[a letter to the NYT about the OneTaste advertisement-article]


Taking Leave
Published: March 24, 2009
To the Editor:

“The Pleasure Principle” (March 15), about the One Taste Urban Retreat Center in San Francisco, described our leaving as being due to a lifestyle decision, to pursue a life that was “heart-focused rather than genital-focused.”

This is not the only reason we left One Taste. We found the environment manipulative, unhealthy and disempowering. Group-think and the threat of being shunned were used to coerce people to adopt the dominant viewpoint. This was evident in the courses, in daily activities and in the living quarters. The general approach was to “work” people until they gave in to whatever they were seemingly holding out on, and dissent was undermined by branding it as a sign of personal failure.

We in no way endorse the programs One Taste offers or encourage anyone to join.

Elana Auerbach, Bill Press, Berkeley, Calif.


A version of this article appeared in print on March 22, 2009, on page ST10 of the New York edition.

[en.wikipedia.org]

the mostly PR wikipedia article on OneTaste, (with a couple actual facts too!) has a gaping hole for one singular piece of OBJECTIVE factual, footnoted, referenced information.

Last sentence in the entry, before References.
Some OneTaster put in the junk about Daedone living with her "boyfriend"...(he ain't a boy anymore!).

QUOTE: "moved in with her boyfriend, information technology professional, and financial backer in his apartment in a separate part of town."

Can you believe the tone of that? Who wrote that? Talk about transparent propaganda.
Notice they left out one thing...the guys NAME...the "boyfriend" is Reese Jones, and he was mentioned in the NYT advert-article.
An IT professional? WTF?! He's a Venture Capitalist and global entrepreneur. He's only an IT professional in that he appears to personally own all of the OneTaste websites.
Is this guy a wikipedia Houdini? Someone needs to stick his name in that Wikipedia entry, just in the purely factual sense it was in the NYT.

Its amazing how he is able to keep his name out of Wikipedia so far. Let Jimbo Wales delete it hisself.
If they take it out, and it stays out, then perhaps The Register and Cade Metz, will be interested in how that happened. It would make a good story.



Reese Jones also comes up as the Registrant for all of OneTaste websites [forum.culteducation.com] so does that means he owns OneTaste outright?
If you owned the Microsoft website, that means you own and control Microsoft.

What's the deal? hey, New York Times...is anyone home? Do you guy's have this thing called a search engine? You see, you put the subject of your story into one, and see what comes up. Its really complex stuff.
Oh, sorry, I forgot. You just run the pre-written article by the PR company with their PR media Talking Points...
Questions? Questions? we don't ask no stinkin' questions...
questions don't pay the bills....



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2009 12:19AM by The Anticult.

notice also in the Wikipedia article, that OneTasters have deleted the body-text references to Victor Baranco, which have been PROVEN, and referenced.
She has said so previously in her PR statements, which have recently been changed.

It was posted in numerous places by Robert Kandell, that Daedone studied Baranco for 7 years.
[forum.culteducation.com]


why hide this now? Why lie so openly and brazenly? Do they think people are stupid? Do they think they can get away with it?

There is even a recent comment of someone who participates in OneTaste, how after his first session, they started going on about MOREHOUSE, and the In-Group being like the Mark-Group, etc.

Why is OneTaste trying to hide their deep connections to Victor Baranco and Lafayette Morehouse?


Because that is where they learned the primary mind-fuck techniques they use on people, and if people know what is being done to them, it doesn't work as well. One thing damaging groups always do, is use deceit in how they recruit and self-promote.

The outstanding news source, the New York Post did a deep investigative report into OneTaste recently...
TOUCH-AND-GO SITUATION
ORGASMIC MEDITATION COMES TO NYC
JUSTIN ROCKET SILVERMAN

uh, not. They ran one of the worst shill-jobs you could ever imagine.
Newspapers are going broke as they have no ads, so now they obviously sell space as "stories".

Notice on the NY Post website there are NO COMMENTS posted.
Why? Because on every other previous "article" with comments, it had all sorts of criticisms and analysis of OneTaste.
How much extra does it cost to get comments on the stories blocked? Or is that included?

JUSTIN ROCKET SILVERMAN? and his anonymous girlfriend "Layla"? Notice how ironically, they display the grooming of "Layla" by not "pushing her"...what a coincidence that was featured in the story, to counteract the dozens of other first-person reports that say the opposite.

They feature instruction by the renowned experts Robert Kandell, Racheli Cherwitz, Nicole Daedone.
Daedone claims everyone will be OMing 30 years, just like they do "yoga" now. Good marketing strategy, try to use the trojan horse method, pretend that OMing is no different than "yoga".
as if.

but Vic Baranco would like that. One thing its missing though, is the ironic sarcasm of Victor Baranco's "Mark Group".
Where you have the gall to actually tell the people you are duping they are the "Marks" (a Mark is a gullible easy target in a swindle, a patsy).
The in-joke is that even though you are telling them they are the "Marks", they don't get it.
[thesaurus.reference.com] [Synonyms: chump, cinch, doormat, easy pickings, easy touch, fall guy, jay, mark, mug, patsy, pigeon, prize sap, pushover, scapegoat, sitting duck, soft touch, sucker, trusting soul]

In-Group...sorta works...obvious double-meaning...and it does refer to the basic culty idea of US vs THEM, those filthy Outsiders. So, In-Group is pretty good too.
Not as good a Mark-Group, though. Thanks Vic.

There are some blog sites who ALLOW to comments on the story, and the comments are usually amusing and accurate, as they criticize OneTaste.

But thought control, is very important. So you leave the comments open, yet there are no comments appearing....very revealing...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/10/2009 09:40PM by The Anticult.

Speaking of comments...Gawker has a short article on the "averticle" from the NY Post on OneTaste.

... What it Takes to Be a Writer Now
By Hamilton Nolan, 12:03 PM on Tue Mar 31 2009, 18,418 views
[gawker.com]

And comments are OPEN, and there are many.
Check the comments about each comment. (Discussions)

This is why they disallow comments on adverticles from this OneTaste group, they don't want reality interfering with their press releases, copied into "article" adverticles.


-----------------------
[everything2.com]
Adverticle (n.) -- A corporate advertisement cleverly concealed within a supposedly unbiased "news article", or "editorial".
Other examples of adverticles can be found in magazines and other newsstand periodicals, where print ads are designed and formatted to look like they are legitimate stories in the magazines in which they appear.
Adverticles, short for "advertisement articles" are prime examples of low-brow marketing, as their attempt at deception only serves to insult the reader's intelligence.

a college paper Spartan Daily, has spoken out criticizing OneTaste, and quoting Reese Jones, and Nicole Daedone.
"Thinking with your head, and not with your pants" [media.www.thespartandaily.com]

The connection to colleges, students and OneTaste, is not a random one.
For example, are these associations connected to youth, appropriate with the controversial XXX-rated sexually exploitative OneTaste, with its direct connections to Victor Baranco,
(Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America, Including Material on Charles Manson, Mel Lyman, Victor Baranco, and Their Followers) [www.amazon.com]
as Robert Kandell of OneTaste posted...
[forum.culteducation.com] "She [Nicole Daedone] has spent the last seven years devoting her energy to the work of Dr. Victor Baronco, founder of More University." (Quote by Robert Kandell, Jan 10, 2006)


Reese Jones is listed as a Director of Chabot Space & Science Center.
[www.chabotspace.org]
QUOTE: "Chabot Space & Science Center inspires and educates students of all ages about our Planet Earth and the Universe. ...outreach K-12 programs serve over 50,000 school children annually. Up to 2,000 K-12 teachers annually can take part in professional development programs, who in turn reach up to 60,000 Bay Area students each year."

DIRECTORS [www.chabotspace.org]
Reese Jones
Founder, Netopia
Fellow, Univ. of California, Berkeley


Reese Jones 1999 Fellow [entrepreneurship.berkeley.edu]
University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business
Lester Center Fellows, Fellows in Entrepreneurship:
[entrepreneurship.berkeley.edu]
Fellows in Entrepreneurship:
2006 - Jim Hornthal
2005 - Jim Hornthal
2004 - Terry Opdendyk
2003 - Kevin Brown
2002 - Jim Hornthal
2001 - Steve Domenik
2000 - Hubbard C. Howe
1999 - Reese Jones
1998 - Jerry Fiddler
1997 - Joan Cooper
1996 - Anita Dimondstein


____________________________________
Thinking with your head, and not with your pants
It's Down to This
Kimberly Tsao
Issue date: 4/15/09
[media.www.thespartandaily.com]

Om …

San Francisco's One Taste Urban Retreat Center, which houses almost 40 people, offers massages, yoga classes and orgasmic meditation.

The residents get up at 7 a.m. to stroke and be stroked. The women, undressed from the waist down, climax via their research partners - that's what they call them - who, they say, also benefit from the meditation.

A 2007 SF Weekly article reported that the center's founder, Nicole Daedone, hails "OMing," or orgasmic meditation, as the slow sex movement, coming on the heels of the slow food movement. Daedone aims to have branches in every major city, such as Los Angeles and Seattle.

"Many communal living situations centered on women have been about denying sexuality - convents, for example, or selling it, like at brothels," said Ted McIlvenna, president of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.

I get it - the center empowers women's sensuality, which has been denied, even up until today. I don't have a problem with the center's mission of "making your body a pleasurable place to be" either. It's a noble goal.

Racheli Cherwitz, 28, said the center "has improved her self-image and given her 'deep physical access to the woman (she is) and the woman (she wants) to be.'"

That I have a problem with. It's one thing to allow orgasmic meditation to rejuvenate your sexuality, but to let it define who you are? The article states that the residents' ages span from the 20s to 50s. I realize that's when quarter and mid-life crises set in, but there are other, more constructive ways in which to find yourself.

Get a hobby.

Then again, a New York Times article found residents claiming that "OMing is really about the 'hydration' of the self, the human connection, not sex."

However, Reese Jones, boyfriend of the center's founder, said, "It's a procedure to nourish the limbic system, like yoga or Pilates, with no other strings attached."

"When you go to a massage therapist," he added, "you don't take the masseuse to dinner afterward."

Contradiction much. If the center is really about bonding, then why are some residents' so-called research partners not their life partners? They could stroke a person in the morning and share a bed with someone else the same night. The connection truly runs deep.

Bob Gower, a 41-year-old resident, said, "I have just the closest friendships that I've ever had, the deepest love for people that I've ever had."

OK, you can build friendships in nursery, kindergarten, elementary and high schools, summer camps, college and work. Perhaps people can't help where they find friendship but once you get a hobby, make friends there rather than at a sex center where you're in lust.

Elana Auerbach, a former resident at the center, presented another problem with the participants: "They take on Nicole, exude Nicoleness."

She said, "You stop trusting yourself and start trusting Nicole."

Daedone denied it, of course, but even she admitted, "There's a high potential for this to be a cult."

Auerbach eventually left the center because she said she "wanted a life that was 'heart-focused rather than genital-focused.'"

Yet some, such as Daedone, actually equate orgasmic meditation with fulfillment.

"I just broke open, and the feeling was pure and clean. In a strange way, I think at that moment I decided to live," said Daedone, referring to her first experience prior to opening the center.

Really? An orgasm compelled her to start living?

For the most part, I'm all for the mantra, "To each his own." Spend your hours playing "Guitar Hero," bouncing on a trampoline or jumping off cliffs, fine. But I don't believe people need to rely on orgasms to jumpstart their lives.

After all, there's no Viagra for women.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/17/2009 12:27PM by The Anticult.

[en.wikipedia.org] At the OneTaste wikipedia article, there is one, or a couple of OneTaste members who are constantly trying to delete any critical information about OneTaste, which is typical with these groups.

The main "argument" is to try and use the couple of adverticles, which were obviously "bought and paid for" as glorified press releases, as a reference about what is "accurate" about OneTaste.

What a complete joke.
For example, the NYT didn't even bother to check who OWNS the OneTaste websites. This posts shows info where the name Reese Jones comes up everytime.
[forum.culteducation.com]
That info should be posted in Wikipedia, how Reese Jones controls all the OneTaste websites.
If you own the website, that means you control the company, if not own all of it.

The "cost" of courses as listed, is literally a sham. The much higher costs are detailed earlier in this thread.

So far, the Wikipedia Admins seem to have kept a low-profile. But at some point they are going to have to step in.
And they better not make decisions based on insider influence!
Already, one of the OneTaste members, appears to be getting "coached" on how to work the wiki-system.

Sure, Jimmy Jimbo Wales might be buddies with some of the involved parties with OneTaste...but that is why the Wikipedia Admins would be wise to keep their fingers out of it.
Or there might be some more articles in The Register for Cade Metz, and a NYT follow-up.

[forum.culteducation.com]
Cade Metz, more Wikipedia rigging in San Francisco for The Register?

and the well-financed OneTaste national PR advertising/propaganda campaign is gaining speed.

this "blog" by "Ashley Harrell" even goes beyond even the recent PR. The only accurate thing in it, is the category...SF Oddities

Slow-Sex Movement Picking up Speed: Documentaries, Books, and an Upcoming Lecture Series from SF's One Taste
[blogs.sfweekly.com]

The entire blog, is literally all PR, literally to the level of propaganda.
Daedone is NOT about "intimacy", that is just a buzz-word, to try and sugarcoat what is really going on.

The media is NOT ringing their phone off the hook...try the other way around. Who is OneTaste's PR company? Maybe its listed on some press releases? probably a big New York company.

The blogosphere comments are almost unanimously making fun of how ridiculous OneTaste appears to be. Comments on open blogs are close to 100% critical. [gawker.com]

Even sex-positive feminists criticize OneTaste, and have called it utterly ridiculous and exploitative.

OneTaste has nothing to do with "Buddhism".
- what an insane world, where groups of people wearing rubber gloves are manually stimulating strangers at 7am, in a for-profit capitalist business, and they try to call it Buddhism?
Note to Self: just call everything Buddhism to make it sound better in the media.
- ok..Greed is Buddhism, also according to OneTaste, capitalism is commune-ism. (how many communes are private for-profit companies? That was Victor Baranco who started the sex-commune for profit idea...)
- Lust, Greed, Vanity, Deception, Power, Narcissism? Yep, those are all Buddhism too.
- massage parlors? Buddhist. (hey, maybe if the 'massage parlors' by the airport registered as a Buddhist Om meditation orgasm center, they could avoid the police raids? think about it...)
- The only thing that isn't Buddhism, is that junk the Buddha said about suffering and desire.

And the 3 "documentaries" about OneTaste. Guess who's is going to pay for those? Take a wild guess.
This is the new thing, you hire some indy "doc" person, to do a PR-doc on the group, like Landmark did recently with Werner Erhard. They throw in a couple of lame critical comments which they dispute, but its literaly an infomerical. Just wait and see.

and to top it all off, they censor the comments on the blog, of course. Why? They can't handle the truth.

You want to real REAL comments from the public?
There are 100 of them here.
[gawker.com]

Below are some real comments about some of what goes on in these sex-groups, sex-cults, and its not about "intimacy", if anything, its ultimately about impersonal desensitization.
People need to be told the direct truth without secrets of what goes on in these for-profit sex-groups, and not the whitewashed marketing propaganda.


_________________________________
HAI, Human Awareness Institute
[forum.culteducation.com]
Quote:
SeekingTruth
Quote "Then came the hard part... when the WOMEN inserted a plastic speculum for the men to inspect them."
When we did this the speculums were left in the women for a LONG time. It is one thing for a trained medico. to do this for a SHORT time only, but its a whole different ball game for untrained women to do it for a LONG time, even to themselves. Bearing in mind that many of the women had been raped in their sexual lives, as we found out during the double circle Q&A sessions, this was one hell of an exercise for them to get through. I wonder what they got out of the exercise, and also the exercise when the naked women went round gazing and fondling the naked men's penises?

I remember also on the level 2 that each man had to demonstrate how he masturbated to his female exercise partner.

But it got much worse on later levels when fingers went a wandering inside various orifices of pre-chosen naked exercise partners.


I managed to pinch myself with the speculum too...

I didn't get anything about of looking at the penises, either. I was in my late 30s, I'd seen penises before. But I still ran back to the interns because I didn't want to be viewing the penises of strangers.

As for later levels... I'm very curious. What, specifically, goes on there? ...
___________________________________



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/2009 03:42PM by The Anticult.

As I recall, in the movie, A Fish Called Wanda the female protagonist has a boyfriend who is into extreme machismo, a martial arts fanatic, goes around quoting Nietzsche, and practices his kata and power chops with soulful classical music playing in the background.

One day, they quarrel, and this intelligent lady snaps:

'And one more thing, contrary to what you believe, Buddhism is not another word for every-man-for-himself!!!'

Wikipedia is cracking down on Scientology and their behavior on Wikipedia.
Good info from wiki-watcher Cade Metz.

Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
[www.theregister.co.uk]


But is Wikipedia only going to crack down on the cultish groups that Wikipedia doesn't like?
How about the cultish groups, that happen to have members and friends, that are buddies and perhaps even business associates with Wikipedia owners like Jimmy Jimbo Wales?

What about OneTaste? [en.wikipedia.org]
For example, in the Wikipedia article they keep removing the references to Reese Jones, who has been proven in the NYT to finance OneTaste, and as shown in the thread, even "owns" all their websites!
The name Reese Jones has appeared in articles about OneTaste, so it should not have been removed from the wikipedia entry.

And it appears that Reese Jones knows Jimmy Jimbo Wales personally?
Are they involved in any actual business together?
Was Reese Jones involved in the early money that went into Wikipedia, or not?

Why does the Reese Jones name keep getting deleted from the OneTaste Wikipedia article?

Why is there no Wikipedia entry on the multimillionaire internet venture capitalist Reese Jones?
[www.futureinreview.com]
[www.linkedin.com]