I just found a wonderful new section of the Scientology Volunteer Ministers web site.  It’s a section of the This is Scientology speech by David Miscavige about the Scientology Volunteer Ministers.

Mr. Miscavige delivered this speech more than two years ago, and of course there has been an incredible acceleration of the work of the VMs since that time, what with the tsunamis which hit a few months later, and last year’s Gulf Coast hurricanes, not to mention the earthquake in Pakistan, this year’s cyclone in Darwin, Australia, fires in Cape Town Africa, earthquake relief in Java which began in May and is still going strong.

On top of that the International Association of Scientologists sponsored 3 more VM Goodwill Tours to add to those already out, to make Scientology technology available everywhere on Earth.

It’s very exciting to me.  I know the value of this technology first hand.

It has helped me enormously and I’ve been able to help my friends and my family with it.

I found a very interesting blog by Aerospace Bob.

I don’t know much about astronomy and the kind of engineering it must take to explore space, and some of his postings are above my head, but I like to follow him and see what he’s looking at, and learn some new things along the way.

Today he had a really interesting posting, though,on a subject that was more earthbound.  He posted about the recent Tom Cruise/Viacom news and what Bob posted shed new light on it to me.  Makes sense:

The Tom Cruise / Paramount controversy all makes sense now. I’ve met Cruise and found him to be a pretty decent fellow who respects others. His movies generated in excess of $3 billion in revenues for Paramount, and his last 2 movies generated a total of $1 billion revenue. It was hard to understand the business case for Paramount’s actions, especially the public tone of those actions. It all made sense when I found out that 2 members of the board of directors at Viacom (the parent company to Paramount) are also members of the board of directors of major pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer and Wyeth. The blackbox warnings that are now required for certain drugs have had a negative impact on drug sales, and Tom is credited with helping bring this about. So it just looks like a case of payback, with Paramount caught in the middle. Details are provided here.