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Howdy!

Pictures posted to a.b.s.

What was good about this demo was the lack of routine displayed by the clams. Since the clams had somehow found out we were coming, they had roped in a lot of people. Seemed like the usual mix of staffers / Sea Ogres / public / kids. I naturally think that the ones who look the way normal people with an eating disorder look are Sea Ogres, but I could be wrong - maybe they're simply long term staffers who do not have enough money for food.

There were two OSA types doing the friendly (and distracting) valence. Many others did the usual shpiel. The most commonly used phrase from the clams was "you are only destroying things." At one stage, I managed to nail down specifically what it was they thought we were doing - it turned out that our mere physical presence was destructive. I've been accused of a few things, but it's new to be accused of being anti-matter.

Some of the locals tried to gently persuade us that we had it all wrong and attempted standard discouragement and diversion tactics. I do wonder if it struck them as odd that we had specific answers to their generic criticisms of our activities. They all much preferred to try to divert me ("Why are you protesting here today?") to looking at my web-site. I guess it must be odd to be so scared of the Internet and of protesters as to have to disengage all semblances of a thought process.

There must have been one camera for every two clams. I don't know how to distinguish their behaviour - taking turns at shouting right in your face and video recording - from that of a group which has decided to manufacture an incident. I'm glad to report that not even tens of minutes of having "you can only destroy things" shouted at our stalwarth protesters had any effect other than slight exasperation.

The local ex-member (and solo-protester in December) did very well, being even better than some of the long time protesters at having his personal space invaded.

Towards the end (after more than two hours of protesting), they finally realised that they could strike a great blow for $cientology by forcing us to abandon our chosen slab of pavement by having their kids scrub it with toothbrushes (or whatever - dangerous paint scrapers have been suggested; I was busy trying not to step on the little victims). We did move away from the org - by one shop window. They tried to have me move again, and I told them that they had the window they wanted and they were not getting the one I was in front of. The did not insist (having by then obviously gotten used to the utter ineffectiveness of Standard Tech TRs in the Real World[tm] when faced with free people who do not have a vested interest in staying brainwashed).

All in all a fantastic day out - XENU even smiled on us and made lovely weather. We'll have to get back to that org later.

Suppressively yours

Jens

- --
Key ID 0x09723C12, j.tingleff@ieee.org/jens_tingleff@yahoo.com
    Analogue filtering / 5GHz RLAN / Mdk Linux / odds and ends
http://www.imaginet.fr/~jensting/             +44 1223 211 585
"..there was no message involved, the hedgehog was a hedgehog.." Dostoevsky
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