List of San Diego Scientology Missions, Churches (Orgs), Schools, Front Groups 1970-2015

San Diego is an interesting case in Scientology because it is less than 200 miles from Los Angeles, the West Coast hub of the religion, and yet today that religion is barely existent in San Diego county, which is larger than Delaware and Rhode Island put together.

Missions

A Scientology Mission is a storefront to sell Hubbard books, along with being a low-level auditing and training center (people usually go from "life repair" to preclear before moving on to the local Org.) Usually Missions are the first Scientology outlets in an area, and San Diego followed that pattern.

As far as we can tell the first Scientology Mission in San Diego was at 1052 10th Avenue, in a single-story building that has since been demolished (it's now a parking lot.) This Mission was part of a series of Missions run by a man named Carl Barney in Los Angeles; the four LA Missions were allegedly incorporated as the "Church of Scientology of Los Angeles" and all five were called Scientology Coordinated Services. In order to keep ordinary people coming in (prices were rising in the 1970s), Barney ran this odd usury scam involving a front corporation called the Nationwide Acceptance Company, which would defray costs through loans to the public members. Barney was found out by the "mother church" in 1979 and was forced to sign over his Missions and declared a Suppressive Person (an antisocial person wrecking Scientology), and kicked out. It is unknown if Carl Barney founded the San Diego Mission or bought it out, and we do not know when it was founded. A former staff member, Howard Dickman wrote about his involvement in Scientology, which lasted from 1972 to 1977; according to him, Scientology grew so fast in San Diego that by 1973 they had moved around the corner to 926 C Street (property has also since been demolished.) It should be noted that the area in question is in downtown San Diego, which has been going through radical changes in development since the early 1980s. In any case, 926 C Street was the first true San Diego Church of Scientology.

The next organization was the Mission of La Jolla. La Jolla is a beach community slightly north of downtown San Diego and part of the county. We do no know where the Mission was, but we know incorporation papers were drawn up in April of 1971 by Robert H. Fell II and Janet and Gary Lawrence; the papers were filed on April 13, 1971. The Mission lasted until 1973 when it was merged with the San Diego Mission. The State of California records claim that the Mission of South Lake Tahoe (now defunct) was the agent for the La Jolla Mission, but that may have been after Carl Barney was thrown out.

Around 1973 two Missions formed: the Mission of Encinitas and the Mission of Adams Avenue. As with the La Jolla Mission, the address of the place in Encinitas is unknown to us. We do know it did not survive the 1970s, because it is not on this 1979 list of organizations (taken from the appendix of What is Scientology?, a Church-published reference book.) Encinitas itself is a beach city north of La Jolla and next to the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base. The Mission of Adams Avenue was far more important because it boasted such excellent auditors as Enid Vien (d. 2012), and was still raved about by former Scientologists years later as an excellent Mission. The place began at 3201 Adams Avenue (now the "El Zarape" restaurant), then moved to 6911 El Cajon Boulevard (at the time an abandoned supermarket in a strip mall - now a "Papa John's" pizzeria in the same strip mall.) According to this I have it backwards, that the Adams Avenue Mission ended in March of 1989 and became the Mission of Encinitas the same month, so the Mission moved east and then went north. Either way, both are defunct.

Chula Vista had two Missions, separated by thirty years of time. The first time they were at 192 Landis Avenue at least during 1978-79; then they were at 311 F Street, suite 103 from January, 2008 to October, 2010. They had a website for the 2008 version, but I can't find it now; that small storefront (today a computer repair place) was the last Mission the Church ran. None of the same people were involved as far as I know.

Escondido also had a Mission from July of 1987 to July of 1994, and like the Encinitas location I know nothing about it. This claims they changed names in 1994 to the "Church of Scientology Mission of Coast Mission", but that is a typo or wishful thinking because I can't find that place. Escondido itself is a few mile east of Encinitas, yet another inland Southern Californian town.

Churches (aka Orgs)

 A church is not where Scientologists go every Sunday; it's where they go for auditing (psychology while holding E-meter cans), and training to Clear and the "Operating Theatan" (OT) levels, which run from OT I to OT VIII. There are also side levels and self-auditing, so you can spend the rest of your adult life doing Scientology courses. As with the Missions, they also sell the Hubbard books, CDs (formerly open-reel and cassette tapes), DVDs, along with E-meters and other paraphernalia. The term "Org" is short for "organization", which is what they called these places before Hubbard went all religious in the 1960s-1970s to dodge taxes (at one point "ministers"*, including the President of Scientology International Heber Jentzsch, wore Catholic-style clerical collars.) As with most places, San Diego had far fewer Churches than Missions.

We wrote about the first San Diego Scientology Church above; that organization lasted until around 1980 in that large two-story building.....but it gets slightly complicated. According to the State's records, in December of 1975, a "Greater San Diego Scientology Church" was incorporated. The mailing address for this Church was 3956 Texas Street, Room 9, San Diego, which may have been the address of the agent (that seemed to be the case for some of the Missions.) If it was a re-name of an existing Org, it only lasted five years because they changed.....

Into the same name but a different address: 2559 C Street, San Diego. The agent was Linda Schive. What I have heard from ex-Scientologists is that in the '70s people preferred to get auditing at the Adams Avenue Mission rather than deal with the Church of Scientology San Diego, "Greater" or not. They were at that address from 1980 to 1994. The building at 2559 C Street was demolished and the lot rebuilt into yet another obnoxious condo complex.

The last and present Church of Scientology, San Diego was incorporated in December of 1994 by its current (the last we have heard) President David A. Meyer. 1330 4th Avenue has been the address since it was incorporated. For a period they were trying to sell the building, then rent it out while working on their failed Ideal Org project on Parkway Drive in La Mesa (more discussion on that later.) At the present time, the Church on 4th Avenue is the only outlet for adult Scientologists in San Diego County.

Scientology Schools

Scientology was one of the first to copy the Rudolf Steiner "Waldorf Schools" and push for a private education system built on Scientology ideas. San Diego has seen secular private schools, Fundamentalist Christian private schools, Waldorf Schools, military schools, and also the Scientology schools.

Apple School: this was the first Scientology school in San Diego County. Based on a school run by Bonnie Bishop in the mid-1970s when she took over the Los Feliz "Midtown School" and turned it into the "Apple School", this school was run out of storefront at 4616 Avocado Boulevard in La Mesa near the El Cajon city line, and was open to non-Scientologists. The school ran from Kindergarten to 6th grade in two long separate rooms and most of the instruction was self-directed. I've heard rumors that the school originally started in a former Catholic nunnery in Chula Vista, one person online** claimed they had been part of a prototype version of the school somewhere in El Cajon or Del Mar which was just a large house with a trailer in a backyard. Apple School La Mesa lasted about a year, or a year and a half, from 1982 to 1983 or early 1984. Afterwards the location cycled through a number of businesses and is a gym (Crossfit La Mesa) today.

Delphi Academy: Based on the Scientology education ("Study Tech") at the Delphian School in Oregon, the one in San Diego was in La Jolla at 7527 Cuvier Street, and it was dead by 2011. There was also the Delphi Academy of San Marcos (134 Woodland Parkway) which was run on the same site as the Old Richland Schoolhouse which was used for wedding receptions. The owner of the school was Jonathan ben Gerson, and his back rent problems sunk the school and caused the venue to shut down for a period.

Applied Scholastics: The main difference between this and Delphi is.....not much. The Applied Scholastics Academy of San Diego was just the Delphi Academy in La Jolla (7527 Cuvier Street) working out of the same building rented from a Methodist church, and the school is now defunct. Ben Gerson's San Marcos Delphi Academy also became an Applied Scholastics school.  Speaking of which, he also ran a tiny AS school in a mall in La Mesa. The school was at 5911 Severin Drive, though the school itself overlooked Amaya Drive. The La Mesa school died with the San Marcos one, in 2011....coincidentally, the school was near a 7-11 convenience store, mirroring how Apple School was next door to a 7-11. Finally, the one school that still exists is Applied Scholastics Academy North County (800 West Mission Road, San Marcos.) As with the La Jolla school they are renting space from a Methodist church. So out of five schools in thirty years, only one is operating. [2018 update: Applied Scholastics Academy North County has been dead since 2016.]

Front Groups

Before there was Narconon or WISE (World Institute of Scientology Enterprises), there were a number of national front groups Scientology created in the 1960s-70s and San Diego had a number of them. 

National Commission on Law Enforcement and Social Justice:  Group founded in 1974 claiming to be about human-rights promotion and government record-keeping has allegedly been used to attack Interpol (or so says Arnaldo Lerma's Lermanet website.) In 1979 their HQ was at....926 C Street, the San Diego Church of Scientology.

Committee On Public Health and Safety: Also credited as Committee on Health and Public Safety. This was the way Hubbard got back at the American Medical Association for the heavy interference they gave him in the early 1950s, and also how they forced the Church to put stickers on the E-meters claiming that it wasn't a medical or scientific device. COPHS heavily promoted alternative therapies, pointed out how expensive American medicine was/is. In 1979 their address was at 321 20th Street, San Diego.

Citizens Council on Human Rights: This is the one most people know, thanks to their LA anti-psychiatric,"house of horrors" museum on Sunset Boulevard. Founded in 1969, this is the anti-psychiatry wing of Scientology front groups. When R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz were popular, these guys promoted them (and Szasz co-founded CCHR.) In 1979 their address was.....321 20th Street, San Diego.

Committee to Re-Involve Ex-Offenders: An ex-convict's group allegedly designed to get former prisoners into Scientology. As with the other two, the 1979 location was 321 20th Street.

All of the 20th Street organizations shared the same telephone number, a good indication they all worked out of one room. The building on the location looks too new for the time period. None of these groups seem to be operating in San Diego today.

The failed Ideal Org

This is a long, complicated story involving Jonathan ben Gerson, David Meyer, Gerri Fischman (the actual head of the CofS-SD), and David Miscavige's demand that all Orgs become "Ideal Orgs" (a Hubbard term for an Org that is running well, but twisted by Miscavige to mean "a nice-looking, big building full of expensive Scientology-made furnishings, which the Church owns outright.") It also involved Proposition 8, a failed attempt to get La Mesa to approve an anti-hate-speech ordinance, the SD Church begging its members for cash, the purchase of the abandoned Coleman College campus (formerly a bowling alley at 7380 Parkway Drive in La Mesa) right when the commercial market went south in 2008, their failure to make enough money to please Miscavige and start construction on a new building, and the final selling off to a developer so that the property could be converted to ugly shitbox townhomes is a story that deserves a book chapter unto itself. Supposedly the San Diego Church has only 20 full-time "publics" left, because all the begging went nowhere and infuriated the rest.

The TL;DR Section

After decades of existence, Scientology only has one working Org and one working Applied Scholastics school. Seven Missions, two Churches, five Schools, come and gone. San Diego is less than two-hundred miles from Los Angeles, the hub of West Coast Scientology, and this is as good as it got.


_____________

*  Ministers are hard to define inside Scientology; today there are "Volunteer Ministers", but those are just staff members in yellow jackets sent to natural disasters. In the past people would appear for the press cameras dressed like this (another Lermanet photo, unfortunately; Heber Jentzsch is on the right.) Or this (Yvonne Gillham Jentzsch, Heber's first wife, possibly a file photograph.)


** From a former version of the ExScientologyKids.com messageboard, when it was locked and the only messages allowed were on a test forum. I also heard from a former parent user of the Apple School itself; she told me that the school had closed with no warning. Possibly the members were accused of "squirrling" the "Tech", of doing things without Hubbard's sanction; or the money behind Apple School was a Missionholder hit in the 1983 Missionholder's Conference, where the people who owned high-performing Missions were forced to sign them back to the Church. Either way Apple School died harder that some of the San Diego private schools I've heard of, such as St. Albans (collapsed in 1985 after a "parent strike" over allegedly poor teaching); or Fairhaven's Christian (imploded dramatically in 2000-2001 after the pastor of the mother church admitted an affair, let other people run the organization for six months, then tried to commit a coup. Rather than deal with a crazy man, the church and school shut down, and sold the site to another church. That pastor is still out there, and somehow still at a pulpit. His name is Preston Bunnell.)

Copy of "Why Wikipedia Will Fail"

Why Wikipedia Will Fail
by E. A. Barbour

For months, Mr. Strelnikov has begged me to write a fully honest essay on where Wikipedia is going. Having just spent FOUR YEARS studying and taking notes on the internal culture of Wikipedia, as well as its content, and having helped to produce a website containing more than two million words of notes, I daresay that most people would likely conclude that I can actually sit in judgement of the Wiki-world with some accuracy. In fact, the only hard conclusion I can reach is rather simple: that Wikipedia as an active community is dying, and no one can stop it. Because it is based on lies. The content? Hell with that. It was just the "honeypot" to build the community.

In 2011 and 2012 I performed statistical analyses of editing patterns, administration actions, article content biases, and a variety of other quantifiable patterns. One thing that stood out was a repeated pattern of percentages of good work vs. bad work; in general, roughly 15% of Wikipedia work is valuable, and the other 85% is either of dubious value or is complete garbage. This percentage appears in all kinds of unrelated analytic areas. And yet, the Internet-using public sees absolutely nothing wrong with it. Least of all its alleged "founder", the ever-dubious Jimmy "Jimbooboo" Wales.

Understand the worst thing about the perception of Wikipedia: it is not one thing, it is many many things. It is a scattered gigantic mess of hundreds of websites, with tens of thousands of people editing bits of it every day. The general public does not see the massive and lumbering bureaucracy behind the scenes, nor do they see the mind-blowingly stupid fights on hundreds of noticeboards, arbitration boards, mediation boards, or special areas like the ever-broken "Manual of Style". For fools, perception is truth, and these ugly places are not perceived because they are not easy to find. Not to mention the considerable amount of traffic on private Wikipedia IRC channels, which only insiders see. This is an archaic Internet protocol that very few people use anymore -- even IT professionals. It is "invisible" to average folks, therefore it does not exist.

Another part of WP's warped public perception is that average users automatically assume the administration is "reliable" and "trustworthy". Because of course, in their ignorance, the hoi polloi deludes themselves into thinking "as above, so below". And what they see (all they see) is "loads of interesting and probably-reliable info". When in fact, Wikipedia is the same 85% dubious/rotten, above AND below. Some of the administrators are good and honest people, some of them are average, and some are deeply arrogant and incompetent. Some are completely crazy and should be medicated forcibly. But they aren't controlled in any way. Again, this returns to Jimbooboo's incompetent oversight of the people he installed. And their subsequent evolution into a kind of obsessive, intolerant cult organization.

No one else but Wales can be blamed for the presence of "The Cunctator". Or of David Gerard, or of Tony Sidaway, or of Mark "Raul654" Pellegrini, or of "Essjay", or of Fred Bauder, or of a litany of other early administrators. Incompetent or not, they licked Jimmy's ballsack, so he put them in and insisted they have power, whereupon they caused total chaos. Some of them were placed on the early Arbitration Committee, simply because "Jimbo Sez So". The early history of Arbcom is full of dirty tricks and favoritism done by these fine people, to protect their friends and whatever biased Wikipedia content was involved. Arbcom eventually became a little more egalitarian yet still suffers from bloviation and uselessness. The rot set in back in 2005-2007 and all the chlorine bleach in the world won't remove it. Their "Mediation" system, which was supposed to prevent arbitrations and editor restrictions, was a massive failure.

And because Jimmy was a lazy and cowardly dictator, adminship was assumed to be "for life". Until recently, when administrators started to be removed for inactivity, the only way to get rid of one was for proven and outrageous acts of abuse for years. Even this was often not enough; several high-ranking Wikipedians who stuck their noses into the Israel/Palestine editwarring and other areas have yet to be punished for playing favorites. (Ironically I found that the administrators who were quitting or being pushed out for inactivity tended to be content contributors. The remaining sysops are mostly bot-operating drones, vandalism patrollers, and nut cases. Drug addicts, in other words. Wikipedia is their cult and their heroin. For some of them, Wikipedia is a source of income. Of course, no one wants to talk about this or admit it.) Wikipedia was set up in a broken way, we know exactly who was responsible, and yet it is clear it can never be repaired.

Back in 2012 when the now-failed criticism website Wikipediocracy was started, the sysops started a companion wiki for use by journalists and outsiders, to be a repository of hard information about WP internal operations that were difficult to find or verify. I wrote an article about Wikipedia's "death spiral" for it, liberally punctuated with charts from my previous analyses. It was completely disturbing information. And yet it was completely ignored. The Wikipedians ignored it, Wikipediocracy ignored it, and the journalists Wikipediocracy tried to attract ignored it. I've since realized why journalists rarely run critiques of Wikipedia: they use it routinely for background information, themselves, without further checking of facts. In short, they love it, have assumed that it is "accurate", and are fearful of damaging their favorite online general reference with bad publicity. I suspect this is why real criticism of WP, no matter how well justified, falls on deaf ears and is forgotten. Wikipediocracy's asinine sysops have deleted the "death spiral" article, along with considerable other content on their wiki. So an archive.org copy will have to do.

One of the "best" things Jimbooboo ever did for the Wikimedia Foundation was to put Sue Gardner in charge. And the only important thing she accomplished was to make the WMF into an effective fundraising organization. Mostly by begging directly to the general public, and by ass-kissing wealthy people in the Internet industry such as Google's management and Craig Newmark of Craigslist. Otherwise, she hired incompetent lunatics from the insider corps, lied about Wikipedia's quality and value, and otherwise played along with the "cult". She grew the organization from a few paid workers into hundreds, many chosen from the cultic insider ranks. Thanks to their cultic intolerance of criticism or outsider commentary, they refused to admit that Wikipedia's editing community was deeply flawed and declining. Not until Gardner admitted they had a problem in 2010, and was subsequently replaced in 2014 by Lila Tretikov, did any major changes occur at the WMF, as Tretikov started to push out some of the organization's incompetent dead weight (Erik Möller, former "Deputy Director", widely rumored to have had an affair with his boss Gardner) and liars (Steven Walling, Sarah Stierch and others). But she can't fix the community's male bias, paid editing issues, copyright-problem backlogs, and large quantities of crackpots, and she doesn't appear to be trying. Possibly she realizes how hopeless it is.

There are many other disturbing aspects to the handling of WP's decline. The all-important number of articles, or "content pages" is rapidly approaching the 5 million mark, despite a large number of these articles being generated by bots that scrape other websites, or by obsessive nutcases. Or sometimes by paid editors; especially in corporate areas and biographies. That 5 million number is bandied about as if it were magic. There is no talk, no measure of the QUALITY of these articles. Plus, this listing of statistical figures about English Wikipedia  has numerous columns that stop in January 2010. No explanation. Are they so embarrassing? The "official page" about administrators  lists 1,343 of them (whoops, it dropped to 1,342 while I was writing this paragraph), yet if you dig a little deeper , you learn that only 582 of them are currently "active". It hasn't been this low since 2005. As I said, those vanished administrators tended to be content writers and most of them appear to be quite disgusted with the way Wikipedia is operating today. New-article quantities per month are declining, new editor accounts are declining (they now have 26 million of them, even though most are unused sockpuppets and only a tiny fraction do something regularly), and many other indicia of the "health" of Wikipedia editing are either declining or static. You won't see anything about this on the front page, nor in any Wikimedia promotional materials.

Next time I'll comment on Wikipedia's tiny and pseudo-effective community of critics. They enjoy similar levels of competence/incompetence and outright lunacy, and are also declining as Wikipedia declines. And will deny it just as strenuously as Jimbo denies any problems with his "great creation" -- because most of them are either maniac Wikipedian fans who want to "save" it, or are secretly making money editing it. I've got some really negative things to say about Wikipediocracy, in fact.

Copy of "The Battle Over Scientology: Part I"

Right off the bat I want to say that we aren't going to be talking about Xenu, body thetans, auditing, "sec checking", or L. Ron Hubbard's rotten teeth. This is all about the article on Scientology in en-Wikipedia, how it was biased from the beginning, fought over for nearly a decade, and became a relic of the Internet-Scientology wars of the 1990s-2000s while also being a guide for other New Age, "new religious movement" groups on how to dodge the e-mobs while keeping a presence on Wikipedia.

In the Beginning....

The first Scientology article was in October 10, 2001 by The Cunctator (Brad Johnson), and as you can see here it's a long, harsh stub with no section breaks, photos, or complicated layout of any kind. The next edit was in November 19, 2001 by an IP address (62.20.33.xxx) who stuck in all the "cult" references and then it was off to the races. The Cunctator only edited the article twice after creating it, with his last addition in September of 2002. When Larry Sanger resigned from Wikipedia on March 1, 2002 he told Johnson this: "I'm sure glad I don't have to deal with you anymore, Cunctator. You're a frigging piece of work."

Early editors of the article split into two camps very quickly; those who actually used their real names, and those who just used IP addresses, and the latter camp were thought to be Scientologists or PR flacks working for them. Lee Daniel Crocker (who called the article "the best carefully-polished, well-debated" one on Wikipedia in November of 2001), Dreamyshade (one of the first female Wikipedia editors), AxelBoldt, and Bryan Dirksen were some of the early "name" Wikipedians involved. By 2003 Modemac (Eric Walker) was watching over the page and the warring was in earnest. By that point the article had regulars. The anti-Scientologists were: Prioryman when he was ChrisO (Chris Owens, 2003); David Gerard joined in 2004; Tony Sidaway, Gerard's friend, that same year; Will Beback (William McWhinney), also in 2004, then banned in 2012; Antaeus_Feldspar (Joseph Crowley) also 2004, left Wikipedia in 2011; SchuminWeb (Ben Schumin) in 2005, he left in 2012: MartinPoulter in 2005; Cirt (name unknown) 2006, desysopped in 2012; and finally Wizardman (Daniel Tylicki) in 2006. The named pro-Scientologists were much smaller in numbers and they were: Misou (name unknown) 2006; COFS aka Shutterbug (same) in 2007; TaborG (same) also in 2007; Lyncs aka Justallofthem aka Justanother (also unknown name), joined in 2006 and survived blocking, still on Wikipedia today. Misou, COFS, and TaborG were all accused of being sockpuppets of each other and banned; Lyncs tried to be the voice of reason from the Scientology side and failed to make a dent. There were four "uncertains" whose "allegiance" and true names were unknown: Wikipediatrix, who joined in 2005;  GoodDamon in 2006; Republitarian joined that same year, was later blocked as a "meatpuppet or sockpuppet" (?); and Highfructosecornsyrup, also in 2006. That last account was blocked as a sockpuppet of Wikipediatrix. Beyond all the names listed there were a large number of IP addresses and alleged sockpuppets, so much so that a number of half-baked "sockpuppet investigations" were carried out and large numbers of people were banned, most probably innocent. And thanks to all the submissions, deletions, reinsertions it remained a biased wreck that only began having photographs of Scientology buildings attached to it in the summer of 2005, and even then it was just a shot of the long vertical sign of the Los Angeles "Scientology Information Center" on Hollywood Boulevard.

Why Kick Scientology?

There are a number of  reasons, all of them complicated. Since the 1970s, there have been a number of anti-cult movements fighting groups like the Unification Church ("Moonies") or the Hari Krishnas (ISKCON), but especially the cults which encouraged mainly young people to drop their previous lives and live in some sort of collective, and there have been a large number of those, copying the `60s "drop out" communes but sticking in their pet religious dogmas. I see a lot of this as a bourgeois  revenge at the time on the commune culture which allowed the Symbionese Liberation Army (1973-75) to form, the fear that "something worse" would emerge. Instead they got Jonestown and David Berg's "The Family"; while "revolutionary suicide" and the idea of religious prostitution are deeply unpalatable, they aren't the urban guerillas of the SLA nor the bombers of the Weather Underground, and neither of those were cults.

Scientology was different; it was run like a corporation, most of the members did not live in communes (group living was for poorer staff members and members of the "Sea Org" priesthood), it aimed itself at the aspirational middle-class, it was wealthy enough to have television ad campaigns, famous people were members. There had been small bits of criticism like Paulette Cooper's 1971 book The Scandal of Scientology, but the Church liked lawsuits, so the media stayed away. What changed everything was the rise of Usenet, then the early Internet; Scientology tried to attack anti-Scientology Usenet groups in 1994 (possibly because they felt invincible after forcing the IRS to declare Scientology a religion in 1992); they were trounced. Scientology asked members to put a modified version of Netscape Navigator in their computers in 1998 which critics dubbed "Sciento Sitter"; it blocked out a number of anti-Scientology websites. When YouTube started in 2005, that became another battleground as protesters would record their protests and post them, or video editors cut up Hubbard lectures and other material into anti-Church collages, or posted copies of private Scientology videotapes like the 1986 death of L. Ron Hubbard "briefing" or the Jon Zegel audiotapes. The last two examples were posted to "stick it" to the Church of Scientology, to prove that their secrets were no longer so, also Zegel (who was involved in dissident Scientology, mainly David Mayo's Advanced Ability Center) was forced by Church lawyers to make a "recanting tape" after three others laying out where Hubbard had been from 1967 to 1983 and other secrets the Church was hiding from parishioners and the US government. As with everything else Internet and Scientology, videos were pulled for "copyright", but copied and reposted. Some of the videos linked to above are copies of copies.

So this is what the Wikipedia Scientology war was about, continuing the older Usenet fight on another website while also being a sideshow of the mid-2000s "Project Chanology" protests (which started when the Church yanked that Tom Cruise video that wound up being relentlessly parodied anyway.) It really had nothing to do with sticking to Wikipedia's "neutral point of view" in article writing, it was all about protesting an unpopular group the oddest way possible.

***

In the next post on this subject, we will run through the insane 2009 Arbitration case, look at how sloppy Wikipedia is when dealing with the large number of Scientology spinoff cults, and examine a number of odd articles related to Scientology within Wikipedia.

Below is an interview the Lisa McPherson Trust made with Mike McClaughry in 2000. McClaughry was a former member of Scientology's Guardian Office which was a small intelligence organization within Scientology. These were the people who broke into US government offices in the 1970s ("Operation Snow White"); they are now called the Office of Special Affairs and allegedly less crazy.

Copy of the article "The Paid Editing Clusterfuck of Wifione"

One of the biggest problems with Wikipedia since The Popularity began has to be the paid editing of articles on corporations, private colleges, the bios of any living person, and so on. As with most things Wikipedia, paid editing breaks their rules on conflict of interest but it happens so much, all the ever-shrinking army of editors do is ban the most egregious cases.

One such case is Wifione. He/she/it/they was banned a month ago or so for being a sockpuppet army of paid editing, though knowing socks, Wifione will re-emerge with another lame pun for a handle and a slightly-different IP. So who were "they"? One of my sources thinks Wifione was possibly a former Wikipedia admin called "Nichalp" who was also "Zithan" and the Zithan account was a paid editor (which was banned in 2009, and Nichalp lost IP oversight privileges.) Whatever the username, the paid editor was allegedly a University of Mumbai electronic engineering graduate named Nicholas Alphonso who now lives in Australia. He started appearing online in 2002 at the age of 19, possibly using a college computer. But there are complications with that claim of ownership, because it turns out Wifione had more predecessors, all of them from India. But first, who were they allegedly working for?

The Indian Institute of Planning and Management is an MBA school based in New Delhi, with 18 campuses across India, that has been in operation since 1973. It's a father and son affair; the founder is Malayaenda Kisor Chaudhuri, the "honorary dean" is his son Arindam. The IIPM has been ruthless in censoring its online critics in India (Cory Doctorow called it a "diploma mill" in a 2013 BoingBoing post), though it and Arindam Chaudhuri were censured last September by the Delhi High Court for "misleading students" into thinking it had the power to issue Bachelors of Business Administration or Masters of Business Administration qualifications (i.e., they were unaccredited by Indian standards.) Worse yet, the IIPM was claiming it had been recognized by a Belgian "International Management Institute" that had been set up by the Chaudhuris, an "institute" that is not even legal in Belgium. As of this writing, the Wikipedia article on the IIPM has been locked for "new" or unregistered users so that "sockpuppets of blocked or banned users" can't edit the article.

So now we get to the repetitious part of the article, listing all the alleged former Wikipedia handles of Wifione. Thanks should go to Eric Barbour and some others for the legwork......

First there was "Drnoamchomsky" who came and went in 2005. Edited in a fake claim about IIPM using subscription-only Business Week as a source, was found out. This account identified itself as being a part of IIPM (".....Other institutes don't organize any lectures - we do.") The Wikipedia userpage has been scrubbed by somebody from the www.chomsky.info site for "impersonating" noted linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky.

Next was the more open "Iipmstudent9", which as finally blocked in February 2007. There was no pretense of being unassociated with IIPM ("Yes, this id [sic] is used by multiple students from the New Delhi campus. We were not aware this was against Wiki policy, and have agreed to get new accounts for each of us.....we're looking to protect our institute's interests.....unsubstantiated allegations by bloggers on a Wiki page make our institute look bad!")  Was kicked out for threatening Wikipedian "MakrandJoshi" with a visit from the Mumbai (Bombay) Police for allegedly revealing his identity. Also edited from IP address 61.16.233.196. On September 8, 2006, signed as "Mrinal", who later became true separate account.

During the same time but separate were "Iipmalum" and "Dipali Sakhare." Iipmalum  used the same IP address as Iipmstudent9, Sakhare was an employee of Arindam Chaudhuri. She was involved with setting up the PR division of a company called Planman Consulting, whose webpage calls it "an IIPM initiative". Iipmalum was autoblocked in 2007.

"Mrinal Pandey" had "her" user page created on Christmas Day, 2006 by Iipmstudent9....whom she denied being (....."For the sake of clarity :-) I'm not iipmstudent9 or whomever the person is".....November 29, 2006.) She made the November statement from the IP address 203.76.132.74. That address was one of nine used by Mrinal; one of them (58.68.49.70) is the IP of a journalist named Mr. Onkareshwar Pandey, of The Sunday Indian. Which is "associated" with IIPM and Arindam Chaudhuri (i.e. Chaudhuri owns it.) Mrinal was indefinitely blocked in 2008 for using 43 accounts to edit IIPM related articles. No worries; Arbcom unblocked "her" a year later, she changed her name to "Empengent", and blanked her user page. "MakrandJoshi" and Tarantino of the Wikipediocracy board watched her online activities for years. Either O. Pandey is Mrinal, or Mrinal is somebody else (office assistant? girlfriend?) using that last name for editing ID purposes. In any case, they work directly or indirectly for the Chaudhuris.

More minor accounts were:  "Dean.A.Sandeep" who appeared and disappeared on March 31, 2009; he wanted page protection. "Suraj845" was never blocked, worked with Wifione, still around in 2013. There's also "Carlisle Rodham" with a blanked user page.

 "MakrandJoshi" stopped following Mrinal in 2010 despite threats to his property and life; I guess seeing people constantly get away with their schemes must have been too much to take.

List of Wifione Sockpuppets (no links, aforementioned in bold)

RAVIRAWAT
Deborah Fernandes
Kumarsingh
Newsexpress
Matthewlocker
Doublecover
Carlisle Rodham
Empengent
MfginIndia
Bigbangboom 
Abhinaw01 
Atul005
Ravindra Sing Rawat
Rawat2008
Addy kundu
Joshua Artgobain Benedict
Maheshbopara
lanchappell
Richapatell
Sumitpatel12
Solankikumar
PreetiSehgal
PramodMehta
NamithaSahu
Nancy1986
Mohit006
Sanjay Acer
PromilaGaur
Shilpanayar12
Highestheight
Whitepaperr
Editorrahul
Mrs.hidden
Missshivani
Arjunsingh11
Fastmovement
Articlesheet
Smartarticle
Amazingarticle
Articlerelease
Articlexpert
Newsexpert
Strongreader
Deverma
Radhika15
Puneet27
Manojkartik
Gangachauhan
Heenasrivastava
Aakritiverma
Bhadrikajain
Nainasrivastava
Dharakashyap
Kanishkachopra
Kristinakaif
Trishnaroy
Amaritarona
Mayankchopra
Anirudhodja
Karangupta
Jigneshmerhra
Parthaagarwal
Pratikshamehra
Prayushagarwal
Rakshitchopra

Notes:
Accounts Fastmovement through Articlexpert were all minted 11-27-08; all were blocked on 12-1-08.

Account Newsexpert began the next wave 12-18-08.

Account Deverma began editing IIPM article after protection ended 1-5-09.


Postscript

After this post was linked to the Wikipediocracy board, Tarantino wrote this:  "Wifione isn't Nichalp. We know who both are." If you actually do, please tell, so that they can be shamed out of paid-editing of Wikipedia or anywhere else online and popular.

The Kinks - Muswell Hillbillies

One of those albums people forget about when they talk about The Kinks. Pitchfork had this to say about it back in 2004:

"Muswell Hillbillies came out in 1971, and it was the Kinks' first release on RCA. This explains why you haven't been able to find the little bastard for years, but the good kids at Velvel know what's up; They've reissued this 1971 album (and are filling in the gaps for everything up until 1984). Muswell Hillbillies may very well be the best Kinks album you never heard, a scathing but witty take on urban renewal. No, it's not quite a concept album, more like an idea album-- a buncha songs that are a bit downbeat in theme but lively in execution.

What's a Muswell Hillbilly? Well, Muswell Hill was a community in England that the Davies family had to move to after their neighborhood in North London was razed and gentrified. You do the math, kiddo.
 
Muswell Hillbillies features Ray Davies at his whipcracking best, rolling out lyrics like "The milkman's a spy and the grocer keeps on following me/ And the woman next door's an undercover for the KGB." It's a pretty simple sound, and one that's more folk and country based than any album they'd ever done. A wonderful brass band turns up on two of the album's best tracks "Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues" and "Alcohol" (oh, there's a good combination). "Here Comes the People In Gray" is a bluesy stomp about a man whose house is being torn down by the city. "Oklahoma USA" is a pretty ballad about living in a fantasy world "with Shirley Jones and Gordon McRae." But other than the insidiously catchy chorus of "Have A Cuppa Tea" (you may be driven to murder if you listen to it too long), I can't find much to complain about with these Hillbillies."

Tom Scharpling's "Best Show" Back on the Air as a Podcast

One of the great cult classics of latter-day radio comedy, the Best Show on WFMU, gave us the inimitable pairing of Tom Scharpling (writer/producer for the comedy series Monk) with Jon Wurster (drummer of "Superchunk", writer on a number of Adult Swim comedy shows.) Their style was the "reverse prank call", with Wurster calling Scharpling on air at WFMU as a number of characters who become progressively unglued during their calls, sometimes conferenced with regular callers.  Their inital shot across the bow was "Rock, Rot & Rule", done in 1997 before the Best Show existed:

After that, a mythos began emerging around the fictional town of Newbridge, New Jersey, with Scharpling "moving" the Jersey City-based WFMU to the town and Wurster voicing everybody who lives there, to the point where there is now a "Newbridgctionary" website listing them all.

Tom Scharpling would also have guests on, such as Paul F. Tompkins (member of the Mr. Show sketch troupe.) Above, Tompkins and Scharpling rip apart a radio ad for the 2009 "Gathering of the Juggalos" at Cave-In-Rock, Illinois.

The show lasted thirteen years, shutting down on New Years Eve, 2013. After an near-two year hiatus, the show returned as the podcast Best Show, and has been taking calls and letting Philly Boy Roy Ziegler do his thing every Tuesday from 9PM to Midnight, PST.

The original WFMU Best Show recordings.

The new website (episodes availible on iTunes.)

The List O' Fun (As Above, So Below....)

[Posted here in case the original post is deleted by court order in the future.]

The reader may or may not know that Wikipedia has a  "banned users list" (until they deleted it, of course.) What nobody but the little birdies know is that the Wikipediocracy message board, that bastion of sanity and good judgement under the leadership of Stanistani, I mean William "Monty" Burns, also has such a list!

The following fifty accounts have been banned from the Wikipediocracy message board as of December 2014:

wllm (abandoned the site a while ago, but ban him all the same, right?)

Willbeheard (possibly William McWhinney, Wikipedia big wheel.)

TZ9876543210

Tyrenius

tryinghard

Triptych (thrown out, brought back, then thrown out again!)

Tippi Hadron (wife of HRIP7, was fighting with Greg Kohs on messageboard.)

themelinda

The Wife (another old-timer bites the dust.)

Tarc (ditto.)

Stierlitz (even though he has been locked out of his account for four months.)

Sidereal (alleged Wikipedia troll.)

russavia (aka "the Russian airplane guy" on Wikipedia.)

Retrospect

rd232 [addendum: Robin de la Motte of Wikipedia Commons.]

Rathel

Pen

Off2delhiDan [addendum: AKA "Youreallycan" and "Off2riorob", noticeboard pest.]

my two pence

Montoya

mike

MathSci [addendum: banned Wikipedia insider, a nasty person.]

LiquidWater

lightnight

Langston

Kumioko (Wikipedia old-timer; tossed for "personal agenda", whatever the fuck that is.)

Kiefer.Wolfowitz (SWEET JEEBUS, they shitcanned him for "relentless assholery"!!)

kemanan

Kauffner

JohnJ

In the Gulag

Hydrangea

HRA1924

honeypot21

Freddy

Faye Kane girl brain (a real ranter; has Venus symbol in middle of name)

Elissa

Duke Olav III (why?)

Deltahedron

deci

DebbieG

Daniel Brandt (they threw out the GodKing over a "personal agenda.")

Chris

Charmlet [addendum: a teenaged brown-noser.]

bryansee

Bonkers the Clown [addendum: Singaporean kid with an imagination.]

badmachine (Wikipedian; doesn't know why he was booted.)

Analytician

Abd (even though he's been AWOL for months.)

3 to 20 characters

***

Certainly some of these people were crazy, or wankers, or tools. Certainly as a board admin you have to ban people from time to time. But having a secret list, like you are Richard Nixon in 1971, is the sort of chickenshit you can expect from a man who is attempting to run for Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee (aka Jimbo's Kangaroo Supreme Court.)

If the criticism website is as bad as the thing it criticizes, is it even worthwhile to keep it running?

[My sources claim that some of the people listed are sockpuppets of each other, so the journey to Wikipedia behavior is complete.]



[A person claiming to be Tippi Hadron showed up in the comments asking that her name be stricken from the record and her comment deleted. I wrote no. Below are all the comments.]

Anonymous December 10, 2014 at 6:52 AM

Hey sweetie,

Would you mind removing my doxx from that list, for my husbeast's sake? I'm pretty sure some of the folks on WP would have him for breakfast if this got out, and, unfortunately, he still cares about the place and thinks it can be improved. Also, could you please delete this post once you've read it? GK may be a flaming misogynist in addition to being many other interesting things, but there are a number of good folks left on WO, and, as for now, it's the only game in town.

Tippi

Strelnikov December 10, 2014 at 11:28 AM

No.

You haven't been reading this website, have you? We are not playing by Wikipedia's "delete all the child porn before the Feds arrive!" rules....we don't have "nonpersons" or "nonarticles"; unless a comment is spambot gibberish, it stays.

Anonymous December 10, 2014 at 11:47 AM

Actually, I have been reading this website. Your post about TGIF was excellent. The rest, not so much, but then again, I'm a rather demanding editor. So, by all means, keep my doxx, if you can live with that decision. My time over there was up anyway, and The Management made a couple of poor choices in the run-up to all this.

Still, I wrote some posts on there that made an impact. To find my name on a list that contains some of the worst pests in WO and WP history hurts like hell. I could give you deets on some of the names on that list, but you don't seem all that friendly, and I do have a day job.

For me, participating on WO was never about sides, but about people. WP has no right to hurt its BLP subjects the way it does, as far as I'm concerned. But then, as I found out at my expense, WO isn't that much better. It sure got its share of officious former WP bigwigs who couldn't write their way out of a wet paper bag. But lord it over us writers they did. Oh well. All in the past.

You take care, and good luck with whatever it is you're trying to achieve
Tippi

Strelnikov December 10, 2014 at 12:42 PM

You misconstrue; I have nothing against you, or your husband. But I am playing by the rules of journalism, and one of the key points in journalism is you do not delete things. You do notify the readers of errors in the next issue or as a tag below the article. Are you asking me to say that the list was wrong, and that you are still a part of the Wikipediocracy messageboard?

You have to understand that Wikipedia has been lying about its past from at least 2004, and that Wikipediocracy is following suit. I'm not gunning for you; it's Zoloft I want out. I've never seen a guy run a messageboard like him, outside of that hellscape at Something Awful forums; he is narrow-minded, controlling, and manipulative. He will sink the Wikipediocracy project in the long run, just as Mistress Selina Kyle sank Wikipedia Review.

Somey December 10, 2014 at 2:10 PM

Just to answer a few of the issues raised above, you're right that some of these suspensions were questionable and a few were unwarranted, but when Wikipediocracy was set up, a conscious decision was made to exclude people on the basis of "near-constant distraction" alone - even though this is similar to what Wikipedia does (they call it "disruption") and therefore difficult to swallow, at least in a philosophical sense. But the underlying idea is that all interpersonal disputes are considered petty and distracting unless they somehow serve to illustrate a larger Wikipedia-specific problem.

As for specifics, Abd is still active on Quora, which clearly is far-better suited for him. Badmachine (aka "Hipcrime" on ED) was a "pre-emptive" suspension, as he'd apparently been active in GNAA, but that one was still dubious. Daniel Brandt's status is the trickiest of all - at the time, he was so relentless in his pursuit of Tarc's identity (and that of one or two others) that we felt he was hurting our credibility and scaring off other members, but still, he was probably justified in that pursuit. Anyway, when Tarc was suspended, we felt it was only fair to suspend Daniel as well - Daniel even agreed with us at the time, believe it or not.

"Duke Olav III" was an alternate account of a perfectly likable member who, after we asked politely, agreed to stick to his "main" account, so that one's OK, I think (and yes, about half the accounts on the list were suspended for that same reason). Kiefer is back, and agreed to lose the avatar/sig that we all felt was needlessly provocative politically, but he's definitely confrontational (though in a mostly-likable way). Kumioko should not have been suspended, but you can't deny that he was a one-note member; WR would have given him a daily posting limit, but Wikipediocracy just doesn't do that.

"The Wife" and Tippi were suspended for essentially the same reason(s); they weren't good reasons, but once you're in the "insider" group the rules change, and not always in a good way. That's true of most forums, I'm afraid. (Hopefully Tippi's situation can be revisited someday soon and corrected.) Finally, Triptych just got on everyone's nerves as he was completely uncompromising, but he could certainly return to the fold once bad blood on all sides has cooled down a bit.

So, all in all, I'd say about 10 percent of these suspensions are unwarranted, but I could see how some might think it was closer to 20 percent, all told. A lot depends on things like ideology, history of interpersonal disputes, and resistance to personal insult in general. I don't expect the situation to change much, but we'll try to reconcile with some of the people on this list, sooner or later.

Strelnikov December 10, 2014 at 4:01 PM

Good to hear from one of the Masters.....

Somey, my beef is with the shit way Zoloft dealt with Stierlitz; Stierlitz was willing to walk away for two weeks when things got hot and heavy over the Michael Shermer nonsense AND ZOLOFT THREW HIM OUT ANYWAY WHEN HE RETURNED and at 2am TO BOOT! Stierlitz took screenshots and sent them to me; I've never seen a board operator act so petty, outside of the aforementioned SomethingAwful forums. The guy was thrown out for talking about non-Wikipedia material in the OFF TOPICS forums, which is pure insanity. I think he was curbstomped because he WASN'T a member of Wikipedia, so Stanistani didn't have to fear being screwed with in Jimboland.

Somey December 10, 2014 at 5:29 PM

I wouldn't be so quick to blame Mr. Zoloft specifically; he's running the board because he's more willing than most (even myself) to implement the wishes of the group, and if he seems inconsistent, capricious, or petty, it's because the group is only as unified as a barely-cohesive bunch of die-hards who don't know each other in person can be, which is "not very." I don't agree with everything he does, and he's definitely quicker on the trigger than I ever was at WR, but again, that's essentially what the group wants.

As for Mr. Stierlitz, he was actually a special case, and I myself was as responsible for that as anyone, maybe more than anyone. I'd say your opinion of the matter is actually justified, but anti-atheist content on Wikipediocracy is a hot-button issue for me and (IMO) a clear majority of the insider group, especially when atheism is conflated with pro-science skepticism - fairly or unfairly. We've usually been sort-of willing to grin & bear it when it's strictly Wikipedia-related, but as soon as it strays out of the wikisphere, it quickly starts to piss many of us off.

So, assuming he's reading this, I do apologize for my (and our) lack of forbearance... but even in purely practical terms, we really don't like to make it easy for Wikipedians to pigeonhole us as "pseudoscience advocates" or anything else that smacks of an overarching agenda. I understand that it's technically a form of (non-official) censorship, but anti-atheists also should try to remember that religious people are the vast majority, and they have plenty of other places they can say that stuff. Atheists, OTOH, have relatively few places, even online, where they can feel relatively free from it. (And all that said, the situation is far from irreparable.)

Last but not least, I should state somewhere that my memory of some of these events is by no means perfect, nor am I speaking for the group. I also shouldn't have mentioned Tippi and "The Wife" in the same sentence, above - while the reasons were similar, the situations were completely different, and the loss of Tippi is huge in many important ways... whereas suspending "The Wife" was hardly a loss at all (other than that she added to our advocacy-credibility on the child-protection issue).

Anonymous December 10, 2014 at 5:01 PM

You know, I could tell you a few things about the "rules of journalism," but that would likely be entirely pointless. You seem consumed by your dislike for one of WO's admins, and that does not make for good journalism. You have that in common with another WP critic who shall remain nameless, but whose writing seems mostly motivated by his antipathy for one of the founders of WP. I did call that person out on a few things, and was subsequently ousted. The site still profits from the connections I've established, but they now have one less writer. Oh, and I am the writer who put them on the map with the Qworty story. So, please, do talk to me about journalism. Not.

And Somey, I have the greatest respect for you, but please do not lump me in with "The Wife." That account was run by a troll. I believe I did a little bit more for you people. On the positive side, you still have plenty of officious WP admin-style types to pick up the slack.

Peace out
Tippi

Strelnikov December 11, 2014 at 2:36 AM

My sometime contributor Doctor Why (who is not Stierlitz) has this to say:

"Oh look, once again Wikipedia's furious typing is spreading elsewhere
on the web. Accomplishes very little and looks very silly. Why is it
that a serious open discussion of Wikipedia's problems usually becomes
this "Secret Squirrel" crap? None of you are James Bond and I am not
impressed."

Tippi December 11, 2014 at 3:31 AM

If you want to go down that route, please, from now on, address me as Pussy. Pussy Galore, the original fly girl. ;)

For what it's worth, I thoroughly enjoyed Stierlitz's contributions to WO, and banning him was all kinds of stupid, imo. However, I am not sure how much of that was Bill Zoloft's doing. He may have been following orders from on high. Wouldn't have been the first time. Bill may not be perfect (who is?), but he is not the ogre you make him out to be. And that's me speaking as someone who was banned by him.

There are people on WO who have turned petty and bureaucratic into a fine art, people who couldn't see the big picture if it went and took them for a drive in a mint green Corvair at the break of dawn, but Bill is not one of them (and neither is Somey).

I am reasonably sure that if Stierlitz asked Bill to be let back in, Bill would be more than happy to oblige. He's quirky that way, and he's anything but narrow-minded. But would Stierlitz want that, given the way he was treated over there? Then again, grudges. What's the point? Life is short.

Be well,
Tippi

Strelnikov December 11, 2014 at 10:24 AM

Everything in quotations in my last was from that person, not me; he's having issues signing in.

I am glad somebody recognizes that throwing out Stierlitz was an awful idea.....what Somey doesn't recognize is that throwing people out of a website opens the possibility that they (or their friends) will start criticism websites. And Wikipedia/Wikipediocracy are a huge conjoined target; only Reddit would be bigger.

Somey December 12, 2014 at 12:32 AM

It wasn't an "awful idea," it was a necessary evil. Religion (or the lack thereof) is just not our target area, unless for some reason it is. And I do recognize that banning people leads to new websites of a critical (or worse) nature - we all recognize that. But when you've already got the 800-lb. gorilla doing it to you pretty much all the time, you grow a thicker skin after a few years, I guess. It's the nature of the business.

Strelnikov December 12, 2014 at 2:24 AM

I've met Stierlitz; he is not religious. He is interested in bizarro stuff, and he hates guys like James Randi because he thinks they are fundamentalists of a very narrow-minded materialism. Because you admitted that you threw him out and not Billy "Monty" Burns, you are now on his shitlist....which is a very bad place to be.

Somey December 12, 2014 at 8:18 PM

I dunno, "shitlist" - that sounds like a potential fatwa to me...? I'd say he's quite religious indeed. Maybe I could be the first Wikipediocracy martyr and get it on with dozens of virgin babes in the afterlife. Woo hoo! I can't wait! :)

Strelnikov December 14, 2014 at 10:10 PM

Somey, he will track you down and expose you. That's the shitlist.

Anonymous December 25, 2014 at 2:33 AM

Finally, someone not afraid to tell it like it is. If there's anything we've learned from the Wikimedia Foundation, the fish rots from the head down. Wikipediocracy replicated Wikipedia's recipe for combining secrecy and power.

As the official Wikipediocracy spokesman, Somey is protecting the brand. I look forward to Stierlitz exposing him. It's well past time.

You have a few details wrong. More importantly, you are essentially correct.

Anonymous March 4, 2015 at 5:17 PM

Someone mentioned an essay I wrote on gender categories, so I posted a copy for reference. I was then immediately banned from Wikipediocracy. It's a perfectly innocuous essay. You can see it here: http://www.conservapedia.com/User:PeterKa/Filipacchi. Apparently, the long arm of Hachette Filipacchi Media tracked me down.