The other night yours truly and a band of local anons did a fliering raid.  We try to do them once a week, where we don our masks and walk throughout downtown handing out fliers, and stopping to chat with those who are curious and ask for more information. If you don’t do these raids in your city try one out one evening, they’re surprisingly fun.

One member of the public we encountered was a librarian who works at a central library.  She recounted a story about how just the week prior a big box arrived from Bridge Publications filled with The Basics.

The Basics are an 18-book collection which combined costs $525 directly from Bridge Publications, Scientology’s publishing arm.  Scientologists are encouraged by the RTC to collect the addresses of their local libraries and pass them on to Bridge Publications, who will then send the libraries The Basics.  However, in addition to passing on these addresses, Scientologists are also required to pass along a payment at full price for The Basics collection to Bridge Publications.

Yes, you read that correctly: Scientologists pay full price for a book collection they’ll never see because David Miscavige tells them to.

No special discount.  No act of altruism from the very rich Church of Scientology itself to spread the word.  None of that.  Instead, the Joe Schmoe public Scientologist had to pay full price to cover not only printing and shipping costs but the markup that generates a profit.

These local Scientologists might be interested in knowing that the librarian we met has confirmed their payment has resulted in a collection of 18 brand-new books are filling up a garbage can outside of the library.

I told the librarian that her library should have done what others across the world are doing: sell them at a fraction of the cost on eBay where someone might find them useful.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 5:11 pm and is filed under lulz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.