Response to all!
Welcome, Voldemorte. I say start where you want and we'll be happy to read. Especially if you're newly out, we'd (or at least I) enjoy what is recently happening. Did the Ship actually sail for the maiden voyage? Did the public get told about the asbestos? What are the number of public in the orgs?
Hi again everyone, and thank you for your responses.
Regarding the ship, NOTHING is communicated about it inside. I didn't find out until I started searching and ran across it.
Regarding the orgs, it is actually pretty interesting. The Fort Harrison (temporarily the new building while they are renovating the FH) seems like a ghost town. I have been over there many times in the last few years, and it always struck me funny at how dead it seemed. It's like a ghost town. The AO on the other hand had been booming. Very crowded, but that also seems to have declined over the last few years. In 2001, the FH was PACKED, and then it seems like it's declined significantly.
On the local front, the basic book program did seem to get more people back in the course room, but that is now going down quickly. I think it is because the entire thing is based on a lie. The books are not "NEW" they are just modified continually, I think to maintain the copyrights, and have something new to sell. As well as the fact that they are still squirreling what LRH actually wrote. I still don't buy the justification that they were all wrong for so long. I think they are trying to make them more palatable to the population, as well as removing controversial stuff. (I just did a comparison of 08 vs. a version I just got from the 70's and it is a travesty what they did. They basically took out the entire auditor code section, paraphrased it to state that "it is covered elsewhere" and then continued with the next chapter).
I also see the desperation of the communication increasing dramatically. I get probably 20 e-mail promotions a day on various things, including wins they are communicating. What's funny is that they can't see that the wins that are being shared are not actually wins, but are uneducated viewpoints that either you don't want, or their win makes everything else wrong. To pharaphrase one, it basically said that "I am now superior to everyone, and if you don't appreciate this win, you have evil intentions" Crazy.
Otherwise, the one thing that I have noticed is that as new public aren't coming in, they are having to do all their fundraising from existing public, and that is continually getting smaller. I know for a fact that the org in has a historical public that reaches over 10,000 that has purchased major services, and yet, they can't get 200 people to an event or barely on course.
So, I think the decline is speeding up and people are beginning to see. I know personally of three other OT7s who are not continuing on the level, and I know of 5 personally who are in actuality criminal, but continuing. I chose not to be part of that group.