you if you throw the occasional (in your own words) ‘fit if I don’t get what I want’. It’s because there are deep abandonment issues there, and that’s OK, it really is. Have you seen Good Will Hunting? Watch it… It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault…

And all this is distracting from the real bad guy here, right? That nasty Charles Taylor, who’s careless flirting caused this whole mess. If he hadn’t been smuggling diamonds to arm child soldiers in Sierra Leon, none of this ‘inconvenience’ would have happened in the first place. Then you would have been free to plan your anniversary party with Vladimir Doronin.

Oh, by the way, good luck with that! I hear it’s going to be the ‘Party of the Season’ with all his billionaire Russian friends and half of Hollywood helicoptering in too! That should help take your mind off things! Maybe he’ll even propose, if he does just make sure it’s a Kimberly diamond this time!

Love

S. Icofant.

Shame, I could have made it as a Burka model

Written for Don't Panic

But Sarkozy finally got his way and managed to outlaw the Burka from French streets this week. It’s amazing how banning a controversial item of clothing has been spun as an act of libertarianism. French Justice Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie said it was a victory for "Values of freedom against all the oppressions which try to humiliate individuals; values of equality between men and women". Oh, so presumably this redresses the balance for male bank-robbers who have been forbidden to wear balaclavas and facemasks into Santander for decades... Pah! A largely male National Assembly tells women what they can and can’t wear, oh, the irony!

Feminists must be so confused. Is it a blow to oppressive husbands, or a blow to women who don’t want to be perceived as sex objects? Defiant, fully veiled Muslims could be about to become the bra burners of the 21st century. Which is even more ironic. What a mess. It’s a lethal cocktail of all three dinner table taboos: religion, politics and sex.

This bodes well for the newspapers because finding these taboos mixed together is the secret of a great news story (Religion + sex = Catholic Priest sex abuse scandal, sex + politics = David Laws scandal, religion + politics = Obama’s fundamentalist preacher scandal), but it’s pretty boring for the rest of us. A few veiled religious fundamentalists obscuring their sexuality from prying eyes in Harrods isn’t going to stop truck drivers reading Nuts magazine, just as Jordan flashing her silicon in the jungle isn’t going to free Saudi Arabian women from the tyranny and oppression of the patriarchy. Western and Arabic expectations of women are obviously vastly different but equally un-feminist in that both are essentially based on the woman’s role as an object of sexual desire. So frankly both can get down from their high horses. Something Sarkozy will never do so long as he has to stand next to Carla Bruni.