From Battle Creek MI this past Saturday:

From The Montréal Mirror, Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park discuss the infamous Trapped in the Closet episode.

TP: At first, we wrote Tom Cruise as this really flamboyant gay character and Comedy Central told us we just couldn’t do that. And we were like, “Why not? He’s never going to act upon it.” But they still said no way. So then we came back and said how about if we say that he’s in the closet and they still said no way. So we said, “No, what if he is literally trapped in a closet and can’t come out?” And they said, “Yeah, you can do that.” You see, we don’t get notes from Comedy Central but we do still have to talk to a lawyer, so every script has to go through a lawyer, and we’ll go, “Okay, so we can’t say this, but can we say this?” At the time, everyone was saying you just can’t fuck with those people, so we went, “Okay, let’s fuck with those people.”

MS: The reason Scientology was so upset about it is because they want people’s introduction to their organization to be from them. And the idea that there’s a bunch of kids around America and the first time they hear the word “Scientologist” is on South Park, and their first information about it comes from that show… I think the kids will already know what they’re being talked to about. If you see that show and that’s the first thing you learn aboutScientology, it will affect the way you think about Scientology forever. You can’t ever think about it the same, if only because it’s the first time you hear about it.

From the Salt Lake City Weekly:

The story of Hubbard and the Blackfeet is one that’s been told for years. According to official Scientology biographies, Hubbard, born in 1911, spent a short time on his grandparents’ Kalispell ranch when he was a boy. During that time, he claimed to have befriended a Blackfeet medicine man named “Old Tom” who taught him tribal lore and made him a “blood brother” in a special ceremony.

Parts of Hubbard’s biography don’t hold up under scrutiny, according to historians and researchers. Tribal enrollment records from that era contain no “Old Tom,” historians say. Christian names were not used among the Blackfeet of that time period, and the Blackfeet never had a blood-brother ceremony.

…

When first interviewed for this story, Blackfeet Tribal Chief Earl Old Person seemed doubtful the war-bonnet ceremony had even taken place.

“I haven’t heard of that,” he said.

But, by April 10, he had heard about it, and he wasn’t happy.

“They’re not given that right to transfer a war bonnet,” he said. “Those people don’t have the right to do it. You’ve got to be given authority to do it.”

A document from the Bureau of Indian Affairs rejects the notion that L. Ron Hubbard was “adopted” by the Blackfeet Nation, noting that the agency has “no record of such an action.”

Besides, there’s no such thing as a posthumous war-bonnet ceremony, he added. “The person’s got to be present,” he said.

There are only a few elders who can transfer war bonnets, Old Person said, including himself. He said he’d asked [Narconon’s Patricia] Devereaux to come talk to him about correcting the situation. Scientology and Narconon, he said, “really need to come to us. Talk to the people that have some authority.”

Today Tonight Covers Scientology 2 from Syd Anon on Vimeo.

ANZO statcrash:

L. Ron Hubbard’s Space Station 33 from Artoo45 on Vimeo.