Printable version of this document (PDF, 8.6 MB)
by
Paulo Correa, MSc, PhD
Alexandra Correa, HBA
ISBN 1-894840-16-X
© Correa & Correa 2002
All rights reserved
PART I - SAHARASIA TAKEN TO TASK
1. Saharasianism galore! (A short lesson on the politics of practical pre-History)
2. 4,000BC, the birth of what?? Anything??
Did State societies arise in 4,000BC? No.
Is 4,000BC the marker for the origins of organized warfare? No.
3. When and why did the Sahara desertify?
PART II - 'BASIC PHYSICS' WITHOUT SCIENCE
1. Myron Sharaf, the great orgonotic functionalist
2. The stew made between Orgone Physics and Cosmic Radiation studies
3. The beef on muons
4. Blasband and cheap relationism
5. Baker the second, on a new detector (a glorious DC voltmeter!)
6. Sheer nonsense about Oranur
7. The retrograde resurrection of Dayton Miller's static Aether and Demeo's explanation for the easterlies
8. Cloudbluffing and saving the children of Eritrea
9. "OBRL Progress Report"
PART III - A 'BIOLOGY' OF THE INDETERMINABLE
1. Reich's Experiment XX and its limitations
2. Grad's supposed studies on Biogenesis and Experiment XX
3. Yesteryear's bions: memories of a Reichian molecule
4. Sprouting elongated Mung beans... or shrinking the controls by stress?
5. RBC's and the ease with which DNA springs eternal
PART IV - SAVING THE BEST FOR LAST: DEMEO & Co ON THE ORGONE MOTOR AND ''FREE' ENERGY
1. Demeo's rehashed little rubric on the Orgone Motor
2. The Reiter 'examination' of the KS-9154
3. Demeo on 'Free' energy... from the eighties
4. Demeo's two 2001 letters to the authors re his witnessing our demo of the OR and Aether Motors
5. A simple demonstration of the diurnal variation of the Aether Motor
APPENDIX - THE TRIBULATED HISTORY OF REICH'S SPINNER MOTOR(S)
REFERENCES
PART I
PART II
PART III
PART IV
"Most who decry war, practice it covertly by other means" |
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(Anonymous) |
One could call what follows below a critique. But a critique aims at redressing errors in thoughts or actions that are deemed worthy of being redressed. Yet, the supposed research reported in the Pulse of the Planet #5 (May 2002)(1), or PP5 for short, has no intrinsic value - as is amply demonstrated below. This is the sad constatation one is obliged to make after reviewing all of its features on archeology, basic physics, biology, cloudbusting, etc. None of the writers whom we will examine below deserve the respect of self-critical research workers - precisely because, as will become apparent, they do not care what they say or how they say it, any more than they care about citing literature with precedents or opposing points of view that are worthy of consideration. To pompously call this PP5 an Heretic's Notebook can be seen as nothing but a sorry heresy of Reichianism against the spirit and courage of true heresy.
One could also designate what follows as a review - but such is carried out by peers. Yet, we cannot regard Demeo or his ilk as our peers, any more than we would wish to debase ourselves to become theirs.
No. What follows is an expedition that became destined to concretely investigate how Reichianism has become stigmatized by a rampant poverty of thought and nonscientific, mystical beliefs that are represented as being 'scientific' alternatives to mainstream science. To do so, there is only one route to follow: take Demeo and his collaborators to task - theoretically and experimentally. So call it an assessment if you will - pure and simple.
Is it unbiased? This would be the kind of lie that Demeo is given to - as when he claimed to have written his shoddy, ignorant and ill-willed 'Critique' of Volume I of Experimental Aetherometry from an objective, impartial viewpoint, as our peer... But science is never unbiased - its bias is precisely knowledge: knowing or not knowing.
Is our assessment fair? On this one, the reader will have to decide. We believe it is an honest assessment and an accurate examination of both what is said and what is strikingly omitted in PP5; and this task is carried out not in the name of Reich, nor even in our own. Not in anyone's name - but solely as part of the pitiless work of thought which has long been sorely needed in these fields of inquiry - like opening the windows of a room gone stale, to let in the lively fresh air of the Great Outdoors.
Demeo makes evident why so many good scientists and thinkers have for so long hesitated in approaching Reich with the same honesty that our texts claim. Everything they read which purports to defend Reich is, in general, a veritable anathema for the scientific spirit and its quests. Now, it must be said, it wasn't Reich nor his mistakes - which, here and there, he also committed - that are responsible for this lameness of thought and weakness of investigation.
No. It was what the followers - who, almost to a man, betrayed Reich until his last hour - did (and with a vengeance, as PP5 also amply demonstrates) to disfigure every good thought and direction of investigation that Reich took. To dissolve, in and through the Reichian Church, the responsibility of any subsequent researcher in Orgonomy. To associate Reich's work with mystical and mythical dogmas from which there is no retreat except into further nonsense. To discard method as if science were a matter of fiat by faith.
What follows should probably be regarded, more properly, as an enterprise of healthy demolition of the most undignified collection of rubbish ever written in the name of Reich. (Oh yes, armed with our indulgent critique of Saharasianism, we can appreciate how Demeo is a Reichian not really because of Wilhelm, but because of Eva, the mother of all Matrist cultures.)
One thing is now certain - Demeo's new mission to suppress any mention of our extensive work - in basic physics, basic biology and the Aether Motor - has boxed him in even further than he was before. While Reich remains the overt 'despotic signifier' of the Demeo chapel, as it befits every iconolatry to have one, there is now a Lacanian absence, a 'barred signifier' - as Jacques Lacan was fond of putting it - whose covert identity has Aetherometry written all over it - and whose 'signified' are all the unreferenced allusions to our own work and findings, not to mention the clumsily hidden 'rebuttals' Demeo sprinkles throughout his PP5.
But as Demeo is about to finally find out - Aetherometry is more like Lacan's 'object a' than his 'despotic signifier' or its 'democratic signified'. Actual science takes no prisoners. In that respect, it shares a lot with the nomadism of Villa and Zapata.
Paulo Correa
Alexandra Correa
H.B.A. (Psy & Soc), M.A.S.G.
1. Saharasianism galore! (A short lesson on the politics of practical pre-History)
The Saharasia material that Demeo includes in the PP5 ("Update on Saharasia: Ambiguities and Uncertainties about 'War before Civilization'", PP5, p15) is even more debile, infantile and amusing than the effort he made in his hefty coffee-table book 'Saharasia'. We will not go into a detailed critique of the Demeo 'thesis' about the origins of warfare or his ridiculous idea of what is or is not violence. We simply think that a thorough critique of his work in this respect is just not worth our while. One day, maybe - maybe not - we might publish our own voluminous works on the origins of war and the State, where we gladly and effortlessly ignore just about everything that Demeo has written on the subject or has considered important. But there are some jokes we should presently like to share with the reader - because they go right to the core of any minimally critical evaluation of Demeo's manicheistic Saharasianism, and we are not aware that others have addressed similar matters before.
PRIMO, of course, there is the manicheistic split that Demeo has developed and coined as a "dichotomous" (sic) separation of "social behaviours and institutions" (PP5, p.16) We're back to flatland alright: everything neatly falls into "armored patrist" versus "unarmored matrist" societies - thus reviving the ridiculous leftist notions of Bachofen, Engels, Fromm and the young Reich, of a fundamental historical division between matriarchy and patriarchy. This kind of reverse Freudianism was completely and healthily dispatched to the ashcan of ethnocentered anthroposophism by Levi-Strauss (2), with his now classical demonstration that savage or tribal societies indistinctly show, even inside the same tribal structure, both patrilineal and matrilineal forms of filiation, as well as matrilocal and patrilocal forms of alliance or marriage.
The whole Saharasian enterprise smacks of politically-correct 'male-feminist' revisionism of the ethnological record - with the 'good' ('profemale') and the 'bad' ('antifemale') tribes distributed across Demeo's neurotic and moralizing differences - including his homophobia, such that "armored patrist" societies always have homosexual tendencies plus severe taboos, whereas "unarmored matrist" societies have "absence of homosexual tendency"(sic). Likewise, all the so-called evils of society, such as prostitution, mutilation practices, etc, are entirely and solely characteristics of "armored patrist" societies.
SECUNDO, the Christian spirit that emanates like a stale odor from such a ridiculously useless endeavour makes one's teeth cringe. (Remember, this trash is uttered and printed not even in the name of Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Marx, etc, but in that of Reich - as if the latter's name could per se validate these notions as scientific!) For there are some very simple or basic features of all known diverse social formations that all legitimate archaeologists and ethnologists can agree upon. Let us consider some such facts. For instance, a savage or tribal society, wherever it might be, always presents us with an impotent chief who cannot command and always lacks a permanent war machine (3). Why? How? Yet savages everywhere regard their culture as the 'way of the warrior and the hunter' - ever since the most distant days of the linguistic experiments in mnemotechnique at the dawn of culture: "the harsh law of the Guayaki leaves them no way out: the men have no existence except as hunters, and they remain secure in their being by preserving their bow from the contact of women" (4).
In assessing Clastres' ethnological work - and the tremendous contributions he made in a very short lifetime - Deleuze and Guattari wrote these concise words:
"But Clastres goes further, identifying war in primitive societies as the surest mechanism directed against the formation of the State: war maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of the groups, and the warrior himself is caught in the process of accumulating exploits, a process that leads him to solitude and a prestigious death, but without power. Clastres can thus invoke natural Law while reversing its principal proposition: just as Hobbes saw clearly that the State was against war, so war is against the State" (5).Other such facts: consider the emergence of the very oldest village-towns: everywhere one finds that they had NO ARMIES, that they did not have an army institution, and yet these villages or towns were dependent upon sedentarian occupation of the soil and presented complex social stratifications. Now consider the appearance of urban fortifications - everywhere it coexisted with a flux of nomadism that threatened a territorial State, a stratified society. Or consider instead the City-State: everywhere it acquired a military mechanism, as war came to play into the hands of the State. Consider any nomadic formation, no matter how far back it goes: it always constituted a permanent war-machine directed against the State, but not a military mechanism of the State - precisely because no nomadic formation was structured as a State.
All these critical differences are lost in Demeo's flattening of history, and specifically by his 'sexualizing' approach to the history of warfare. The distorting schemes of arbitrary classification which he proposes flatten not just the historical emergence of 'organized' warfare, but equally blanket the origins of savage or "primitive" culture and the very emergence of State societies.
At the dawn of culture, all societies appear to have been structured by kinship systems that our ethnologists have come to call "savage" or "primitive". These societies knew no State, were not organized as States, and knew no permanent state of war, any more than they practiced privatization of property. They were societies of ranks, not castes, and thus had no social stratification in the usual sense. They practiced sporadic warfare (as the works of Clastres and Florinda Donner (6) have amply shown) and deployed their own brand of violence ('cruelty') which they wielded as the very tool with which to dress or breed the human over our animal nature. The scarifying and incisive shamanistic practices of all savage cultures have no other objective but the inscriptive work of culture. Demeo, like most Occidentals, has never understood this fundamental aspect of savage societies. The revulsion he experiences at contemplating the very cruel nature of all savage repressions and inscriptions precludes him from any understanding of these cultures 'from within'.
But let us carry out a simple exercise. We ask: Do savage or tribal societies fall into the neo-Marxistoid Saharasianist scheme of Demeo? (This scheme is summarized in his Figure 1 on p. 17 of PP5, reproduced as Figure 1 below.)
Let us see. One could pick at random - say the Tupi-Guarani of South America, or the Tarahumara of Mexico, to pick well-known and well-studied examples. These were decidedly savage tribal cultures. No one has ever dared to suggest otherwise. Their codes were the warrior's path, and both cultures knew and practiced war, though both lacked a permanent war assemblage. Yet, did they present us with the characteristics that Demeo attributes to Patrist societies? Let us run the Saharasianist gauntlet and do the experiment:
Dear reader - can you believe that nearly a century and a half after Nietzsche, in his Genealogy of Morals, demonstrated how language began as a mnemotechnique of pain, as a form of shamanistic inscription of word-promises (and what else is a marriage?) on the body of the initiated (yes, the savages were the great inventors of language and culture!), there are still these neo-Reichians like Demeo who believe that all savage painful initiations and rituals of inscription are sadistic characteristics of...patriarchal societies! Blissfully ignorant of the entire Theatre of Cruelty that Artaud discovered amongst the Tarahumara! Blissfully ignorant of the very aim of the inscriptive work of savage culture: "how is a new memory to be created for man - a collective memory of the spoken word and of alliances that decline the alliances with the extended filiations" (8).
Demeo's Saharasianism reveals itself for all it's worth: a disneyfied version of Rousseau's romantic vision of the noble savage. Yes, the savage was noble, yes, the savage was good, but not good in this banal PC or disneyfied sense of Demeo - good by the cruel measure that savages had of what goodness for them was all about: the way of the hunter and the warrior. There never were any Matrist savages! Therefore no Matrism, if it ever existed as such, could be called 'primitive'.
TERTIO, the ridiculous argument of Saharasia rests upon a fundamentally Christian view of the human world and its history. This goes to ridiculous extents when Demeo confuses violence with war, and war and violence with the State. When he talks, for example, about the origins of "ancient human violence ca 4,000BC" he means, in his awkward language, the origins of a society with classes, or more properly, with castes - and that is, in concise language, the origin of the State, of its bureaucracy and its apparatus of laws, police, coercion. For violence, whether human or nonhuman, has always existed since Life began! Savage societies are not societies where there was no violence. And there are no lives of animals or plants that are devoid of violence. All organic assemblages involve some usage of violence - some fluxes are barred, others are gated through. Reich himself understood this well, and sought to explain expression of "primary violence" as a reserve force of instinct that could be elicited by the systematic frustration of any drive (read Character Analysis!). Deleuze used to teach that thought itself is a violence done to the senses - and that the fundamental act of desire, the act of thought, is necessarily born with some violence. Reich's thought is powerful precisely because - with its insights, intuitions, experiments and brainstorms - it did violence to the organic of the misconceptions of an entire epoch. It is out of a reaction to that very violence, that too many reject his challenges or twist their potentiality for shabby reasons and purposes.
It is simply absurd to claim that the origins of human violence date back to 4,000BC, but it might once have made some sense to claim that it was then that the institution of the State found its origins (Ah, the good old Neolithic...). It is equally idiotic, however, to claim that systematic or 'organized' warfare as a social institution first began at that time. So when Demeo mixes these three distinct concepts - violence (human or not), war and State - into a single antifemale concoction and pretends to be able to date it, one can be sure it is...another Demean-ing stew!
2. 4,000 BC, the birth of what?? Anything??
So, we take Demeo to task. And, in passing, we ask: why this fixation on the 4,000BC marker - save that it is when Demeo dates "the first drying up of Saharasia" (9)? But is that even true??
4,000BC is a convenient date since it was once the official marker accepted for the appearance of the famous Neolithic, the Neolithic that keeps getting pushed further and further back in time... Indeed, the question is of some concern - since that Neolithic has generally meant the beginning of agriculture along fluvial plains that permitted sedentarian villages which eventually developed into towns.
1. So we make our first critical question to Demeo: can 4,000BC serve as a marker for the emergence of stratified classes? Or in other, still more exacting words: did State societies arise in 4,000BC?
First we note that the evidence for the existence of State-societies goes much, much further back than this arbitrary dating of 3 to 4,000BC - well into the nights of time (Deleuze once told us that, in his view, it could easily recede back to 100,000BC!). Every archeologist knows about the so-called "lack of visibility" problem that affects rigid dating schemes for such concepts as the emergence of the State or the stratification of societies.
However, what must be seen as the fundamental act of barbarism against savage cultures is not an armed act, but the creation of a priestly bureaucracy within an agglutinated society. The creation of State societies effectively altered the nature of social violence, as much as its aims and methods. To the cruelty of savages, royal priestly cultures counterpose the terror and vengeance of the despot:
"It could be that, spiritual or temporal, tyrannical or democratic, capitalist or socialist, there has never been but a single State: the State-as-dog that"speaks with flaming roars". And Nietzsche suggests how this new [despotic] socius proceeds: a terror without precedent, in comparison with which the savage system of cruelty, the forms of 'primitive' regimentation and punishment, are nothing. A concerted destruction of all the primitive codings, or worse yet, their derisory preservation, their reduction to the condition of secondary parts in the new social machine and the new apparatus of repression" (10).State-based societies filled the impotent locus of the chieftain in savage societies with the figure of a magical and legislating despot-king. Look at the record in Africa or MesoAmerica where royal societies (societies with a State and sometimes slavery) existed well before the white-man's colonization.
But Demeo confuses everything - he confuses the savage institution of chieftainry in societies that are organized without a State, with the institution of the despot or the king in State societies, just as he confuses the savage shaman with the despotic priest, or the cruelty of savages with the terror of despots. In fact, in what concerns the question of bureaucratic priesthoods, or castes, he believes that another characteristic distinguishing Matrist and Patrist societies is that the former have female shamans whereas the latter have male shamans (PP5, p. 16). This is not science, but pure sexism such as one could find in the simplistic trash writings of certain "radical lesbian feminists". Ô Demeo, thou bist sehr IGNORANT, AND PROUD OF IT: you will find female shamans throughout savage societies, whether matrilineal and matrilocal, or patrilineal and patrilocal, or combinations of the two! Your "Patrist" cultures were everywhere filled with female shamans!
The answer to our question above - did State societies arise in 4,000BC? - is simply not forthcoming from Demeo, Saharasia or PP5. But the simple answer is that social stratification and the existence of State-societies long predate this 4,000BC marker. Demeo, instead, proceeds as if these villages and towns of the Near East had come about without a State formation and without social stratification. The examples which he gives to buttress his notion that villages and cities emerged before there was a State society, as villages or cities of a "Matrist" society, are totally bungled up.
Let us look at a single such example: on this, too, we took Demeo to task in person, a year ago, when we explained to him that settlements like Çatal Hüyuk in Anatolia already demonstrated how a State-based society did develop without war or fortifications, ie without a military war-machine. He could not remember, at the time, what Çatal Hüyuk was - even though it is briefly discussed in Saharasia (11), where he argues that "social conditions at Catal Huyuk (sic) were peaceful, with considerable female influence. (...) Great social organization clearly existed, but no clear evidence of either hierarchy or stratification was found."
Now, this is patently wrong. Çatal Hüyuk I presents all the traits of a stratified society practicing sedentarian agriculture and herding, and structured by a priestly bureaucracy. Demeo's gratuitous statements betray the same incapacity to dedicate time and effort to the study of his subject that we will subsequently find in the 'biological' and 'physical' researches compiled into PP5. So many blunders of the worst and most mediocre kind.
Çatal Hüyuk was precisely a State-based society because it presents just such a stratification - in the absence of any form of military organization! We quote from The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol I, Part 1:
"Shrines or small temples at Çatal Hüyuk are distinguished from houses by their religious decoration, the presence of cult statues in stone, and by clay and by richer burials with ceremonial weapons, obsidian mirrors, etc. (...) Even more remarkable [in these temples] are pictures connected with death - scenes of enormous vultures pecking at headless corpses of men lying on their left side or extended on their back (...)" (12).The differences in burial rituals, the existence of separate temples, the representations of farmers, hunters, priests (of either sex), the statuettes of male and female deities (known for their busty and hefty aspect), all point to a sedentarian, peaceful society which is State-based and administered by a priesthood.
This is just one among very many examples we could give of Demeo being out-to-lunch on the subjects on which he sells books. Jericho I, which dates back to >8,000BC, only becomes surrounded by fortified walls a millennium or so later, and yet presents signs of stratification everywhere, as every sedentarian occupation unearthed by archaeologists has to this day.
Everywhere in the Near and Far East, fluvial-plain village-based State societies were evidently implanted by 8,000BC, if not by 10,000BC!
This wipes out, in one fell swoop, much of Demeo's fantasistic pursuit: it certainly was not "extreme human violence" which instituted the State in society. The Marxist theory of history also stands refuted - the State was not a response to internal warfare (and with this, much of Reich's early Marxist evolutionistic scheme in The Origins of Repressive Sex-Morality also goes out the window). Indeed, the best archeological record today indicates that State societies did not form by war. It is far more likely that Karl Wittfogel's thesis is the correct one - the Asiatic phenomenon of State formations is tied to the hydraulic engineering that permitted sedentarian agriculture; the priestly caste was not a mere intellectual or magical excrescence, but a caste of engineers and administrators with the know-how required to build and run entire hydraulic networks of villages; take away the network, and the village-scheme - along with sedentarian agriculture - ceases to be viable.
One may wonder what revolution brought such alteration in society that created these hydraulic State societies - Clastres himself thought he had found its distant germen in the migrant journeys led by karais which he studied among the Tupi-Guarani. Independently, however, from the social movements that dissolved and amalgamated diverse savage societies to create a terrain where a State-formation could be erected, there stands this bare fact: the State was brought about by peaceful means, by some form of magical compact, and not by war. Everywhere the archeological record of the oldest or archaic State societies shows that these had no army, no military mechanism, no fortifications. And - against Marxism and Engels in particular - everywhere the State emerged before there was any such thing as the introduction of private property in savage societies.
Çatal Hüyuk serves as an example of how Demeo hasn't a clue of what he is talking about: with it, he has revealed that what he calls Matriarchy or Matrist Cultures is, after all and simply, those originary or archaic State-societies that had not yet been threatened by systematic warfare and nomadism. Unconsciously, this betrays that what underlies his adolescent notion of "Matrism" is the Occidental yearning for "an orderly society" which is, after all, nothing other than Plato's Golden Age revisited, when autocrats (preferably of the maternal type...) were loved by their subjects...After all is said and done, Demeo's 'matriarchy' is really merely for laughs!
The simple explanation for Demeo's classification of Çatal Hüyuk as a Matrist culture is that he has read James Mellaart's statements about its religion being "dominated by women" in this State-based society or despotic formation...Demeo, the man, admires autocratic matriarchs (like Eva Reich in her prime). Yes, there are much worse fixations than those on well-endowed matriarchs - but, fixation or no fixation, none of 'Saharasia' can be taken seriously as an ethnological crosscultural study.
Lastly, as a form of indirect revisiting of our intense disagreement with Demeo about these very matters a year ago, prior to our demonstration of the OR and Aether Motors (note that we did not penalize him for this and went ahead with the demo), Demeo decided to go back and produce a restudy of the questions of Jericho and Çatal Hüyuk, which he has now published (13) - with no reference, of course, to that event. This time he finally quotes Bar-Yosef, to suggest precisely what we had told him - that sedentarian occupation by State-based societies occurred throughout the Far and Near East without evidence of any military mechanism being involved in this spread of the State model of social stratification. Demeo now writes: "(...) Bar Yosef (...) additionally [found] absence of evidence for warfare in the entire Near East region between 12,000 and 6,000 BC". Hallelujah!, even if Bar-Yosef's comment was decontextualized, since it applied specifically to sedentarian sites. Ring the bells, nonetheless! Here is evident proof that State-based societies, despotic societies with priestly bureaucracies, peasantry, police systems, coercion apparatus, laws and phonetic writing appeared neither as a function of class-war, as Marx and Engels once thought, nor as a function of warfare or military conquest - and did so well before Demeo's date of 4,000BC! The State came about as a peaceful revolution, likely older than 10,000BC.
2. So, now that we know that 4,000BC does not mark the emergence of stratified societies, which is a much older phenomenon, we move to the next question. Given that the practice of war is much, much older than 4,000BC - since it was a savage invention - the question becomes: is 4,000BC the marker for the origins of 'organized' warfare?
This is a complex question. Demeo explicitly claims that 4,000BC is the marker for the beginning of warfare. But what warfare is he talking about? He is never clear - all warfare is indistinct for him.
However, we have seen above that war and the way of the warrior have always existed, as far back as one regards savage cultures disappearing into the mists of time. What Demeo actually means, is 'organized' warfare, or, better still, systematic warfare. And this presents us precisely with that complexity which Demeo is remarkably unable to analyze.
For organized warfare does have a dual sense: in one way, the question concerns the appearance of nomadism, where one encounters a permanent war-machine organized without a State formation; and in another way, the question concerns, instead, the development of archaic nonmilitary State-societies into militarized State societies that became effectively run, not by bureaucratic priesthoods, but by military aristocracies.
Demeo, however, has precluded himself from having the tools to analyze anything remotely like the origins of military States and the problem of nomadism. The sexualized dichotomy onto which he flattens entire cultural worlds is a banalizing joke. Even the term 'cross-cultural' is pure modern marketing - since our man does not have the minimum baggage required to propose anything like a systematic approach to the entirety of the cultural experiments on this earth! The result, we have already seen, is a stew in which Occidental Europe comes out Matrist but the Sioux or the Touareg or the Tarahumara, etc, are Patrist! The simple fact is that this guy's doctorate in geography should be recalled - for the hopelessly simplistic notions he proposes cannot account for a single savage, or nomadic, or despotic, or civilized entity anyone has yet encountered! But never mind that!
What Demeo is missing here is nothing short of the entire body of serious and challenging work on this matter that others have conducted and published over the past six decades - beginning with Childe, Leach, Leroi-Gourhan, Seton Lloyd, Kwang-chih Chang, Clastres, Elena Valero, Deleuze and Guattari, Florinda Donner, Colin Renfrew (to name a few) and ending with the simple facts of historiography. For a permanent state of warfare was first invented by nomads - it is in fact the very characteristic of nomadism. It is these nomadic societies which Demeo so much wants to culpabilize for "Extreme Patrism" - because he unconsciously realizes how these were the social forces that once destroyed the idyllic, peaceful State despotism that he imagines was everywhere being run by the likes of Queen Victoria and other matronas. From his very presentation, one can conclude that the 'matriarchy' or Matrist cultures he longs for are nothing short of the despotic societies of the past, before nomads came crashing through them, at a time when farming societies were orderly and policed by priesthoods.
Nomads are to be blamed - in Demeo's militant 'male-feminist' ideology - for having destroyed precisely the State apparatus or State-based societies that brought about social stratification and priestly bureaucracies! He got IT ALL upside down - the reason why the first settlement of Çatal Hüyuk has no other fortifications besides a contiguous high wall to keep animals out, is precisely because the State-event was not a military or armed one, because State societies first emerged through a very different line of development than that of war! And the reason why the second settlement at Çatal Hüyuk (on the opposite side of the river) already shows fortifications, is because in the meantime war intervened! Likewise, Jericho II shows ample evidence of fortifications - photos of which Demeo even prints in the PP5! - but on which he has the courage of commenting: "Towers and enclosure walls are not, by themself (sic), evidence of warfare and social violence" (p. 21). Caramba! Through one side of his mouth, Demeo claims that sedentarian occupations are devoid of warfare and the walls are to protect them from animals, as James Mellaart (the discoverer of Çatal Hüyuk) suggested and we emphasized a year ago to Demeo, whereas through the other side of this same mouth he discards the dating of military fortifications around 7,000BC for Jericho II and shortly thereafter for Çatal Hüyuk II!
But here is the critical question we have for Demeo, and the one to which he will never be able to adequately respond: how does Demeo propose to date the birth of nomadism and 'organized' or systematic warfare by looking at the archeological record of State- societies that did not know 'organized' warfare and which were destroyed by nomadic assaults from without??
You see - this is the conundrum: nomadic warfare was in fact the organized result of a response which tribal and nonstatal societies mounted against the spread of State-based sedentarianism. But we only know of this record indirectly, by the discontinuities in the archeological strata:
"So-to-speak 'between' the magical-despotic State and the juridical State containing a military institution, we see the flash of the nomadic war machine arriving from without" (14).This is the summary of the entire record which Demeo discards but which Deleuze and Guattari examined at length, in several of their published seminal works. Demeo is sorely in need of reading their Treatise on Nomadology - which is part of the voluminous A Thousand Plateaus - if only he could understand any of it! There, they date the State apparatus of military capture to 7,000BC. By 7,000 BC Jericho had definitely undergone an upheaval bearing all the signs of nomadic incursions (15). But archeology has not, since the 1980s, stopped pushing the origins of Jericho further back. The very first occupations of Jericho may hark back even to 10 or 12,000BC.
Indeed, with respect to nomadism - and its organized social practice of warfare - we have to understand that one cannot pin its emergence on the Iron age, anymore than on any other metal age, at 700 BC, or 1500 BC, as was once fashionable. The archeological record today indicates that by 4,400BC horse carts from the Southern steppes of Russia began penetrating Mesopotamia. One might think that here, at last, there could be some sense found for Saharasianism - but no, since Demeo lacks any concept of nomads (who he labels "Patrist" indistinctly from savage or despotic societies that he chooses to also label thusly, thereby tossing all into the same nebulous vat) and what's more, and germane to the argument, since we have no way of knowing how much longer, prior to that date, nomadism had existed in the steppes of Russia!
One cannot with any legitimacy whatsoever date the phenomenon of nomadism and organized permanent warfare against State-societies by merely considering when it was that State-societies acquired a military character - an army, fortifications, walls, etc. By the time that nomadism reaches the Far East, millennia have passed in its development on the Russian steppes. Similarly in the Sahara and Near East - as we will shortly consider.
One thought, however, appears to be permitted by the historical record: that nomadism or permanent or systematic warfare arose precisely as warfare against sedentarian, State-based societies. It was the spread of sedentarism that elicited the emergence of nomadism. How far back can that go? As far back as State-based societies will be found to go. After all, signs of a despotic society, such as burial cults of the ancestors, can be found in the Middle Paleolithic Period of Choukoutien in China! If State-societies - with their doctrines of 'gods on high' - emerged that far back, one can indeed without any difficulty contemplate nomadism in the Russian steppes emerging as far back as 100,000BC. One might even tie cave occupations to the ulterior sedentarian movements that eventually lead to the type of occupations we see in Çatal Hüyuk and Jericho, etc.
Evidence for such archaic practices of burials and cemeteries prior to the creation of fluvial networks of villages can be found at the Qadan sites (13,000BC-9,000BC, considered Upper Paleolithic), spread over a zone stretching from the second Nile cataract to Tushka, and they coincide with the oldest records of sedentarian agriculture (using stone sickles) known in the Sahara. Most archaeologists agree that these agricultural practices in the Sahara and Egypt appear to suddenly stop around 10,500BC. The evidence for a change in climate responsible for a long period of floods (a pluvial) suggests that this could have been the cause for such a cessation - but one cannot rule out nomadic incursions. Along these lines, statistical examination of the bodies buried at the three Qadan sites indicates that 40% had died from violent combat (in the Jehel Sahaba site, over 50%) (16).
One thing is certain though: by 7,000BC, there is not just an apparatus of capture - an Asiatic State-formation everywhere implanted in the Middle East which is already in the process of being militarized - but also a nomadic response by societies that were organized without a State.
So, the emergence of nomadism dates to well before 4,000BC, and so also does the emergence of militarized City-States. By 7,000BC, Jericho II is a City-State - and State-based forms of social organization have already learned to appropriate the nomadic war-machine. Indeed, this is the entire social convulsion which Demeo misses with his Saharasianist thesis: he misses any possible understanding of how royal despotic societies ruled by priesthoods of all types - with their matriarchical or patriarchical cults (for both existed and coexisted in royal formations!) - became societies with a State now ruled by aristocracies of war, not by priestly castes. Barbarism, in its strict sense, means just that - the policy of conquest by militarized States that eventually replaced the nomadic policy of destruction of the State by war: from city-States to Empires. And here also we find the origins of private property - as the means invented by the State to land and encast the military aristocracy. Hence, the juridical State is always a militarized one.
Demeo's consolation is that he is among only too many short-sighted self-appointed judges of history that have failed to understand anything. Indeed, the magical and priestly State of sedentarian networks is the institution which, under the cover of 'matriarchy' or Matrism, these poor sods venerate. What Demeo regrets is the transformation of the despotic State into a warfare State - he regrets everything about it: that nomads destroyed the State by invading it from the outside; that villages or cities responded with their entreaties to nomads; that here and there, and eventually just about everywhere, these entreaties succeeded in creating military aristocracies of nomadic extraction which came to rule over the State-based agricultural societies.
Once State-societies responded to the problem of nomadism, it was not stratification that appeared, but a second caste stratification that was added to the original stratification of the State. Demeo entirely misses this critical aspect of the history of warfare and the State's adaptation to it. Now, too, we can see better what his perversely distorted thesis of Saharasianism is really all about - denouncing all warfare, whether committed by State aristocracies, by nomads at war with the State, by savages at war with each other, or by fascists or revolutionaries, etc, etc, as Patrism.
This, it now seems clear to us - now that we are obliged to make the in situ analysis of Demeo's idiotic notions - is nothing short of a nihilist renunciation of Life, history and reality. Patrism has never existed - it is a figment of Demeo's lack of mind. A residual form of Freudo-Marxism. An inverted Freudianism - as if Freud's 'primordial brothers' had murdered the Mother, not the Father. Histoires à dormir debout. An adhesion to parti-pris notions in defiance of both facts and their intelligence.
Lastly, the reader should note that this is neither the time nor the place to address the incredible shoddy distortions that nomadism suffers at Demeo's hands in Saharasia. He credits nomads correctly for contributing to the destruction of archaic State-societies, but thinks that this took place only from 3,500BC onwards - since he needs to identify the entirety of nomadism with Aryan tribes (yes, he discards pre-4,000BC camel- mounted nomadism in Arabia and Africa without so much as a mention of the structure of those Berber cultures). Despite his repeated footnotes referencing Gimbutas (and no reference we can remember to her teacher, Childe, and his monumental work on nomadism; or to Colin Renfrew's 1987 work on the subject either), Demeo has learned nothing about the nonstatist structure of nomadic societies - nothing about, in one word, the social structure of permanent war-machines. Check these passages - and the prose - from Saharasia (17):
"The southward Indo-Aryan migration was widespread: The Mittani pushed south across the Caucasus; the Hittites moved into Anatolia; The Hurrians invaded Mesopotamia; Dorians moved into Greece [not the Achaeans!]; Italic (sic) speaking peoples arrived in Italy [where else!]; other Aryan groups spread from Iran to India. Other groups driving horses and wielding battle axes invaded West and Central Europe, where the earliest fortified settlement date to after 3,500BC. (...) These militant peoples maintained the female in a position subordinate to the male, and they possessed characteristic social institutions. (...) The invaders (...) arrived with new metallurgical knowledge, a military caste, strongman leaders, royal tombs [really!], an emphasis upon the horse in both myth and sacrifice, and horse-drawn wagons and chariots."Unfortunately, none of these migrations Demeo cites occurred in 3,500BC, but well after 1,800BC! But never mind that. And never mind that the Indo-European peoples who invaded Greece ca 1850BC were Achaeans (Ionians and Aeolians), and that the Dorian migration took place nearly a millennium later (1,100BC) and drove the Achaeans to the Ionian islands. And too bad also that, as Renfrew demonstrates (18), the distinctions between Indo-European languages occurred between 6,000BC and 4,000BC, and the development of nomadism and this linguistic differentiation were practically achieved among pastorialists in the Russian steppes well before wheeled carts and war chariots appeared, ie well before 4,500BC. Never mind, either, that nomads nowhere present the social stratification which Demeo describes above and which is, after all, characteristic of barbarism - of the military States that captured and absorbed the nomadic war machines, and not of the nomads themselves.
Undeterred, Demeo fills a book with such running editorializing. But even his division between 'Matrist' archaic State-societies and the militant, 'fascistic', nomads becomes bungled up (he now has 'farming civilizations' issued from warring Bronze Age cultures) - save, of course, for his unending moralizing:
"Bronze Age agricultural cultures were also established in the Amu Darya region after 3,000BC (...) and ultimately became the center of an irrigation farming civilization. However, pastoral [sic] cultures characterized by the new, antifemale tradition soon displaced Neolithic settlements in Southern Central Asia" (19).There it is - Demeo's contribution, in Saharasia, to the study of nomadism: an 'antifemale' movement whose origin he attributes to pastorialism!
When all is said and done, Demeo has, of the Aryans, exactly the same erroneous view that Hitler proposed in Mein Kampf - only the prism is inverted, from the Right to the Left, from the Patriarch to the Matriarch: the Aryans were pricks who created the State by 'militant' warfare. We now know what a pack of lies this is - this ideological error, which even our dear Nietzsche fell into (but having far better reasons and excuses to do so, let it be said). For, indeed, the historical Aryans were nothing of the sort. They did not invent or create any State. They were, in fact, slayers of the State. Like other nomads, they were the enemies of stratified systems. But in the process of destroying the archaic priestly State, they eventually were captured by the very State they were so intent on slaying. This is how armies were born the world over, and States became militarized, and war aristocracies were born: by appropriating the invention of nomads, the invention of the war-machine, as an army mechanism that supplements the apparatus of the 'church', police and laws. The only historical achievement of these Aryan nomads was not even the destruction of the State - just the destruction of the archaic State. And the walls and tower of Jericho II, at 7,000BC, already attest to that: there is a flux of nomadism approaching on the horizon.
On this matter of the Aryans, there is another joke we intend to share with the reader: after describing, on page 289 of Saharasia, how Hindu gods along with the caste system (an obvious error, by now!) were brought to India by "Indo-Aryan warriors (...) [with] a fanatical antisexual, antifemale philosophy" [sic!], Demeo presents pictures of 'Patrist' pottery marked with the inverse swastika and comments: "Pottery quality and artwork degraded into colorless abstract symbols, abundant with (sic) the Indo- European swastika" (p. 294). Much is curious about this - especially when the pottery in question is of the so-called Dorian period in Crete, and this is after 1100BC, not before 1600BC as Demeo pretends in his title to the page containing the pictures. Secondly, because it is not even clear to archaeologists whether these displaced Dorians were Indo- Europeans. Thirdly, because the introduction of symbols in pottery is associated with phonetic writing - and more and more this appears to be a characteristic marker of archaic State societies. Fourthly, because it is far from established that the swastika (always found with the arms inverted) is an Indo-European symbol - being found just as well in the Americas and amongst Semitic nomads. Lastly, to give Demeo a coup de grace, the swastika - instead of being a symbol associated with 'war, conquest, pestilence and death', appears to have been a symbol associated with fertility cults. None other than Reich, on pages 95-96 of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, wrote:
"To begin with, the swastika was also found among the Semites, in the Myrtle court of the Alhambra at Granada [built by early Islam]. (...) Löwenthal describes a XIVth century swastika (...) embellished with vulva and a double cross [that] appears (...) as the symbol of the fertile earth. (...) Thus the swastika was originally a sexual symbol. [Reich's italics] (...) This explains the inscription on the swastika (...) on the miter of St. Thomas à Beckett, dating back to Indo-Germanic times: 'Hail to thee earth, o mother of man. May you thrive in God's embrace. Overflow with fruit for man's benefit'".Despite Reich himself, we get saddled with Demeo's history of the Aryans: bloody 'Patrist' murderers filled with male-gods and swastikas that...were 'actually' 'Matrist' sexual symbols of fertility characteristic of the cult of the earth in archaic State societies. Nothing could be clearer. May dialectics help him yet!
The total failure of Saharasia to address the events of the State, nomadism and military warfare - and the very genesis of barbarism - is only matched by Demeo's strident denunciation of all warfare and violence as being against the spirit of (An)orgonomy and Saharasianism. This is the fellow who once labeled us "irrational critics". May some pig-God, as Artaud was fond of saying, save us from what Demeo and his ilk mean by Reason (oh we're sure they would spell it with a capital R just like Robespierre) and rationality. Reich would simply shudder.
However, let us not rush to excuse Reich either. Yes, what were mistakes that he committed - for a variety of reasons, including the pernicious influence of Marxism - have now become magnified by the orthodoxy-seeking desires of this pauvre Demeo. Indeed, if it is a matter of finding demonstrable errors that have not been borne out by archeology, ethnology or 'anthropology', we do not have to go much further than precisely the influence which the errors and myths of Engels, Bachofen, Malinowski, Freud, etc, had upon Reich's thought in the early 1930's. For instance, the entire 'Saharasia' enterprise can be seen as a feeble attempt to prove the correctness of these errors which Reich - perhaps for lack of better data and understanding at the time, perhaps not - summarized in 1932 in Der Einbruch Der Sexualmoral, in these ethnocentered and Marxist terms, when discussing Freud's hypothesis of a primordial patricide: "In primitive conditions, the 'chieftain' perfectly coexisted with maternal succession, and it was only in a posterior period that he entered into contradiction with it, when it became a patriarch." Or, in People In Trouble (p. 96), when he writes: "natural and matriarchal society is still free from sex-negation. During the transition to patriarchy, a sexually-moralistic sector arises in society". But Reich was young then and committed to Freudo-Marxism; and few field studies in ethnology existed; and archeology was still a 'primitive discipline'; and we must understand the political motivation behind these thoughts of Reich: those that "affirm the priority of patriarchy obey to present-day sociological motivations" - referring to the ideology of fascism then rampant in Germany and Europe.
We want the reader to understand this without any margin for confusion: it was with respect to fascism's and Freud's eulogies of patriarchy and ideologies of patriarchalism (let us not forget now how Freud regarded Mussolini as a veritable Hero of Culture), that Reich found the vehemence to adhere to what appeared to him, back then, as evidence that contradicted the ridiculous notions that societies always had leaders or had been State-societies, or that the most primitive society was patriarchical and founded upon some form of original patricide. Reich had no intention to found the opposite viewpoint either - that the creation of societies with leaders had come about by some primitive form of matricide (as Demeo suggests throughout Saharasia when he turns nomads into founders of the State and attributes to them the exclusive practice of widow murder, which he calls 'mother murder') - but, explicitly for political reasons, he indulged in dialectical inversion, like others before him, by militantly adhering to the Bachofen-Engelsian fiction that primitive societies were matriarchal. We now know what societies this 'matriarchy' claims for itself: the archaic priestly, magical State; a benign form of despotism!
We will not go here into the much greater complexity of kinship systems found by ethnologists since Malinowski's work - the work which so much marked the young Reich, and which Demeo takes as his Bible in writing Saharasia (Demeo writes on p. 48 of Saharasia: "In his work The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality (1931), Reich drew upon the works of Morgan, Engles (sic), Bachofen, Freud, Malinowski, and Roheim to argue the origins of sexual repression in the compulsory, polygamous marriage and marriage gift"). In fact, Ethnology, for Demeo, simply froze in the 1930's; he does not even mention the Tarahumara or the Tupi or the Guayaki or the Nahuatl peoples anywhere in his book - which, more properly speaking, could be described as a magazine of 'ethnocentered pornographic anthropology'. Even Marxists of every stripe were eventually forced to abandon the anthropological notions of Engels once the ethnographic record became irreducible to such oedipalizing prejudices.
Demeo's porno-oedipal record of history and archeology claims, however, that it "involved a review of materials which Reich did not have access to, namely more recent environmental, archaeological, and anthropological studies, which I [Demeo] set into a geographical and historical framework" (Saharasia, p. 389). In other words, Demeo acknowledges that he cannot claim whatever excuses we may find for Reich's ideas in the 1930's. Yet, after unending pages of lopsided descriptions of castration and mutilation, he manages to write a single paragraph (on p. 132 of 'Saharasia') on the scarification of the body, the very basis of the mnemotechnique that produced savage cultures everywhere! And even then, he only talks about amputations and teeth extractions...
Of course we are left without knowing how nomadism - if, together with desert and war, it supposedly spread from the Saharan region, after having come from the Russian steppes - ever got to North America and the Aztecs. Demeo states on page 389 of Saharasia: "This work has presented a radical thesis [!!] on the origins of child-abusive [!note this one!], sex-repressive and violent, armored human culture - patrism - in an area defined as Saharasia, with its subsequent diffusion to adjacent and distant regions". Yet, he never tells us how 'Saharasia' mysteriously transited from the Aryans of the Far and Near East, to the Toltecs or Aztecs of the New World. It don't matter - since Demeo discards these with more pornographic pictorials of "mesoamerican sadism", "self-abusive blood rituals", culminating in his moralistic judgement: "the nomad warrior Aztec became a dominant bloody power". This is all he sees in Mesoamerica - even though he acknowledges on the same page 376 of 'Saharasia' that "I have not sufficiently researched the chronology, full cultural background, or migratory movements of these [Mesoamerican] cultures and other cultures in North America".
But undoubtedly amongst the best stupidities uttered in this piece of anthropological pornographism, is this educated guess (taken from C. Pelegrino) that betrays Demeo's profound knowledge and admiration for the Matrist (not the Cretan, but the) Cretin Kulture: "(...) had not the Minoans been so destroyed [by a volcano in 1,600BC], their rate of technological development was so rapid they might have developed rockets and landed on the moon by the time of Jesus." (sic, sic, sic, on p. 291 of 'Saharasia'.)
Jesus! Mary! Had we read this Saharasianist trash a year ago, we would have been sure not to have invited this Cretinaceous specimen to our laboratory. We can already envisage the bucolic Cretins of a 'Matrist' society developing rockets to hurl each other messages of Love and Peace.
'Saharasia' surely ranks amongst the worst books ever written.
3. When and why did the Sahara desertify?
We will limit ourselves here to presenting the most basic findings of research that indicates the complexity of the factors involved in the desertification of the Sahara. All indications point to the process having been well underway by 9,000BC. By which time, as we have seen above, State-societies already existed in the Near East, and so did warfare.
One of the most telling works on the dating of the desertification of the Sahara is the cartographic investigations conducted by Prof. Hapgood and his students at Keene State College, beginning in the 1960's. His researches indicated that the polar ice masses and identified crust displacements were complete by 10,000BC, and that the Mistral winds in the Sahara were extremely wet in the period of 10,000 to 6,000BC. He dates the beginning of the desertification to 6,000BC (20), before the second or SubNeolithic pluvial.
Martin Claussen, of the Potsdam Institute for Climatic Impact Research, and his colleagues, recently became known for their extensive and detailed study of Holocene climate where it is suggested that the climatic change was initiated by subtle changes in the Earth's orbit (when its tilt was 24.14°; the perihelion then occurred at the end of July, not in early January) which became amplified by atmospheric and vegetation "feedback" from subtropical regions (21). The initial phase of the process created a pluvial period. But atmospheric displacements of water and wind patterns led to a rebound period of growing aridity which the model of Claussen and coworkers dated to 6,700BC, and which ended by 5,500BC, with savanna-type vegetation. This first desertification was followed by a counter-rebound, another pluvial, that permitted recovery of vegetation in the Sahara region. The second and more brutal phase of desertification was found to have occurred in the 4,000BC to 3,600BC period. In this analysis, the devastation of the archaic agricultural State societies, which were already militarized!, resulted from climatic changes that arose in response to orbital perturbations. Caught between flooding and aridity, the Saharan agricultural "civilization" literally sank into the sediment. But so did nomadism, as evidenced by the decrease in rock-art around 6,700BC. Thereafter, pastorialist themes appear, from 6,000BC on, to replace the agricultural and aquatic representations in the Saharan rock- art before 7,000BC.
By Claussen et al's work, desertification did not begin at 4,000BC. It began at 6,700BC, and was preceded by violent climatic changes beginning at ca 9,000BC. What happened ca 4,000BC is simply that the desertification process intensified, as the second and last phase of the process of desert formation began.
Lastly, it is our own view that it is more than likely that human societies, specifically the forms of social organization characteristic of State-societies, had a hand in this last phase of the desertification process. Modern civilization has everywhere demonstrated what climatic changes it can induce - from smog to desertification. The environmental impact of our society is largely vehiculated by means other than those which once contributed to the demise of those State-societies in the Near East, even if our war on forests continues as it once did, as the relentless daily destruction of the Amazonia demonstrates. The disappearance, indeed, of these militarized State-based agricultural 'civilizations' was neither the sole result of nomadism and warfare (which they learned to appropriate and distill), nor merely the result of climatic changes imposed by natural forces and events. It is also, and above all, perhaps, the result of their own doing - the result of their deforestation practices, their 'tiring' the soil, their mismanagement of alluvial sediments and water flows and their intensive exploitation of nature. If the means were different, the lesson remains the same.
SUMMARY SCHEME OF LATE HOLOCENE EVENTS
AFFECTING THE SAHARA PRIOR TO 4,000 BC
10,500 BC | Evidence for sedentarian agricultural practices; early social stratification: priestly bureaucracies; village occupations; burial sites; systematic warfare |
10,000 BC | Orbital alterations. |
9,000 BC | Violent climatic changes: pluvial (1); archaic State-societies: hydraulic networks of villages/towns; advanced stratification. |
8/7,000 BC | Nomadic incursions; the State learns to capture nomadic war-machines; militarized City-States emerge: rule of aristocracies; networks break down in internecine warfare between cities; city-empires. |
6,700 BC | 1st desertification of Sahara. |
6,000 BC | Pastorialism rampant. |
5,500 BC | Pluvial (2, "SubNeolithic pluvial"). |
4,000 BC | 2nd and more intense desertification of Sahara begins. |
1. Myron Sharaf, the great orgonotic functionalist
Our first recollection of Sharaf dates back to the morning of the first day of the first LEARN conference organized by Prof. E. Mann in 1979 at York University in Toronto. We were writing Honours Thesis papers for Mann on precisely the origins of the State, organized warfare and the institution of private property, and helping him pro bono to organize that first conference on Reich. In this capacity we were transporting a variety of publications that Mann had planned to sell, when we crossed the door of the amphitheater. Sharaf was already inside the room, and upon seeing us he exclaimed - "Ah, you must be Ted's secretaries! Would you distribute those [pointing to a stack of pamphlets] through the tables?". This was more of a bark than a request. To which one of us responded - "We're Professor Mann's students, not his employees, and certainly not your slaves!". The penalty we suffered was that the only people who helped organize the conference but did not receive free passes to Eva Reich's 'lecture' on breast feeding and massage that weekend, were us! Utterly devastated, we had to find another breast to feed us...
About Sharaf almost nothing needs to be said - his treacherous friendship with Reich, his most dubious handling of the whole William Washington Affair, the gigantic enterprise of trashing and disinformation to which he submitted Reich's life throughout his petty book, his petty resentments for Reich allegedly having slept with his mother and wife, the psychiatrization and oedipalization of Reich's thought to which he resorts over and over again ad nauseam, etc - speak for themselves for an eternity to come. But there is a priceless quotation from Sharaf's ludicrous and pompous paper in PP5 entitled "Orgonomic functionalism" (PP5, p. 45), which contains a phrase that perfectly describes Sharaf himself and, in fact, Demeo and his acolytes: "Space cadets"! Here it goes - Sharaf on Sharaf and other masturbatory 'psychophants' that call themselves Reichians:
"But the trouble with the mystical person who often is attracted to orgonomy is that there's a wall between excitation and the perception of the excitation, as in the schizoid, they are spacey, flakey, space cadets. You know what a "space cadet" is. It's a spacey person who goes up into the skies...that's a joke. A space cadet is somebody who is not founded in the world, he's up in space. They're often like that, and they're rather difficult people, in terms of orgonomy, because they're attracted but then they always want to mix it with something else and combine everything, with astrology, with this, with that,. [sic] And it's not disciplined. And it's confusing. The advantage of the mechanist is that he tends to keep away; he doesn't get all excited and then disappoint you. So those are some of the distinctions." (1)Yes - mechanists and spacey people! How true! The devil certainly knows its own - including its own intrinsic nothingness: its trash. There is no need for further words. Sharaf was always eloquently stupid. One could pick innumerable other statements from any and every text he ever penned. Innumerable roadposts of "spacey" ideas like those he had and those which Demeo continues to peddle regardless of the subject.
2. The stew made between Orgone Physics and Cosmic Radiation studies
The Cosmic Radiation features are one of the most priceless parts of the whole PP5 enterprise, like a kind of joke perpetrated by C-grade students on the body of Reich. It opens with an editorial note from Demeo ("Editor's Note: On the Theoretical Relationship Between Orgone Energy and Cosmic Rays", PP5, p. 176), where the following preposterous lies are thrust into the mind of the reader:
" (...) the measured directions of cosmic rays at the Earth's surface (...) are almost wholly random, coming from "everywhere", though with a slight west-to-east bias. (...) By classical theory, primary cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere are 98% gamma rays and about 2% electrons, and these quickly decay or breakdown into secondary particles, which are detected closer to the Earth's surface. These secondaries are composed predominantly of high-speed protons (...) Among the secondary particles also are abundant, negatively charged-muons..."What an utterly confused and confusionistic attempt to lay the ground for a bungled marriage of accepted cosmic ray physics and Demeo's own version of Cosmic Anorgonomism! Notice how he fails to provide any references for any of his statements - and for good reasons which we shall now examine, but which boil down to the fact that no such references could ever exist!
As usual, Demeo discards all the facts - in this case, the facts that pertain to the conventional Physics he is supposedly expounding on (!):
1. First of all, 90% of cosmic radiation is thought to be composed of protons and 10% of helium nuclei (2), NOT GAMMA RAYS AND ELECTRONS! Electrons and X-rays have been detected in primary cosmic radiation, and the question is still open with regard to the presence of definite fluxes of gamma rays in this radiation; nevertheless, up to 100 MeV, the gamma ray flux is less than one-thousandth of the nuclear component (3). Shame on Demeo for being unable to read even the published 'old' and basic literature and instead indulge in such fantasms!
But if we could hazard a guess, we would suspect that Demeo's source is none other than Millikan's theory of cosmic radiation consisting of 'ultra-gamma rays'. But this was superseded in the 1930's, when introduction of counter-telescopic measurements aboard balloons, and later in rockets and sondes, permitted the identification of much higher cosmic-ray energies. Subsequently, it became understood how the gamma radiation detected at lower altitude was the result of pair-annihilation - which, in turn, became identified as the marker of the neutral pion-muon decay characteristic of uncharged secondaries.
2. Secondly, neither gamma rays nor electrons break down into secondary cascades (4). On the contrary, it is the primary nucleonic flux that breaks down inelastically into what the Standard Model calls the pion-meson secondary cascades. The typical shower of particles starts with pions, which decay via the weak interaction to muons and muon neutrinos. The muons subsequently decay to electrons, an electron neutrino and another muon neutrino.
3. Thirdly, when, essentially, these cascades are NEUTRAL, they ultimately result in the production of gamma rays via pair creation and annihilation. So, therefore, electrons and gamma-rays result from secondary showers of cosmic radiation. They do not give rise to them!!
4. Fourthly, it is the decay of the CHARGED pion-meson secondaries that gives rise to muons (5), and the subsequent cascades of decay electrons - and not the decay of supposed electrons and gamma rays that does so! (Other forms of decay, such as kaon-decay, play a minor role.)
5. Fifthly, the secondaries are not composed primarily of protons, rather, as already stated - the primaries are!!
6. Sixthly, many of the well-known variations in primary cosmic radiation are not at all "wholly random", as Demeo claims (6), but display some well established and identified trends. We name them:
Finally, as if the six basic errors in Demeo's Introduction above were not enough, he speaks of "abundant, negatively charged muons" at the end of the secondary showers (6), when everyone knows, since the studies of Rossi (1934), Johnson (1935) and Pals and Peters (1964) - all of which David Marett fails to reference in his paper (see below) - that the charge ratio of vertical muons at sea-level is everywhere POSITIVE (see Figure 2), THERE BEING MORE POSITIVE MUONS THAN NEGATIVE MUONS as products of charged pion secondaries!!! In fact, it was the nearly constant positive- biased value of the charge ratio of high-energy muons that led to quark chromodynamics (QCD) and all the other nonsenses of the Standard Model, when this ratio was interpreted to suggest that approximately three secondary mesons would be dynamically related with each primary nucleon (9)!!!
The following Table illustrates the Demean theory of cosmic rays - a theory for which all evidence is lacking, and which cannot even claim to be Reichian, heretically or not!
Established Cosmic-Ray Physics | Demeo's Notional 'CR Physics' |
1 Cosmic Rays: 90% Protons 10% Helions |
1 Cosmic Rays: 98% Gamma Rays 2% Electrons |
2 Cosmic Rays: Pion-muon decay: A. NEUTRAL Gamma Rays (from pair annihilation)
B. CHARGED |
2 Cosmic Rays: Protons turn into muons (!?) No neutral decay
|
What is most amusing about all this is that Demeo wrote this statement about "abundant negative muons" in an Editorial Note that serves as introduction to the paper by David Marett, where it is explicitly stated that there is instead "an excess of positively charged muons"!! Even the Hughes reference of the Marett paper - the only journal reference for which he provides a title - reads "positive excess"...
In other words, Demeo himself did not even bother to read the paper he ceremoniously introduces to the reader! He talks about "the seeming chaos in the background cosmic radiation", but evidently a much greater chaos lies in his own mind!
3. The beef on muons
There is not much beef. Only nonsense abounds here. It was some 15 years ago that we first saw the school-essay David Marett wrote for one of his courses for his BSc in Physical Chemistry at the University of Toronto, with the same data (or lack thereof) that he now presents in the re-written version Demeo has published in PP5 ("West-East Assymetry and Diurnal Effect of Cosmic Radiation", p. 177) (10). He hasn't even bothered to add to the paper any references more recent than 1973, except for the 1986 Muon Reference Binder of the Physics Dept. at U of T! (Check out Paul Lafargue's Right to Laziness!) And as one of us told him then, we tell him now - if the burst data is not included, there is not even a very preliminary case for any variation whatsoever in his data: it suffices to see Marett's Figure 4b, to realize that all the data fall within one standard - what? error? deviation? Marett never tells the reader! - 'measure'...
Now, our beef with there being no 'beef on muons' does not concern the actual proof of the East-West asymmetry for cosmic ray secondaries, and thus muons. Such an asymmetry has been known since the 1930's - though Marett fails to reference the pertinent original studies: the first measurements obtained by specifically searching for such asymmetry were reported in 1934 by B. Rossi in Ric. Sci. 5:569 and in 1935 by T. H. Johnson ("Progress of the Directional Survey of Cosmic-ray Intensities and its Application to the Analysis of the Primary cosmic Radiation") in Phys Rev 48:287. Johnson measured a greater cosmic ray intensity from the west, suggesting an excess (later confirmed) of positive charge resulting from secondary showers. Johnson inferred that the primary cosmic radiation incident upon the upper atmosphere was likely composed of mostly positively charged particles - and eventually this was confirmed, in that primary radiation is mostly composed of protons.
Then, also in 1935, in Phys Rev 47:647, Vallarta suggested that the longitude effect of the CR flux was a geomagnetic effect. Essentially, muons from the East, when compared to those from the West, are suppressed by the Earth's geomagnetic field (8.1E25 gauss-cm) because of its dipole structure (displaced 340 km from center, toward the Indian Ocean) which bends the mostly positively charged rays toward the east. Aside from the constant effect of geomagnetism, magnetic fields of the sun and of the planets, as well as the solar wind, influence the angular distributions of muons close to the earth. More recently, Kamiokande in Phys Rev D 56:56 (1997) found the muon E-W anisotropy to have an amplitude of 6*10-4 (in the range of 1011 to 1014 eV). Finally, Project GRAND (1998-2000) has made possible the measurement of muon angular asymmetries with low systematics, by separately subtracting West form East and South from North angles for each half-hour of the day for a two-year period, thus eliminating most of the systematic errors which had crept into these studies in the past (see "Secondary muon asymmetries at sea level with low systematics", by Poirer, J et al, in Proc. ICRC, Copernicus Gesellschaft, 2001, p. 3930). The residual East-West asymmetry (after correction for the Compton-Getting effect) as a function of the solar time of day is extensively studied in the literature pertaining to this project.
Note that one of the objectives of project GRAND is precisely to "insure that a possible residual asymmetry in a single day will not produce a noticeable effect over the sum of all the days", ie to remove another common source of error in the measurement of these asymmetries.
This entire world of references, and more, is totally ignored by Marett's paper.
Marett's diurnal data does not even show the phenomenon which was the purported object of the study - the diurnal variation in E-W asymmetry - which we will now show, together with the N-S asymmetry, after Poirer et al, in Figure 3A. There, it is apparent how the value of muons from the West, subtracted from those from the East, fluctuates between -3.78*10-3 and -2.77*10-3. Is that what Marett's data - summarized in his Table 1 (see our Figure 3B) - show? No. If we perform an E-W subtraction on his data we obtain -1.17*10-3 - off by nearly three-fold from the mean of the fluctuations obtained by Poirer et al.
Let us do the same for his North-South asymmetry data: the result is: +1.01*10-3. For
the N-S curve of Poirer et al in Figure 3A, the mean was 0.75*10-3, with the mean given
by Marett being off by ca 25%.
Note how Marett fails to mark in his Table 1 (our Figure 3B) any statistical parameters (n, SEM, SD, etc), leaving the reader to wonder if the means he reports for a few angular positions are 24 hour averages or not. Also note how South and North have no data for 22.5° and 90° elevations.
Astonishingly, Marett claims that the muon flux data he obtained conformed to the conventional isotropic formula "with the exception of the west to east flux which was higher by 22%", and entirely neglects to mention that, at the same 45° angle, the percent difference that his data report between North and South is 19%, ie essentially of the same magnitude as Marett's 'exception', at 22% (actually 21%). We have already seen above how the fact that in Marett's study the two asymmetries are of comparable magnitude stems from that near 3-fold error for his E-W data. He encourages his reader to not notice this, by omitting any mention of the N-S asymmetry, and by directing the reader's attention to his Figure 3.
Also note - in the same Table 1 - that at 90°, where competition between decay and lateral dispersion of secondary bursts ceases to be significant, there is an inverted E-W residual, at 6%. This value (6%) is likely the maximum actual resolution of the scintillation apparatus Marett employed.
Even more disturbing is that these very two points at 90° are interchanged in the linear regression plot of Marett's Figure 3, where the two curves clearly do not cross before zero (cos2 of 90° is zero), when in fact, per his data, they should; these points are even shown floating outside of the zero mark where they belong, as if someone had moved them by way of a graphics program. Moreover, whereas the West slope in that same Figure 3 now has an additional point at 1.5 (cos2 67.2°), to permit at least the tracing of a curve between three points (four if the zero points could somehow count, since the curve is clearly misgraphed...), the curve for the East is traced between two points (!!), at 45° and 22.5°. This is not even called intelligent fudging. It appears to have been done so that Marett could end up with curves whose ratio of slopes appears to confirm the positive to negative muon ratio, since his Table 1 cannot do that with that single 45° pair. By any statistical standard, these curves (yes, Marett fails to tell us what the bars are which he presents - SEM or SD or?) would not appear to be statistically different.
Note also that Marett mentions five bursts, all of which occur between 12pm and 3pm. Yet, in that infamous Table 1 he only presents three burst data, and none for the West direction, supposedly one of the parameters of his study!
One might well wonder what is the purpose of including in a PP5 billed as an Heretic's Notebook a paper that reports nothing new on cosmic ray physics, and whose supposed verification of well-known asymmetries in the muon flux is inaccurate and of inferior quality to what has long been published in this field.
The real conclusion Marett should have taken from his own school-experiment data of 15 years ago is that the difference between East and West at 45° did not appear to be significantly different from the difference between North and South at the same elevation.
This, then, is the illustrious paper regarding cosmic ray studies that Demeo introduces as "excellent" - a paper which, as we have seen, he himself did not (or would not!) either read or scrutinize.
But perhaps the best part of it all is that, after having known us for nearly 23 years, and having repeatedly heard from us how the midday sun most unexpectedly arrests the spontaneous discharge of electroscopes irrespective of their polarity, this Marett has managed to this day (as is clear from the body of his paper) to remain wrongly convinced that this happens - here we quote from his abstract - "on sunny days because of the increased density of the atmosphere to absorb these [cosmic] radiations". But if that were so - oh yet another unreferenced statement (par for the course!) - then he should neither have observed an increased muon flux between noon and 3pm, nor, if his bursts were anything other than artifactual (ie were significant in intensity and regularity of occurrence), should we observe regularly (on sunny days) the electroscopic arrest under midday sun, for the simple reason that muon bursts ionize the environment and every schoolboy knows that increased ionization accelerates, RATHER THAN ARRESTS OR SLOWS DOWN, the electroscopic discharge rate irrespective of polarity!
In fact, in the 1948 version of the Hoag & Korff textbook which Marett lists as his reference 8, one can read (page 367), in the context of precisely a discussion of the diurnal variation of cosmic radiation, that wherever "the atmosphere warms up, it expands, (...) the mesotron-producing layer rises, and the mesotrons [that's what muon were once also known as] have more time to decay on their way down to sea level". This means that more decay bursts should be observed on sunny days, and since this means more gamma-radiation and positron excesses at ground level, one should observe an acceleration of both electroscopic leakage and seepage, with leakage being 1.25 times faster. Yet, none of this happens - as anyone can observe on his own at ground level with two oppositely charged atmospheric electroscopes on sunny days.
But even if Hoag & Korff were correct in their statement - one should note that, with the high position of the sun near midday, any increase in secondary formation caused by the expanding atmosphere could never peak during that period of the day because of the well-known down-modulation of cosmic radiation by solar radiation. Indeed, the midday arrests of electroscopic discharges irrespective of polarity that are observed on sunny days demonstrate that these arrests are induced by solar radiation - and certainly not by its ionizing component! Furthermore, we should draw the attention of the reader to those two graphs of Poirer et al in our Fig. 3A: there, it is also apparent how the E-W asymmetry is at a minimum near midday - and at a maximum near 18:00. Poirer et al suggest that the E-W asymmetry is "the effect of the sun's interplanetary magnetic field deflecting the cosmic rays on their way to the Earth", whereas for the N-S asymmetry no one has to this day suggested a plausible explanation.
Could it then be that these increases in muon bursts between noon and 3pm are indeed merely a figment of David Marett's imagination - a mere artifact of the total scarcity of his data? Well, let's see - diurnal variations in muon flux are well established: the flux varies as a function of solar modulation; it is well known - since Kane in 1964 - that its maximum occurs near 18:00 solar time and the minimum near 06:00 (11). Poirer et al also found a second local minimum at 06:00 (see Fig. 3A) in the E-W asymmetry variation. Ergo, even if sunny days were to present more muon showers than cloudy days, the midday electroscopic arrests would still be due to the action of the sun - since it is clearly solar radiation that downmodulates the intensity of these muons and decreases the E-W asymmetry. This, evidently, is another confirmation of our own experimental aetherometric contention that it is a different form of radiation, ambipolar massfree, which is indirectly responsible for the midday electroscopic arrest. It is not merely a matter of subtracting the ionizing effects of cosmic rays. Moreover, if we were to take Marett and Hoag & Korff seriously, then instead of a midday electroscopic arrest of leakage and seepage on sunny days, we should observe an acceleration, with leakage a bit faster than seepage! The facts are simply not there, as we have amply shown in our Volume I of Experimental Aetherometry.
So, the question left for us here is - why does Demeo dish out with such gusto his absurd concepts of cosmic primaries and secondaries, and pack into his belated PP5 a mediocre study of muon decay in cosmic-ray secondaries, with such tenuous conclusions as those which form the topping for Marett's pasta?:
"In conclusion the west-east asymmetry of cosmic rays and the wave-like west-east phenomena of Reich [he is referring to the so-called heat waves on the horizon of a hot sunny day] betray an energetic motion leading the earth in its rotation."Thus, by Marett's own data and Marett's own logic, we should all start figuring that the Earth also and simultaneously rotates from North to South. This is the grand conclusion of his paper.
Demeo - who, as it happens, played a role in the ending of our two-decade-long on-and-off friendship with David Marett - has got just what he deserves: he can now be saddled with every lunacy that Marett comes up with- some of which, over the years, we patiently tried, alas in vain (as is now completely obvious), to correct.
Indeed, how does one jump from the E-S and N-S muon asymmetries to Reich's model of an orgone envelope of massfree radiation moving from the West to the East and responsible for the Earth's rotation? Aside from the fact that the rotation is what locally causes the diurnal variation in muon flux, as the latter is downmodulated by solar radiation and its magnetic field - do muons move the earth? What do muons have to do with the price of eggs or with orgone energy?
That same Hoag & Korff reference, in the 1948 edition (not the 1938 one!) reports how Blacket and Anderson's studies had alerted physicists to the fact that these cosmic ray particles (then known indistinctly as 'barythrons', 'yukons', 'heavy electrons', and so on) were approximately 200 times the mass-energy of the electron. Are cosmic ray primaries or secondaries responsible for the rotation of the earth??
It would seem, then, that Demeo simply wanted to appear to have produced a scientific publication in Reich's name - taking, maybe, a little revanche on us for his own inability to produce - following our challenge to him in November last year - any precedent whatsoever for any coherent thought from his Reichian camp on matters relating to basic physics. Having demonstrated how these proposals of Demeo and David Marett regarding cosmic rays and muons make no sense at all, let us now finally make that question critical for all Reichian doxa: are these off-the-wall proposals at least in agreement with Reich's thought on the matter?
The answer, in no uncertain terms, is an emphatic NO! Indeed, there is nothing whatsoever in Reich's writings that even vaguely suggests any such assimilation of the orgone envelope rotation to asymmetries in cosmic ray secondaries of muon showers preferentially coming from the West or the South!! On the contrary, Reich argued vehemently that the rotation of the Earth was the result of the motion, from West to East, of a massless orgone energy envelope, slightly faster than the speed of the Earth's rotation. His interest was not in the so-called primary cosmic ray showers of nuclides, but in the primordial cosmic radiation of massfree orgone particles. He stressed over and over again the difference between the two: that the so-called primary cosmic rays are already the result of "cosmic energy after matter", whereas primordial massfree radiation is "cosmic energy before matter". Listen to Reich himself:
"We must make a clear distinction between cosmic energy BEFORE matter and AFTER matter. The former is represented by the observable forms of primordial, massfree orgone energy; the latter is represented by the well-known different 'particles' of [electromagnetic radiation], such as alpha, beta and gamma rays, neutrons, mesons and so forth. (...) The sharp distinction between cosmic energy before and after matter is of paramount importance if confusion in thinking and applied method of research is to be avoided" (12).You read it here - the wise words of Reich himself, written before the complete discovery of DOR, disavow the very confusion in thinking that underlies both Marett's paper and Demeo's Editorial Note. What Demeo & Co. are in fact engaged in is a veritable enterprise of chronic distortion - where they set about studying energy after matter as if it were the same as energy before matter, and confuse primary showers with secondary ones, and both with the PRIMORDIAL cosmic energy Reich called orgone!!
Reich clearly cautions anyone (anyone who can read, that is!) NOT to confuse mesons (sic; the term "mesons", in Reich's time, designated as much Cecil Powell's "pi- mesons" as it did the "mu-mesons", later called muons!! The general term, in 1947, for intermediate particle entities involved in secondary showers, was mesons or mesotrons) with primordial cosmic energy! There - no one needs to read Aetherometry, or understand the gross errors of Marett; it suffices to comprehend and follow Reich's advice not to fall into the pitfalls that Demeo has fallen into.
It is clear that these shoddy offerings by Demeo and Marett regarding a supposed muon asymmetry are not Reich's fault, nor are they in any way in accordance with Reich's functionalist thought.
So, one asks about the beef - well there is none: these Joes and their supposed research have as much to do with studies of orgone massfree ambipolar radiation as the latter has anything to do with the culture of asparagus in SouthEast Asia. Maybe even less.
4. Blasband and cheap relationism
This part of the Pulse of the Planet almost deserves to be left alone. Through the efforts of Blasband ("The Implications of Current Consciousness Research on Orgonomic Theory", PP5, p.147), Reichians who run away in horror from Relativity can now fall prey to the most delusional relationism imaginable, and employ Reich's concept of orgonotic contact and love as evidence to suggest that consciousness (no less!, but defined ever so simplistically as "all that one identifies as oneself: thought, emotions, physical substance, etc" (13) - indeed, the etc is the most interesting aspect of the unending series...) affects the object of study. This is very fashionable - an all-too-tired truism, these days. But Blasband actually tries to convince us that "orgonomic theory" should learn the implications of what ridiculously mystical and notoriously poorly controlled and designed studies suggest: not the betrayed Machian relationism of Relativity, but the relationism of Heisenberg!! It is all becomes gloriously revealed when Blasband writes, with admiration, this idiocy:
"With respect to resonance, Jahne and Dunne offer a wave theory of functioning and state that the Random Event Generator phenomena only appear when the operator embraces the REG as target with a feeling akin to 'love'" (sic) (14).Sorry - this guy's cornball prose is beyond the pale of any scientific discussion whatsoever. This is 'sickophantic' - not just 'psycophantic'. Can you imagine a future where, because of his so-called 'findings', your emotions will be judged by whether or not you supposedly love the sensor that's pinned on you? Negative versus positive sensor responses...for you to cross a threshold, open a door, get back to your own home, cross a border?
Phony findings that lead to - you already know where.
And then this ambulatory fool, this Brassband, has the temerity to offer complete nonsequiturs such as: "the measurement of anomalously huge energetic charges in orgonotically charged tubes and in the accumulator by the Geiger-Müller counter is closer to the direct measurement of massfree orgone"!!
He supports this statement by attaching to it a reference to Reich's The Oranur Experiment. But, discounting - as one must from the above statement - the ORANUR and ORUR effects achieved by insertion of radionuclides inside ORACs, neither Brassband nor Demeo will ever be able to find in Reich, or provide their readers with, any further information regarding the 'anomalously huge' measurements obtained from accumulators by way of the GM counter - for that was our work, shown to Demeo at the time of the demonstration we gave him, and we have him on videotape stating: "I have never seen this before!" Perhaps the time has come to release this videotape to the public. In the PP5, of course, the demonstration is alluded to in hidden, obscure and unreferenced terms - without any understanding of precisely either how or why these "anomalously huge" counts can be obtained.
The reader should take strict note of the garbage version of Reich these little-men peddle, and how they subreptitiously sneak in what is nothing less than sheer robbery of our aetherometric work - but distorting the facts and the events and their sources beyond both sense and recognition.
Everywhere, a little cabal of lies and disinformation is perpetrated in the name of Reich by such mentally debile individuals who cannot read, but think they can steal enough to make a cogent substitute.
Brassband even manages to pretend that he might enunciate "a theory of time":
"Leaving aside discussion on the fundamental nature of time which is a topic too formidable to entertain in brevity..."
Beyond discussion, in fact - since Aetherometry is the first and only physical Theory of Time there has ever been, because it alone demonstrates, mathematically and physically, that Time is a manifold, and applies this knowledge practically.
5. Baker the second, on a new detector (a glorious DC voltmeter!)
Not to be outdone by David Marett's very fine but useless Heliognosis RF meter, Courtney Baker, too, makes his own contribution (see "Orgonometry: A new Detector", PP5, p. 155). Confronted with the attack mounted by Aetherometry on the diffuse notion of 'orgonotic charges', and the aetherometric demonstration of the existence of both monopolar and ambipolar electric charges, he seeks to reassert the simple fact that orgone energy is not electrical - in any way, shape or form. Does he repeat and review the extensive and meticulous experiments of Volume I of Aetherometry, now that these are, so to speak, sufficiently in his face for him to have addressed a weak rebuttal letter to the editor of Infinite Energy? No. In fact, he and others - including David Marett - manage to make NO references to Aetherometry! We let the reader judge what these fellows would do if they ever they got into positions of power-Potestas! Worse than the worst of fascists, in all Heisenbergian probability!
What a shame - that the beautiful and inspired work of Reich, with all its virtues and defects, has fallen prey to these energumena.
So what does our MD Baker cite to prove that orgone charges are NOT electrostatic charges? He cites four lines of evidence:
First that the light (electromagnetic) radiation in SAPA cultures "did not activate the electroscope" (15). What does the good doctor mean by this? That it did not electrically charge the electroscope (yes, he has great difficulty in saying what he means...). But this is easily explained - all blackbody electromagnetic radiation has long been well known not to charge an electroscope! So, this is hardly proof of anything. That such light radiation from SAPA cultures might "electrostatically charge an exposed pair of rubber gloves" - the very exception which Baker explicitly cites - only makes matters worse, as this would indeed suggest that the radiation observed in SAPA was not merely electromagnetic but also contained some electrical component that charged dielectrics. In fact, by the way!, it was the latter observation which Reich thought was pertinent to his orgone theory, and not the non-charging of the electroscope by SAPA light (16)!
The second line of evidence is a pure fabrication - it is the same fabrication that is peddled by Demeo in his so-called 'critique' of some of our monographs, and which we have demonstrated in our rebuttal (17) to be an irrevocable idiocy. Baker argues that dielectrics prolongedly exposed to ORACs will "activate the electroscope". The fact of the matter is that we have carried out such tests for years on end in a variety of different ORACs - all of which exhibited the anomalous electroscopic kinetoregenerative phenomenon as well as substantial To-T differences - and have never once observed such time-induced charging of dielectrics, NOT IF THE MATERIAL IS HANDLED WITH CAREFUL AVOIDANCE OF ANY FRICTION, OR UNWITTING CHARGING BY CONTACT OR INDUCTION. Untrained readers are cautioned about the poverty of perception and testing that underlies such a false contention.
The third line of evidence for the nonelectric nature of orgone that Courtney, the second pastry-chef on board, comes up with, manages to be even more feeble than the previous two: he writes -
"We may readily activate an electroscope by drawing a comb through the hair, which concentrates orgone onto it [sic]; in clear, dry weather several thousand volts may be obtained on the comb. Yet, the orgone energy in the hair does not manifest electrostatically (otherwise the hair would be sticking away from the head)[sic]"It is nearly unbelievable that an MD could be this ignorant. On a first tempo, one might be tempted to excuse Baker - the reason why he is prey to the 'observation' that drawing a comb through the hair does not cause electrostatic hair repulsion is because the potentials typically imparted to the comb only reach one or two thousand volts on dry days. In other words, assuming (with undue generosity) that Baker knows enough to perform his experiments, he would say "static electricity" if it was a Van der Graaf discharge of tens of thousands of volts (when hair repulsion is only too obvious...), but if it is a few hundred or a few thousand volts (and hair repulsion is not obvious...) then suddenly it is 'orgonotic charges'...But we soon realize that he really doesn't even deserve this form of redemption - his atavism and complete lack of comprehension is far worse: for he must be bald - otherwise wouldn't he already have made the simple observation that hair which is washed (without conditioner) and dried becomes highly electrostatic on dry days with the simple passage of a comb, which registers "thousands of volts" on the electroscope???
If anything, mention of such comb-experiments in this context would only serve to prove that the term 'orgone charges' is nothing more than a gratuitous duplication of the term 'electrostatic charges'; for indeed, the passing of a comb through the hair does provoke precisely the effect that connection to a Van der Graaf elicits, but at a lower intensity because of the decreased potential.
The last line of evidence given by the second Baker, however, is more amusing still - since it is the result not of a correct, but of an incorrect conclusion that Reich himself took from his Vacor-tube work:
"Reich was able to concentrate orgone energy in a highly evacuated glass tube (vacor) by placing it in an orac [sic] for several weeks. The application of high voltage excitation would not only cause the orgone to luminate, but also produce discharges from a central wire which would activate an electroscope" (sic).Unfortunately, those who cannot hit the nail on the head really should not try. But they believe - the poor devils - that this is the way to fame and riches!
Here let us quote our own experiments, since it is with no modesty that we say no one else presently alive understands better than ourselves what Reich was doing when he used his Vacor tubes as Vacor tubes (as sources of vacuum energy) as opposed to when he used them as plasma pulsation devices.
This we can state with certainty: whether a vacuum tube is employed to sustain plasma pulsation (in the TRD, aPGAD, and IVAD regimes) or merely a glow discharge, or employed instead as a Vacor tube with which energy is extracted from the 'vacuum medium', no tube needs to be incubated for any period of time in an ORAC. Reich was sorely mistaken in observations that suggested otherwise. The simple reason why his tubes eventually presented breakdown voltages much lower than those they required after the manufacturer evacuated them is that over time they lost the vacuum, either by the evolution of gases adsorbed to glass and electrode surfaces that were not properly cleaned by the manufacturer (since Reich never made any vacuum pump studies!), or because the seals themselves were imperfect, or both. And Reich was also mistaken when he thought that for these tubes to be used as Vacor tubes proper in the Orgone Motor, one needed to have them 'baked inside ORACs for prolonged periods'. We have extracted energy from Vacor tubes that were sealed immediately before the experiment! This is now on a videotape that will shortly be publicly available.
Moreover, a lower (or, for that matter, higher) breakdown voltage for a vacuum tube is not evidence for 'orgone charges' being distinct from electric charges - since vacuum or dielectric breakdown is precisely an electric process!!!
Baker is therefore another epitome of the poorly congeminated orthodoxy of Reichianism that Demeo has assembled to respond to the aetherometric onslaught.
Undoubtedly the most revulsive aspect of Baker's paper is the mockery or distortion that it makes, in one fell swoop, of both Reich's Orgonomy and our Aetherometric work. Abusing our aetherometric terminology of massbound and massfree electric charges, Baker finds it "necessary to distinguish" (sic!) between three types of charge (PP5, p.156):
I. Free orgone charges, which do not register electrically but "can 'charge' systems with energy".
II. Massfree electrostatic charge, which - as he explicitly tells the reader - is "not due to particles, but to concentrated massfree orgone".
III. Massbound electrostatic charge, which is associated with electrons, protons, etc.
This is a total caricature even of Reich's simple distinction between:
1. Massfree orgone charges that were not electrical; and
2. Massbound electrical charges that were always monopolar.
For let us examine this "distinction" which Baker pretends to be "necessary". First, his "free orgone charges": they are so free that they are free of mass and charge, since they are not electrical. So what are they? Why call them charges if they are not electrical? And how can they "charge" a system? Indeed, what is the difference between charge and "charge"??
But the next class (type II charge) is even better: here Baker invents the notion that there exist in nature monopolar electrostatic charges that are massfree. This is the clincher from which would spring the justification of the Demean idea that positive ions are dor-ish and negative ions are or-ish. You see, all you have to do is perform an act of faith ("Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "I daresay you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."): if there are massfree negative and positive electric charges that succeed, somehow, in not being particles, then they can simply get affected to mass, to yield those ions. It is such a simple and face-saving act (of faith) that one feels quite embarassed by one's own irrepressible desire to ask Baker for a single physical proof for this enormity: a particle-less massfree monopolar charge...
Lastly, of course, there are the good old massbound electrostatic charges which "are associated" with particles like electrons, positrons and protons. But here, too - Baker tells us - we must be on our guard, because "the 'electrical' [sic] functioning of nature is via ions", not electrons (as if electrons were not ions!), because "orgone energy interacts more readily with whole ions [as opposed to what? fractional ions??] than it does with solitary electrons" (sic, same page 156).
What is being baked here is a veritable attempt at recuperating or co-opting the aetherometric distinction between:
1. Massbound charges, which are always monopolar and include the light
(negatron, positron) and heavy leptons, as well as all electrically
charged hadrons; and
2. Massfree charges, which are always ambipolar (never monopolar)
and phenomenologically appear to be electrically neutral.
Moreover, all charges - whether massbound or massfree - are electric and particulate. To talk about "electrostatic charges" - whether massbound or massfree - and claim that they are not particles, is the stupidest non-sequitur imaginable; for a charge - which is always electric - is always, by functionalist definition, a distinct particle, a particulate property. Charge is the original quantum.
But why does Baker go through these imbecillic contractions - aside from wanting to co-opt Aetherometry? Because he must have his readers buy this nonsense in order to convince them that he has a special orgone detector, and not a mere DC voltmeter. Here is how he explains with his "necessary distinctions" the operation of his "orgone detector": type I charge (i.e. orgone charges that are neither electric nor particulate, and are massfree) descends through Baker's antenna to his detector; next, the detector itself transforms this "free orgone energy type I charge" into "massfree electrostatic charge" of type II. Now, keep in mind that this electrostatic charge is already monopolar but devoid of mass. So, all it has to do is stick to mass, and what do we get? - you guessed it: "massbound electrostatic charge" of type III. As he writes on p. 157, "(...) type II charge (...) can then interact with type III charges in conventional electronic circuitry" (not ionic circuitry?...) All this nonsensical verborrhea is there to make the reader believe that he, Baker, must be doing something very subtle indeed. For he is 'transforming' a mere millivoltmeter sandwiched between an antenna and ground, into an 'orgone detector' that he has the gall to call 'new'. And do you know what the 'interaction' of his type II charge with his type III charge amounts to? Simply the impedance mismatch that decreases the potential of high-voltage "electrostatic" charges into the millivoltages of the DC potentials that his 'detector' measures.
We might add that the proof that what Baker has is not an orgone field detector lies precisely in the fact that his detector is unable to sense the massfree radiation of a body which is stationary. As he himself acknowledges on page 157, his detector senses only body movements. Since these are accompanied by well-known action potentials, what he is measuring are these potentials - i.e. fluxes of monopolar massbound charge.
But wait - it gets better still! After Baker enunciates the three "electromagnetic and electrical phenomena in the atmosphere", on page 158 of PP5, as being (1) "radio waves", (2) "High voltage transients" from thunderstorms and (3) "the Earth's potential gradient (...) [of] about 150 volts/meter" in "fair-weather", he moves on with full steam to identify - in his graph 1 - what he dares call "atmospheric orgone energy waves"!
Let us ask him: quid est? Baker's response is a graph of monopolar charge 'peaks' taken every 15 seconds (!!), each from a new angular position(!!), for a period of 10 minutes on an unidentified day at an unspecified hour. The voltage 'peaks' are ostensibly of positive polarity, as he recognizes anyway, with the negative oscillations being essentially nonsignificantly different from zero. But even though he claims that "statistical and graphical analysis could (...) be done on this data, which gave a much fuller qualitative [sic! if you can believe he wrote this!] picture of the orgone energy activity", none is forthcoming save for two rows of averages in his Tables 1 and 2! That's it, the statistical analysis is... qualitative!
Commenting on these positive monopolar "atmospheric orgone waves", Baker concludes that they are waves because of "the quality of the readings [which] is non- mechanical, neither sudden nor sharp but rather slowly undulating" (sic, same page 158 of PP5). To obtain even slower 'waves' of positive monopolar charge, all that Baker would have to do with this arrangement would be to sample even less frequently. And if he sampled faster, he would find faster and faster oscillations culminating in a discovery of the overall noise of his DC voltmeter!
He casually remarks that "on 'quiet' days (no wind), the detector output shows infrequent polarity reversal" whereas on windy days "the voltage continually wanders".
So, let us tell you, o reader!, what Baker got. Any schoolgirl can repeat this experiment, and even improve upon it: wrap a plastic bag upon a metal plate (the larger the area, the greater the voltage), expose it to a windy day, and connect the plate to one lead of your voltmeter and the other lead to ground. Take a measurement: you will see 'electric free energy' from the constant rubbing of the bag over the plate, just as Baker does, for as long as there is wind! The looser the bag, the better, but up to a point, since a minimum of contact is needed, and preferably there should be no ripping. Now, it is true that Baker did not use a plate but a long copper wire antenna (presumably insulated, since otherwise it would soon corrode by being exposed to the elements); he does not tell us how long it was, either. But, even if the antenna were naked, that action of the plastic - or the action of any insulation that is not tight - is no different from the action of the air molecules impacting that wire under the force of the wind.
Now, you will see what is the most amusing part of this Baker foray into 'basic physics' devoid of science: IF atmospheric energy 'waves' are positively-charged 'waves', as Baker claims and purportedly demonstrates (...and in agreement with the excess of positive muon charge that Demeo thinks is, somehow, negative...), then should he not call them DOR waves, rather than 'orgone waves'?
After all, none other than Demeo has indeed proposed - in the Bible 'Saharasia', page 87 - that DOR parallels the effect of positive ions, and he went as far as identifying OR with negative ions in his Accumulator Handbook and his 'Critique' of Aetherometry:
"Reich argued for the existence of two antithetical qualities of (...) atmospheric and biological orgone [sic] energy. (...) This suggests a logical parallel between his [Reich's] findings on dor-ish [sic] desert atmospheres and positive air ions identified in more recent times within desert regions."This leads to what we call "Demeo's Co(s)mic Function", in the Diagram below.
We know that nothing ever dies of contradictions. But it would seem that, in keeping
with Demeo's reduction of OR/DOR to a simplistic and useless duplication of negative
vs positive ions in the conventional theory of electricity, the atmospheric 'waves' of
positive charge observed by Baker the Second should be interpreted as 'dor-ish', not 'or-
ish'. It is all becoming as clear as mud. Orgone is "reminiscent of a DC flow of
electricity" because it is positively charged, ie 'dor-ish'.
And Baker and Demeo wonder why it takes such genius to comprehend what they are investigating! One can see once more why even the most open-minded establishment scientists shrink from any consideration of Reich's work. For morons like Baker have riddled Reich's work with a sordid pile of nonsense! Baker begins by arguing that orgone is not electrical. Yet he makes all the wrong invocations, since every example he invokes suggests, instead, that orgone is entirely electrostatic or, at any rate, monopolar electric - and at that positive! Then to demonstrate that it really is not electrostatic or electric in the conventional sense, Baker proceeds to use a simple (supposedly) dual polarity DC millivoltmeter that measures solely monopolar electrical charges, but without the requisite impedance (so that our man ends up with nothing more than artifactual millivoltages...). Yes, it is a misery from which even the skills of the supposed 'engineer' (sic) David Marett (by the way, how does one become an engineer with a BSc in Physical Chemistry??) would not be able to extricate Baker. Nor can the lies Baker writes about Reich's "bioelectric experiment [on] skin potentials" having achieved only "about two to three millivolts" (sic). We quote from an upcoming study report of ours: "Reich's studies of the erogenous skin zones also showed that potentials which, in other regions of the skin, varied between 0 and -40mV, could reach positive polarizations on the order of +200mV", the reference being p. 83 of Reich's 1937 "The bioelectrical function of sexuality and anxiety", republished in revised form by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in 1982.
The only way these people can get away with these falsifications of both Reich's orgonomy and science tout court is if their readers somehow manage to be as ill-informed as they are.
Compared to the crypto-scientific distortion this canaille perpetrates on the body of Reich's work, the distortion that Lenino-Stalinism operated on Marx's thought, or Nazism on Nietzsche's thought, look like a Sunday trip to the candy store. After all, the Stalinists and the Nazis worked harder at their distortions, and buttressed them with better exegetic support from the texts they were distorting!
Why does Baker not mention Aetherometry and our work, which was published nearly a year before this Pulse of the Planet was issued?
Because Aetherometry has already demonstrated that orgone energy is not at all about electrostatic charges, not about monopolar electric charges. Because Aetherometry has already identified - as anybody who cares can read in our published work - the spectrum of ambipolar radiation, including OR and DOR - removing from these physical functions the mysticism that for so many decades had been woven around them. The incapacity to properly distinguish between monopolar charges of either polarity ("electrostatic charges" whether of high or low potential) and ambipolar massfree charges, harks back to Tesla and Reich. It took Aetherometry to demonstrate how there are phenomenologically neutral charges - massfree ambipolar charges - that, in their passage and interaction with Matter, confer kinetic energy upon monopolar charges (ie induce secondary electrostatic effects) and indirectly produce blackbody photons (ie "lumination"). None of these phenomena are mysterious - what is mystifying is the stubborn lack of understanding and of willingness to learn on the part of these self-appointed failed students and followers of Reich.
Baker begins by wanting to differentiate orgone energy from ordinary electricity. But for that, he needed the tools of Aetherometry which he chooses to blissfully ignore. Instead, he ends up by demonstrating, with an ordinary DC voltmeter, that orgone energy is all about monopolar charges, and thus no different from 'electrostatic charges'... Moron indeed.
All that Baker is reading, with his antenna, is the monopolar electric conversion of the electrostatic fields associated with his test bodies, friction caused by wind, etc. So much for his demonstration of a separate and distinct existence of orgone radiation.
6. Sheer nonsense about Oranur
The 1-page article by six Spanish researchers ("Confirmation of an Oranur Anomaly", PP5, p.182) begins badly enough with another memorable editorial contribution by Demeo -- this time, a definition of ORANUR. It reads:
"Oranur is the term used by W. Reich to designate an anti-nuclear effect of orgone energy, one expression of which was anomalous behaviour of GM counters"...(18)The reader who wants to know about ORANUR would do well to read our earlier rebuttal of Demeo's basic and systematic errors (17). It is true that Reich discovered what he termed the ORANUR response while seeking to find a way to immunize living systems to the effects of nuclear ionizing radiation. But in the process, Reich came to realize that the response he called ORANUR was the result of the reaction of orgone to nuclear radioactivity. What did it fundamentally consist of? Reich had expected to find that, in environments where orgone energy was highly concentrated, as in ORACs or in his OR room, nuclear activity would be buffered by the orgone activity, and thus decrease. To his astonishment, the very opposite of what he expected happened: instead of quenching nuclear radioactivity, exposure of radionuclides to 'high orgone environments' was found to create a runaway reaction that greatly amplified the effects of nuclear radiation (including intensification of radiation sickness). Read the Oranur Experiment report!! Reich later speculated that controlled exposure of organisms to such runaway radiation could have precisely the intended effect of immunizing them against the adverse effects of nuclear radiation. But he never proved this suggestion nor studied it in any way that one could construe as a systematic proof of his contention.
Subsequently, in the course of repeating the ORANUR effect, Reich came to realize that the physical reality underlying it was rather complex: exposure of 'concentrated orgone energy' to nuclear radioactivity converted orgone energy into DOR radiation. Hence, the ORANUR proper is nothing other than the process of conversion of orgone energy into DOR which is promoted by nuclear radiation when the latter is introduced into concentrated orgone environments. Hence, ORANUR IS NOT AN ANTI- NUCLEAR EFFECT OF ORGONE ENERGY; RATHER, IT IS RUNAWAY NUCLEAR RADIATION THAT IS PROMOTED BY THE LOCAL CONVERSION OF ORGONE INTO DOR!!
This, and this alone, is the phenomenon Reich reported. But who is the Reichian that still reads Reich? Clearly not Demeo or his contributors that he 'peer-reviews' (yes, he is their peer, precisely because he does not review them).
The distinctive mark of ORANUR, as Reich discovered, is precisely the high counts registered at the Geiger-Müller counter with the appropriate GM tube detectors. In essence, then, the ORANUR reaction consists of an ANOMALOUSLY HIGH AND SIGNIFICANT INCREASE IN PULSE RATE COUNTING FROM A RADIOACTIVE SOURCE AT THE GM COUNTER.
IS THIS WHAT THE SPANISH RESEARCHERS FOUND OR STUDIED?
The answer is NO. What they report is a DECREASE in pulse rate, not an increase!! One could say that it is a kind of inverse ORANUR...were it not for another fact: that the decrease they report is TOTALLY INSIGNIFICANT. We note that the one-page report that is billed as "Confirmation of an ORANUR anomaly" contains NO STATISTICAL ANALYSIS WHATSOEVER. Yet, the six supposed scientists (!) have the undaunted courage to state (yes, their exact words are priceless!):
"Simultaneous radioactive decay measurements of two sources, namely Ra-226 and Cs- 137, when placed inside the [Faraday] box [both at the same time???] showed a decrease in their values from 36 to 35.6 cps, and from 276.4 to 273 cps, respectively. (...) The above mentioned 1.2% decrease [sic] in cps is equivalent to a decrease in applied tension to the tubes of 30 volt (...). These results [sic!] show a trend similar to that mentioned by Reich [sic]" (18).Here, then, we have another superb example of what Demeo pretends is 'excellent' science: an obviously nonsignificant decrease in GM rates upon insertion of two radionuclides into a Faraday cage is reported as a confirmation of the ORANUR effect which Reich discovered as an anomalous INCREASE in those rates... Those who read this 'science' definitely get what they deserve: garbage, pure unadulterated garbage!
Ah, but we almost forgot: it took "nine years" (sic) for these six Spanish researchers to accomplish this monumental one-page task...
7. The retrograde resurrection of Dayton Miller's static Aether and Demeo's explanation for the easterlies
Demeo's article on the easterlies ("Origins of the Tropical Easterlies: An Orgone-Energetic Perspective", PP5, p. 212) is the only effort of thought in the whole PP5. Prompted by our letter to him (which of course goes unmentioned) which explained why it is unlikely that Miller's observations and contentions are correct or plausible, and drew his attention to the role of the jet-stream in the rotation of the Earth, Demeo did some thinking on the phenomenon of the easterlies and concluded that the West to East OR envelope flux is actually slower than the speed of rotation of the Earth at the equator, thus giving rise to a global belt of tropical easterlies.
What are these winds? Close to the ground, in the tropics and subtropics, regular easterly winds - known as trade winds or easterlies - blow towards the low pressure area near the equator, the globally called Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). Flohn, in his seminal 1969 Climate and Weather writes (page 104) about the processes responsible for these winds:
"The base layer of the trade wind airstream constantly receives latent heat [sic] from the evaporating water and also a small quantity of sensible heat [sic; as far as we know Flohn was not an aetherometrist] from the somewhat warmer surface of the sea."Flohn goes on to explain how, "since the direction of the rotation of the earth is from west to east, all easterly winds [whether subpolar, subtropical or intertropical], have a braking effect on the earth's surface, whereas all westerly winds have an accelerating effect" (page 107), and that, essentially, their manifestation obeys a seasonal oscillation between westerlies and easterlies:
"The word 'mausim', monsoon, has been used by Arab seamen for over a thousand years to describe the seasonal change in wind direction - north-easterly in the cold season, south-westerly in the hot season - in the sea regions between Arabia and India. (...) There are three continental zones in which there is a marked annual change of wind direction(...). These zones are:This immediately points to two major errors in the explanation for easterlies which Demeo proposes in PP5, starting on page 212. Easterlies manifest themselves at all latitudes, not just in the ITCZ, and their manifestation is periodic or seasonal, and in balance with westerlies for all regions.1. Near the subpolar low pressure trough where polar easterly winds blow in the summer and westerly winds in the winter.
2. Near the subtropical high pressure cells where westerly winds blow in the winter and easterly trade winds (calms) in the summer.
3. Near the ITCZ where easterly trade winds blow in the winter and westerly winds in the summer." (page 114 of Climate and Weather)
But there is more: in his Table 1, page 216 of PP5, Demeo presents the general surface winds as being westerly except for latitudes of +/-10° around the Equator. And the only upper air wind direction that he presents as being "variable" and not "westerly", is at 0°. Is this so? On that same page 104 of his book, Flohn tell us, instead, that "in polar regions (...), in winter and summer, [there is] a slight poleward increase in pressure with an insignificant preponderance of easterly winds in the lower layers" of the atmosphere; and on page 113, that - in the upper troposphere - there is "a pressure gradient [that] slopes towards the equator, accompanied by an easterly flow reaching into the stratosphere which always separates the extratropical westerlies of both hemispheres".
So Flohn teaches that, whether the ground winds are westerly or easterly, there is always at the equator a permanent upper air easterly flow that reaches into the stratosphere. What Demeo calls "variable upper air wind at 0°" is, instead, invariably easterly; and what he calls "general easterly surface winds" at latitudes of +/-10°, vary seasonally between easterlies and westerlies. Moreover, he omits the low level polar easterlies (he calls them "variable" also) which, over the South Pole, are in fact predominant over the westerlies.
The convective Hadley circulation near the equator is entirely ignored by Demeo, since this would be an admission that warm air rises; and so is the fact that this rise, stretching into the stratopause, is inertially displaced to the west by the rotation of the earth to the east. It is this simple inertial lag - which decreases to the very extent that the momentum of these easterlies is absorbed, at ground level, to brake or drag down the rotation of the earth - which is responsible for the upper air easterly flow in the ITCZ.
So, why all this commotion on Demeo's part about the easterlies? Because he is seeking to conciliate the irreconcilable: Reich's theory of an orgone energy envelope moving from west to east, faster than the equatorial speed of the earth and responsible for the rotation of the earth, with his confused interpretation of Dayton Miller's residuals that Miller himself intended as validation for the existence of a stationary Aether passively entrained by the translatory (not rotary) motion of the earth.
After our concise dismantlement of any such confusion, Demeo has returned with new arguments. Curiously enough, he has so much ego invested in the Miller story, that this time he is willing to suggest that Reich should be corrected (it's a first!): the first step to reconcile Reich and Miller is to simply correct Reich by adding a new assumption: "the Earth is assumed now to be moving with the orgone flow, at approximately the same speed" (on page 217 of PP5). His own analogy: "this is analogous to a ball floating in a stream, being carried along by the stream at the same speed of its current". Now, this is a useless analogy, because it never happens in nature - no floating object ever travels at the speed of the water current! Next he corrects Reich's analogy of the ball floating on an ocean, by saying that it is better to think in terms of submersion. However, the relation between ocean waves under the surface and a submersible are no different from those between surface waves and a floating ball, save for the area of impact relations. That is why Reich gave the analogy which Demeo fails to grasp by willing floating balls to go as fast as the current... Moreover, Demeo says nothing further about the promised analysis of submersion. Instead, he comes up with a metaphysical invention: "This is, in fact, what we see with a ball floating on the ocean waves, with two different motional forces, one from the waves and another from the ocean medium itself, which restrains the ball against moving too easily with the waves."
Simply phenomenal! What is the inertia of a floating ball exerted over its buoyant surface becomes the magical force of the "ocean medium itself", a force all the more mysterious as it fails to be conveyed by waves. And, of course, in simple streams there is no inertia - hence the ball can run along with the current - for everyone knows that streams lack "the ocean medium"; that's why they are called streams. No wonder that he exclaims that both of these 'models' raise "thorny questions"...
One of these 'thorny' questions, writes Demeo, is that "for example, the predominant west-to-east flow of the orgone appears to contradict the flow of ether-drift as demonstrated by the late [great] Dayton Miller."
How does he solve this contradiction which, all the while since his Master's thesis in Arts, he thought did not exist - not until our meeting last year and the subsequent e-mail exchanges between us?
By simply putting forth the most confused and peremptory mumbo-jumbo anyone could come up with, even employing, but without any physical sense whatsoever, the aetherometric jargon of 'massbound' and 'condensing':
"Firstly, the streaming motions of mass-free orgone could well be at the 10km/sec velocity recorded by Miller at Mr. Wilson observatory, affecting the speed of mass-free light waves. This velocity might be dramatically slowed down as the superimposition process occurs, where mass is being formed directly out of the orgone energy substrate. At such a point - being attracted to the Earth's surface, building in both charge and excitation condensing into relatively slow-moving orgone units which are mass-forming or mass-bound and capable of imparting a momentum to both atmosphere and planetary mass - the velocity of this more condensed orgone might be well under 1 km/sec, perhaps approximating the easterly velocity of Earth at the subtropical latitudes, of around 1500 km/h ( or ~0.4 km/sec)." (p. 218)All of a sudden - presto! - there is a reconciliation between the orgone streams and Miller's results, because massfree orgone affects massfree 'light waves'! So, let aetherometrists note that light is massfree and consists of waves, not photons (but if light waves transmit light why do we need another useless duplication of orgone energy as being the wave stimulus for light, as Demeo also claims?). Next, let aetherometrists also be warned that mass is magically formed from some superimposition process (of massfree light with massfree orgone??), and that this mass is nothing other than "slow moving massbound orgone energy units". You see - 'coz the Aether is orgone, which is or-ish and dor-ish, and this orgone sometimes has mass, sometimes it don't; sometimes it is heavy like muons, other times invisible like neutrinos, sometimes more condensed, other times less condensed.
What a buffoonery of Reich's Orgonomy and our own Aetherometric Science! No data, no perception or comprehension, just a spewing of senseless words.
Here are the words of one of us, which Demeo has poorly tried to rebuke with his article on easterlies in PP5, and which stand like a knife in the heart of all those recuperators who continue to recklessly amalgamate Reich's theory of orgone-driven rotation of the earth with XIXth century stationary Aether mysticism:
"But the notion of drift itself conjures up the notion of an original event that impelled this drift - such as the mythical Big-Bang extracted from the New Aether Drift axed on the microwave CBR - rather than the concept of an ongoing multiple-layered superimposition of synchronous and consistent fluxes of aether spin that permanently impel astrophysical bodies, and where the lag of the motion of these bodies to their spinning aetherospheres is constitutive of the surface currents sustaining their very rotation and translation, much as the lag of drag-cup motors yields eddy currents that are constitutive of rotor motion (hence the technical concept of slip is nonsensical in drag-cups).So much for Demeo's reconciliation of the irreconcilable - his theory of easterlies and his Millerism stand refuted from the start by his total inability to recognize his own errors in interpretation.In accordance with this model, one should indeed be also able to detect greater motion of satellites near the shear zone when the aether impulses slow down. This is an old question that goes back to the work of Newton. And it is indeed true that, beginning at an equatorial geostationary distance of 35,862 km above the Earth, when the translatory speed of a satellite around the Earth's axis is ca 3 km/sec, satellite speed increases steadily to a value of 7.8 km/sec at ca 100 Km above the Earth, and to some slightly higher value at a slightly lower altitude still; but then, instead of continuing to increase to a theoretical 7.9 km/sec at the Earth's surface, the satellite is dragged down, suddenly decelerated, such that at tropospheric altitudes, the speed of the flux holding an imaginary satellite afloat in a trajectory parallel to the earth would not be any faster than the variable speed (0.01 to 0.1 km/sec) of the jet stream with respect to the Earth. Note also that it is along the ridges and troughs of the jet stream that cyclonic and anticyclonic systems couple themselves, much as eddy currents counter-couple themselves on the surface of a drag-cup. A suitable approximation would be ca 0.5 km/sec at altitudes of ca 10 Km, in temperate latitudes. This abrupt slowing down of the inner concentric layers of the spinning aetherosphere below 100 Km results precisely from the atmospheric and terrestrial absorption of the impulses of the 'aether stream' - and causes, of course, the illusion that free fall is a motion along the vertical.
The question then arises as to whether Miller could have detected that aether motion (and without reference to the W to E motion of the OR envelope), once it slowed down and encircled the planet at a slightly faster rate of motion than the motion of the surface or the rotation of the planet. At ca 1.8 km altitude, and in light of the preceding, it seems unlikely that the value of an aether drift at 9 to 10 km/sec could ever be real. (...)
Were the speed of the drifting Aether dragged down by the rotary motion of the Earth, one should expect that one might observe a cosmic variation when the light path is at 90° to the path of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, over a suitably long period of observations, just as Miller did. However, confronted with his results, one is hard put to see how a body rotating with surface speeds no greater than 0.46 km/sec (at the equator) would slow down a drift of 200 km/sec to ca 10 km/sec at 1.8 km altitude [and at a northern latitude]. It is simply an act of faith to hold onto an entrained aether model and at the same time hold onto the view that, within the troposphere, there is an aether motion at 10 km/sec pointing to somewhere along the arc joining Draco and Dorado. For this aether motion in any aether drag model would have to represent a slip with respect to the earth's rotation at such low altitudes that would be, for all purposes, nearly parallel to the surface."
But above all, Demeo's confused notion that, at the equator, somehow the OR envelope should rotate at the same speed as the equatorial surface, is a physical impossibility because the greater concentration of mass within the Earth lies towards the equator, not the poles, with the result that its motion, as Reich himself calculated, must per force be slower than the Aether flux driving its spin. This is basic mechanics. Moreover, it is also obvious that the greater surface exposed to Aether impulses would be equatorial, not polar. As Reich himself sought to understand it, the easterlies are a local reaction to stagnant tropical atmospheric cells that resist the Aether impulses or 'drag then down too soon'. And, following Flohn's advice, one would do well to understand the dynamics of latent and sensible heats, at the equator.
8. Cloudbluffing and saving the children of Eritrea
We now come to Demeo's specialty work, cloudbusting ("Green Sea Eritrea: A 5-Year Desert-Greening CORE Project in the SE African-Sahel", PP5, p. 183). At first we did not want to bother with this commentary, but Demeo has indeed failed to this day to prove that a cloudbuster can bust even a single cloud. We are not just talking about the absence of formal proof, with time-logs and pictures, proper statistics, control of variables, sufficient repetition. No - there are not even any detailed diagrams of his cloudbusters and the set-ups, with indications of the nearest streams or wells of water that he hooked his devices to, and how or when.
So, all we have to go on is Reich's work and our own few dabblings in the subject that have shown to us that it is indeed possible to bust small clouds or instead grow them with a cloudbuster, depending on how one uses the technique discovered by Reich.
Yet, we begin by noting what is our recollection of something Demeo himself told us - that he has never, to this day, actually built or employed a cloudbuster made of galvanized iron pipes, as Reich recommended and employed. He has employed aluminum instead, including for the work he conducted during his MA program. He told us that it doesn't matter, since Australian aboriginal peoples did it with bones (and not sound?...).
Be that as it may - is the Green Sea Eritrea project what one could call a circumstantial demonstration of the effects of cloudbusting? The answer is a qualified NO, since the data for an opposite assertion, a qualified yes, are simply not there.
It is precisely this aspect of Demeo's cloudbusting enterprise which has long prevented us from taking seriously the allegations made by Carlinsky that Demeo killed so many 'people and cows' as a result of uncontrolled fast floods. Our own evaluation suggests, instead, that there is not even the most tenuous link between Demeo's cloudbusting activities and any tangible results upon the atmosphere and vegetation.
Demeo himself - with his eager procedures, lack of notebooks, lack of systematic experimentation, and so on - precludes any possible link susceptible to serious study. Sometimes the effect of his cloudbusting operations is deemed to occur immediately ("within minutes", he says), other times in weeks or months. This is a patently ridiculous and 'spaced-out' way of assessing any experimental intervention.
For the first operations in Eritrea, in 1994, all he has to offer is an anecdotal piece accompanied by two photos of 'heavy rains' over Asmara:
"(...) On the very first day of the 1994 operations, within minutes of setting up and working the cloudbuster, wind-reversals associated with good moisture flow from the Gulf of Guinea developed" (20).The two photos - let it be remarked - show more fog than rain, but the immediatism of the conclusion ("within minutes"), that certified herald of the 'feeling' method, is all that counts. Bang!
Before latching on to the 1995 operations, Demeo lashes out at an unnamed skeptic. Then come the results of the 1995 operations, which he summarizes in his Figure 4. This consists of a chart of the daily precipitation between June and September of 1995, that he notes was taken from 39 stations, showing two interventions by a single cloudbuster (even though the interventions are smeared across contiguous blocks of days, and it is unclear at which hours and for how long each cloudbuster was operated!).
Our uneasiness begins right with that 'datum' called "39 stations". Which stations were these? Demeo never tells us. In Eritrea proper there are only 10 stations (Nacfa, Asmara, Adi-Ugri, Agordar, Ghinda, Tesseni, Ali-Kaih, Keren, Assab and Massawa). And if one puts together the stations in Ethiopia and Sudan, the number climbs to well over 70 stations. So, how did Demeo select these unnamed stations to compose his graphs, not just for 1995, but also for 1996-1998? Why were some stations included and others excluded? What was the selection criterion? Did Demeo always use the same 39 stations?
These unanswered questions are so basic as to invalidate anything Demeo might have to say on the matter. Not that it matters. For it suffices to look at that 1995 graph: whereas the first-phase operations (July 3 to 15) appear to coincide with a pluvial increase, the second-phase operations (Aug 30 to Sept. 10) are followed by what is actually a very low September precipitation. Yet the text fails to mention, explain or even address any of this.
Indeed, the reader should note that July in Eritrea is typically the month of highest precipitation, which also peaks, at odd times, in September to October. (One might wonder why the Eritreans needed Demeo to cloudbust just then - but no matter).
This brings us to the next occasion on which Demeo tried to 'green the Sahara' - in 1997, which happens to have been, together with 1998, the infamous year of El Niño flooding all over the world. Without so much as a single shred of evidence or data, and armed only with idle speculation, Demeo establishes right away that El Niño is a 'secondary consequence of primary Saharasian dor-stagnation". The publicized correlation others had made, at the time, between El Niño and flooding in Eritrea and other parts of the globe, Demeo now turns on its head - suggesting that it is drought in the Sahara which causes El Niño (21)! He may as well walk on ceilings.
Leaving this nonsense aside, what do his data from the 39 undisclosed stations - summarized by his precipitation map for 1997 - actually indicate? Again we observe the same pattern as in 1995!: phase I operations (June 19 to July 7) appear to be followed by peak precipitation in July (on the same days when peak precipitation was also observed in 1996, when no cloudbusting operations were conducted; and indeed the difference between the 8mm peak precipitation in July 1996 and the 10 mm in July 1997 is simply nonsignificant), and again there is a recorded failure of any response to the phase II operations (Aug. 15 to Sept. 9), which are followed by extreme drought in September.
This already suggests that any pretense on the part of Demeo & Co concerning the effectiveness of cloudbusting is merely an illusionistic act, since, at least half of the time, 'it just don't work'.
So much for the immediate or mid-range effects: they simply are not there, even with the manipulation regarding which stations one 'records' or not.
But the best comes last, as it almost always does - in 1998, when Demeo was able to use a battery of sometimes 1, sometimes 2, and finally 3 cloudbusters. The first-phase operations (22) (July 15 to ca 24) again appear to coincide with some rainfall response, but this is trivial, since a week earlier a similar pattern of rains was observed without any cloudbusting. Next, operations on Aug 7/8 and 12/20 coincide with very high precipitation peaks. The last operation on Aug 31 to Sept. 2 (this is what is marked on the graph) is followed by no available data.
Thus finishes the most inconclusive demonstration of cloudbusting we have yet witnessed. It matches the results of the mini-buster prof. Mann had on his Lindsay farm.
Indeed, 1997 to 1998 was marked by the most severe El Niño-correlated weather- disturbances and flooding (23) that were particularly severe on the Eastern side of Africa, from Mozambique to Eritrea, between mid-October and December, and as early as June, July (excessive Kiremti rains) and August in the Uganda to Eritrea zone (see pictures of the Asmara flooding in June and July 1998).
But at the end of the phase II operations (ca September 3) in 1998, when 3 cloudbusters were employed, what do we see with reference to our Figure 5? That there is no positive response to these operations: rains dip slightly below normal in both Eritrea and Sudan, being virtually absent in the former during September; and that, in mid-October to November, in Sudan but NOT Eritrea, the precipitation was higher than seasonal (also notice how different is the precipitation map of Fig. 5 from that of Demeo's Figure 7 in PP5, page 200, specifically for the months of June to August). Demeo simply omits all data regarding what happened after the Phase II operations in 1998, limiting himself to note that rains on September 9 turned Sudan green, without so much as a reference to any verifiable and competent reporting newswire service. Two similar remarks are made for November (22).
Hence, if we were to conclude, as Demeo does:
"It does not seem coincidental, that this largest of rainfalls [the reader is left without knowing if he is referring to August or to the mid-October to November period that he glosses over - but never mind that either!] to be seen in Eritrea in perhaps thirty years or more, (...) occurred just after the coordinated 3-cloudbuster system was implemented." (22)then we would equally have to agree with Carlinsky - and Demeo would just about have to be declared the cause of the 1997 El Niño disasters all over the world...
Here is Demeo caught in his own juggernaut, and in more than one way: if the rains he is referring to occurred after the 3-cloudbuster operation (Aug 12 to Sept. 2), then its effect only appeared one and a half months later, in mid-October, and in Sudan - NOT Eritrea. How, then, can one gauge with any objectivity or seriousness whatsoever, claims about the effects achieved by cloudbusting which on occasion occur in minutes, but on other occasions take months to materialize??
Were all this not enough, Demeo now does the unthinkable! - he lumps the 1995, 1997 and 1998 phase I operations together with what he calls the phase II operations (which occurred in a climatically different seasonal period of those 3 years) to generate a composite figure (24) where a histogram presents a 'mean' 20% increase in precipitation, thanks to El Niño in 1998 and Demeo's special climatological technique of statistical amalgamation.
After reading this "thing" we were simply and utterly appalled and silent for a long time.
Is it possible that Demeo actually believes he has busted some clouds?
9. "OBRL Progress Report"
Nothing noteworthy here save a mere reference (on p. 255) to David Marett's (aka Heliognosis) supposed field-meter - which, now that Dr. Mallove has revealed in his letter the substantial distance capability of the massfree radiation meters we have invented, is frantically being worked on by Marett and the OBRL so as to "detect energy fields at from [sic!] 30-60 centimeters" and thus become marketable.
1. Reich's Experiment XX and its limitations
We have so far hesitated in publishing our own investigations of biogenesis and bion- formation for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is our critical evaluation that in many instances Reich's observations are simply not correct. One can be fairly lenient towards Reich on this matter because at the time he conducted his studies, biochemistry and thus molecular biology were practically nonexistent. The very existence of DNA and RNA or the biological polymerization of amino-acids were still unknown, and no tissue-culture techniques had yet been developed. We ourselves were able to replicate the SAPA phenomenon as far back as 1985, as well as many of Reich's observations as they relate to the critical biological energy functions of Red Blood Cells (RBCs) - the specialty of one of us. But Reich's Experiment XX (1), where he claimed he observed the biogenesis of protozoa (eukaryotic cells) leaves much too much unanswered to deserve to have been viewed by Reich as one of his most "extraordinary discoveries".
Essentially, in Experiment XX, water was added to sieved garden soil which was either boiled for one hour or autoclaved for half an hour at 120° and 15 lbs pressure, after which the water was filtered off from the earth. Immediate observation revealed the presence of motile and vibrating cocci. Since boiling dissolved and suspended many of the soil constituents in the solution, it is not surprising - though it was for Reich, initially - that the filtrate exhibited the same fluorescence as bouillon or milk. Reich also noticed that the same preparations eventually developed rot bacteria when boiled, but not when autoclaved (2). To complete Experiment XX, Reich placed the filtrate in sealed ampoules or sterile flasks and refrigerated these for periods of varying length.
One of us has extensive (16 years) bench experience of tissue-culture and microbiological culture - and is even co-inventor of a patented method for serum-free tissue culture of eukaryotic hematopoietic mammalian cells. We are therefore quite well aware of how many things can, and often do, go wrong - when the error is not a systematic one - in the sterile manipulation and preparation of cells, media and vessels. It would be far too long a story to recount in these few pages. Suffice it to say that Reich never employed tissue-culture hoods - for they did not exist back then - to effectuate the transfer of any sterile solutions, nor ever employed self-sealing autoclave tubes (which also did not exist in his time), nor longer periods of autoclavation (which he could and should have, and in a systematic fashion), nor did he employ 0.5-1 µm filtration filters (finer than that simply did not exist back in the late 1940's).
It is true, Reich was not interested in the detail of sterile methodology - he regarded the boiling or autoclavation, and the subsequent filtration as "methodological filters" that were sufficient, from a microbiological viewpoint, to make the assertions he made - which, in what concerns Experiment XX, he stated as follows:
"We had discovered a process by which orgone energy existing freely in water, ie not bound up in bionous matter, can organize itself into plasmatic, living substance exhibiting all the criteria of life. (...) We may therefore differentiate between the production of bions from matter already organized (...) and the organization of orgone vesicles from unorganized energy (...)" (3).This is one of the least brilliant texts of Reich. Should Reich, in all scientific honesty, have allowed himself to make such a claim? The answer, we are afraid, is that he should not. The autoclavation step was impressive, but the filtration methods he employed could not have removed precisely these cocci from the filtrate - they just were not fine enough! Hence, if the autoclavation step had promoted bionous disintegration of materials and cocci-formation, the filtration certainly did not get rid of these cocci or bions - and by no means did it remove all of them. But Reich's claims regarding Experiment XX pertain not just to the formation of PA bions or cocci from what he thought (erroneously) was a "particle-free water extract" in the course of the refrigeration step of the experiment, but also to the development of the protozoon-like forms of considerable size (160 µm by our own estimates, see plates 45 & 46 of Reich's The Cancer Biopathy ) that he designated as "plasmatic flakes". Reich describes their growth by elongation, how they sink to the bottom of the vessel (permitting him to replenish their cultures) and how "they develop into contractile protozoa which move in a rapid, jerky manner" (4).
For our part, we suspect that what Reich observed was the development of cultures of Trichamoeba osseosaccus (first identified by Eugene Bovee, as an amoeba which measures up to 150 µm) that typically presents slow or no movement, or instead may employ "bag-like locomotion" (Bovee's words) moving by means of a "single, indeterminate pseudopodium". They have bright submembrane chromatin granules and refractile edges, and are commonly found in fresh water swamps, pools of water on ground with vegetation, or moist soil.
If our thoughts on this matter are correct, then the value of Reich's Experiment XX might be limited to having identified a protozoon whose spores can resist autoclavation under the conditions he employed. This would not surprise us terribly - especially since non-moist soil like that which Reich suspended in Experiment XX is rich in precisely the spores of a variety of forms of amoebae. Encystement is most frequent in species of protozoa that live in ephemeral water puddles (5).
Along these lines, our suspicion is far from being monolithic: in Reich's Plate 45, other protozoal forms can be readily seen that suggest Coccidial amoebae, so it is rather likely that his preparation XX had a mixture of protozoal species. These comments are important - since one would expect that a present-day reproduction of Reich's Experiment XX would at least be a little critical, as is incumbent on every scientist involved in the reproduction and further investigation of a previous protocol - all the more so of one designed more than 50 years ago.
2. Grad's supposed studies on Biogenesis and Experiment XX
So, what does Bernard Grad have to report in this PP5 ("Studies on the Origins of Life; The Preparation of Primordial Cell-like Forms", p. 79) about Reich's Experiment XX which he has been performing all his life, since at least 1955? We let him speak for himself:
"I repeated Experiment 20 [sic] and at my first try I observed his [Reich's] plasmatic flakes in large numbers (Figure 1)." (6)All that any informed reader has to do is look at Grad's Figure 1 and compare it to Plate 45 of Reich's Cancer Biopathy. For the trained eye there is no similarity - though they are both presented at the same magnification! Grad's Figure 1 (which is a tiny field of view) presents a tangle of fungal hyphae, not protozoa; the appearance of the hyphae is smooth, not vesiculated! Undeterred by such a 'biological' enormity, Grad merrily continues:
"However, I also saw other cell-like forms, looking like spores or algae (Figure 2 [which is a very poor 3200x magnification negative (!) picture of "a dividing spore", on Grad's cognizance]) which were quite different from Reich's plasmatic flakes. Struck by their life-like appearance [sic], I decided to investigate them further." (6)Alright - so, what this text is in essence saying is - "forget about those "plasmatic flakes" of Reich, let us investigate the spores and the algae (read the actual fungus) we got on our 'dirtier' version of Experiment XX"...
So, how does Grad investigate them? He promptly answers:
"I did not regard the cell-like forms as being alive when I first observed them but I felt that they may have had some primordial role in the origin of life; hence, I named them primordial forms (PFs)."Notice the "I felt". There it is, in all its glory, a confession of how these 'androids' carry on with their research: by fiat. By fiat of feeling. They are males who 'feel'. That is enough, since neither understanding nor science are of any import or concern anyway. Nor are Reich's "plasmatic flakes". There are still better flakes, more spaced-out ones, yet to come and be 'felt'. So, by fiat, these algae and their spores - which ARE, most obviously, CONTAMINANTS in Grad's preparations - turn into PFs overnight!
It is like a mafioso Capo system - entities are just regularly promoted in rank after a purge. Down with the flakes, up with the PFs! So we ask:
- Did Grad employ 0.1µm filters in obtaining his earth bion water controls - so that he would confirm whether life could arise from "unorganized energy in the absence of matter" as Reich so recklessly claimed concerning his Experiment XX? Nope, he did not. God only knows how Grad filtered it, if at all. And if he didn't, he certainly did not run any controls that did.
- Did Grad filter and re-autoclave his preparations? Nope.
- Did Grad employ a tissue hood culture for all transfers of sterile preparations? Nowhere does he mention it. The obvious answer is no, or he would have remarked it.
- Did Grad employ self-sealing autoclave tubes? Not that he cares to mention.
- Does Grad wonder whether the fungal spores he has visually identified in his preparations can or cannot survive the standard treatment of autoclavation that Reich employed? No. Not even that.
You see, you had to "be there". You had to "feel". Then you would understand the next "thought" that strikes Grad:
"Eventually, the problem changed from one of attempting to discover exactly how the PFs were obtained (...) to one of how to obtain PFs by any means." (6)That makes sense - just stop altogether employing sterile controls and permit free (unsuppressed!) infection. Which is precisely what Grad proceeds to do for the rest of this debile report. But let us first see how he describes the resolution of his problem:
"The solution to the problem of how to prepare the PFs came from the application of the fact that when living tissue breaks down, ammonia and carbon dioxide would be present among other simple products. I assumed that if these substances were brought together, they could again form simple, life-like structures, such as PFs (...)." (6)In a perfect delirium of pleomorphic transformism, Grad goes on to extract PA bions from T-bacilli, and spores from PA bions, and his PFs from these spores. It is a veritable jack-in-the-box adventure. And he does it without even needing to employ earth bion water or any autoclaved solution: forget about that too: a precipitate of calcium chloride is all that is needed when mixed with molar ammonium carbonate - that is what he says (7). Never mind that the contaminants (shown in Grad's Figure 5) he obtains when he mixes the two un-autoclaved solutions don't look at all like those of Figure 1. Forget about that too! No, some pleomorphism will be invoked for that, if needed. All the forms found are PFs. When in doubt, well, it's a PF!
An inordinate amount of quasi-chemical pseudo-experimentation then follows in the remaining pages, where Grad demonstrates how magical his touch is by obtaining a variety of different PFs from Aragonite, Disodium Monohydrogen Sulphate and Peat Moss! But since Grad "feels" that PFs are almost alive, life-like, and so on, he includes, for good measure, examples of PFs which are... DEAD. Yes, check out the isotropic birefringent rhombospheroid crystals of ammonium chloride that precipitated in his Figures 8 and 9 and which he also calls PFs.
He even goes as far as identifying a nucleus - yes, that's right, an eukaryotic nucleus with chromosomes and all - in these crystals.
Man, oh man - that surely beats the heroic efforts of Leeuwenhoek when he decided that he, too, would see under the microscope the male and female homunculi which Malphigi had so much boasted of seeing. Never mind Reich's "plasmatic flakes" - for the origin of protozoa can be found in these quasi-living, unsterile precipitates!
It is as a biologist that one of us would now simply vomit over what is probably the worst piece of work that can be found in Demeo's PP5. Thank God that Grad did not succeed in crossing the border to testify on Reich's behalf on that fatidic day of the trial. It is unlikely that, even then, he would have been able to muster what it takes to respond to the serious objections of any biologist worth his or her salt. And this is the man who was an Associate Professor of Biology at McGill University? No kidding.
This much is obvious to any biologist today - whether with a neo-darwinian bent or a neo-lamarckian one: that no complex eukaryotic cell, such as any protozoon, could ever be created from two or more simple compounds! It's one thing to conceive of providing the materials, injecting the ordering energy, and coming up with prokaryotic simple forms that may be considered to be primordial and to play a role in biogenesis. But quite another is to still think, like Reich did, that one could create eukaryotic cells in particle-free solutions from the energy accumulated by watery suspensions of a variety of solutes. Reich just did not prove his case, and was wrong about his assumptions regarding both filtration and autoclavation.
All this, however, pales before Grad's approach (if one can even call it an approach!) - where Experiment XX never manages to be performed, no controls are ever employed, no fundamental questions are asked, and yet, soon enough, he moves on to ever greener pastures, where other algae, fungi or amoebae - and even crystals - are now indistinctly invoked as being formed from watery suspensions of two chemicals!
All that Grad has shown is that most of his chemicals, if not his glassware, etc, have been exposed for too long to the air in his laboratory. In short - are contaminated.
And what he failed to do was precisely to investigate whether or not Reich was legitimized in assuming that complex cells like protozoa can emerge from truly cell-free and spore-free suspensions.
Doing that, however, was never really his objective.
3. Yesteryear's bions: memories of a Reichian molecule
One can give Reich plenty of latitude. He still made errors like any scientist may. Finding them requires attention, observation, a critical mind, patience in reproducing and studying a variety of effects, a constant mapping of experiments, employment of the proper controls and an inquisitive mind. We do not believe that Reich's errors are responsible for the shameless display of false knowledge that Demeo has compiled into his PP5. The errors of these Reichians are their own responsibility, which they will never assume. You see, we are probably the only ones ever to take them all to task at once, with arguments, facts and experimental demonstrations which are not the tools of those they derogatorily call the skeptics. For they alone, these Reichians, these halfpenny scientists and semi-engineers, are "true believers".
It is here that people like Carlinsky instinctively sense the betrayal so characteristic of the elites: these betray the masses in whose name they constantly speak, and for whose betterment they rule... But forget Carlinsky - for indeed, for us as for a million other scientists, the essence of science is skepticism - the inquisitive and fair mind. But skepticism alone leads to nothing without the hope to learn; without the care to reproduce and verify by being meticulous about the conditions and employing ever better controls; without an open mind. Yes - skepticism and an open mind - those are conditions of science as it should always be practiced, precisely because they are essential attributes of the functional organic of science, of its inquiry, of its method. For science, at the end of the day, is not skepticism, but knowledge, adequate and actual, of nature, knowledge that is at once theoretical and experimental. Skepticism and an open mind are only science's conditions of possibility.
Demeo's band of ragtag scientists would be almost funny if it had not in mind, unconscious as that might be, the objective of using Reich as the means to silence others, suppress knowledge, distort, misinform and disinform, giving of Reich's effort only the image of utter sloppiness (orgone is electrostatic charges but not electrical, cloudbusting effects take minutes or months, PFs are a matter of 'feeling', nomads are antiwoman, etc, etc) and runaway mysticism (if you put a Spinner inside an ORAC, it will turn better after a while; you must love your REG, etc, etc).
This said, note, however, how the enthusiasm of this crowd gets the better of them: at that first LEARN conference in 1979, Gaston Naessens was present and had a film he wanted to show. Naessens and his wife had great difficulty speaking English, so they asked us to translate - during the film and afterwards - Gaston's statements and comments. The film had been shot through a darkfield microscope, and at a point it presented a very thin film of cells. Grad, who was in the audience, couldn't stop himself from jumping up and crying out: "That's the bions! That's the bions!". Gaston grabbed Paulo forcefully by the arm and, with his deep voice, cascaded his own interjection: "Mais non! Il est en erreur! Ce sont des corpuscules rouges, pas des bions". That was the first time that these authors saw an RBC film in darkfield. But Grad? How could he have mistaken RBCs for bions?
The paper that follows Grad's ("Some Observations on Reich's Experiment 20", PP5, p.88), written under pseudonym by some German character fearful of reprisals, is another example of the same. No critical questions are addressed in what is a more systematic repetition of Experiment XX, and 'flake' forms actually similar to those of Reich are at last photographed. However, some of them, because of their smaller size and much more granulated form suggest that a third amoeboid form can be consistently extracted from Experiment XX preparations - most likely a species of Eugregarines found in soil and the organs of annelids and insects, such as Aseptatina (Figures 7 and 8, or even 11 make one think of the eugregarine Monocystis lumbrici) or Blastodinia.
What this second paper truly underlines is that very little is known in present-day soil protozoology about the endurance of encysted forms with respect to temperature and pressure treatments. A whole field stands unexplored, largely because most protozoal species remain to this day unstudied and unknown. As Prof. J. Bergier, who taught protozoology to one of us, put it: "protozoology is not sexy". Unlike the matter of vesiculation of matter and the creation of protoprokaryotes, however, this protozoological realm of investigation, we're afraid, has nothing to teach one about biopoiesis - and certainly not for as long as Reich's procedure in Experiment XX remains unaddressed by the proper controls that in this day and age are a must. In this sense, the Bion-Biogenesis seminar report by Demeo in PP5, makes complete hogwash of all these questions. These people will go on believing that what they are studying, in the best of cases, is not the resistance of spores to heat and pressure, but the spontaneous generation of eukaryotic complex cells from scratch.
One should remark that whereas Reich had ample excuse for his lack of adequate methodology, Grad and his trainee Demeo do not: it has been known for at least 20 plus years that protozoal cysts can survive dryness for years, freezing for months and heating for temperatures up to 115°C or more. Bacterial spores have long been identified which are resistant up to 1 hour at 160°C (9). The heat and pressure resistance of microorganisms is only presently being explored for Archeobacteria that are found near volcanic environments. Nothing, virtually, is known about heat and pressure resistance of eukaryotes. Here the rose is thrown, but not by any other name!
4. Sprouting elongated Mung beans... or shrinking the controls by stress?
Demeo's paper on Mung bean elongation inside ORACs ("Orgone Accumulator Stimulation of Sprouting Mung Beans", PP5, p. 168) does no service to a good reading of Reich or the demonstration of any effect whatsoever of ORACs: the methodology is fraught with critical flaws, both in the experimental designs and in the data analysis. One could begin with a simple constatation - that the author lacks any formal training in biology or biophysics. This may well be what explains his introduction, where the makes this gratuitous statement:
"While the physics experiments developed by Reich are very important, the biological effects remain more foundational (...)" (10).This is patent nonsense. Physics lies at the foundation of biology, and this is not a question of 'more' or 'less' - this foundational or basic science is called biophysics, and its chemical extensions, biochemistry and molecular biology. Even biochemistry is but a subset of biophysics, strictly speaking. Moreover, effects, whether physical or biological, can never be foundational. Physical and biophysical functions can, but not effects or even causes.
In this paper, Demeo fails to test the ORAC group and the control group in the same ambient space - instead of placing both of them outside or inside, he places one inside and the other outside his mini-barn structure. This failure damns the entire enterprise, given that the temperatures inside the two boxes just could not have been the same, with the mini-barn necessarily showing a different thermal lag than the control, plus attenuated variations. One can also be almost certain that the control group experienced much greater temperature and humidity extremes. In this very respect, it is curious how Demeo does not provide, or did not keep, any logs of the diurnal variation of either temperature or humidity inside the two boxes.
Sensitivity of Mung seedlings to nighttime cold exposure, even for short spikes, is well known. There is a whole literature about this - and about the function of ethylene in promoting lignin production, and the involvement of peroxidases in heat and cold stresses. It is also amazing how DeMeo manages not to quote any of the existing prolific literature on all these aspects of the Vigna radiata... And had he found no literature upon the effects of temperature and humidity upon Mung beans, it was incumbent upon him to conduct such a study rather than shoot off into the dark. For, indeed, the extremes of cold that a control box may undergo could well suffice to stunt the growth of the control seedlings right across the board. Instead of the supposed elongation in his ORAC group, there could well have been a stunting in his control group!
Another tremendous omission on the part of Demeo concerns the total lack of any records of the amounts of water that were administered to both groups. Demeo simply claims to have fed water on a need-to-drink basis. But a record would at least show which group had most to drink and when, and also whether or not they were watered regularly. Mung beans have notorious responses to both lack and excess of water; with vermiculite bases, however, one can easily control for that. Indeed, an excellent control would have been to have kept a log of the water provided - and if the ORAC group effectively consumed more water, a third group outside of the ORAC should have been given the same amount to demonstrate that they did not use it or even responded negatively to it (all groups being sprouted at the same time from the same pool of beans). Sadly, none of this was carried out - because, simply because, these experiments never deserved much care or thought in the very eyes of Demeo, who came up with them.
Demeo also avoids doing the obvious in his Mung bean experiments - which is a comparison between his control and a group placed in a typical tissue-culture incubator. Referring to simple incubators, he rationalizes his failure to do so by arguing that thermal gradients exist in incubators. Yet, what he replaces the true and tried biological techniques of incubation with, is the completely nonuniform arrangement shown in his Fig. 5 (11), where it is obvious that the small temperature differences Demeo reports for the two boxes or groups indicate that inside them, the temperature difference would likely have been null, precisely because of the completely nonuniform type of lamp-heating which the author employed ad hoc. Indeed, the gradient in the heated box must have been so ample as to nullify the effect of the lamp. This is, all in all, a very bad technique that no biologist worth his or her salt would be caught dead employing. Moreover, unwittingly, Demeo thereby exposed his seedlings to a fairly strong 60Hz RF signal leaking off the lamp he employed to so rudimentarily simulate a very unevenly heated box!
The methodological errors of this paper of Demeo are, however, exemplary. Let us enumerate them, as an exercise in objective review:
5. RBC's and the ease with which DNA springs eternal
This will not be long. The pseudo-scientific folklore reaches pinnacles of innovation in the supposed blood studies of Demeo & Co ("Bion-Biogenesis Research and Seminars at OBRL: Progress Report", PP5, p. 100). Demeo, for instance, lumps the myriad of platelets (2 to 4 microns, known today to be formed in marrow as cytoplasmic fragments of megakaryocytes that are released to peripheral blood), intestinal cell-secreted chylomicrons and hepatocyte-secreted lipoprotein vesicles found in film bloods under ultramicroscopy, as variously being the same as Gaston Naessens' somatids, Enderlein's protids and (the best!) Demeo's own 'food bions'! This gives proof of the sheer obscurantism of this portion of PP5.
Worse still is what Demeo, who is not an hematologist and not even a biologist, has to say about Reich's Blood Test:
"One researcher was able to show, that bionously-deteriorated RBCs carried measurable quantities of DNA beyond what might be expected from bone-marrow residues (they have no nucleus, and do not divide or replicate independently, being formed only in bone marrow). Within his own theoretical structure, this important observation supported the concept of "parasites", but viewed from the perspective of bionous disintegration, it suggested bions forming within RBCs might be creating their own DNA." (12).Note, first off, how the researcher remains unidentified. Then comes a most doubtful statement: "bionously-deteriorated RBCs carried measurable quantities of DNA beyond what might be expected from bone-marrow residues". How were these RBCs isolated from the remainder of other bone marrow cells? Because all trivial modern methods require, for such separation, the use of chemical treatments (such as heparinization) that are well known to interfere with Reich's test because they osmotically stabilize the cells - we must ask: how was separation achieved? And how were RBCs separated from all other smaller elements, such as platelets or even cocci or PA bions? Even more pertinent are other questions such as: how were these young marrow erythroid cells - that are aprioristically called RBC's by Demeo - already in a state of 'bionous disintegration'?
You see, marrow is filled with populations of erythroid progenitor cells. Nuclear extrusion occurs in marrow, between the normoblast (having a pyknotic or shrunk nucleus) and the reticulocyte stages. Reticulocytes (not RBCs) form the essential marrow erythroid population (they already carry hemoglobin) - but they have not yet matured into RBCs, which they do in the spleen of adult mammals. Furthermore, all reticulocytes still carry ribosomal RNA which confers upon them their characteristic basophilic staining.
Hence, one must further ask whether the study presented or investigated normal ('nonbionously disintegrated') fractions of DNA and RNA for marrow erythroid progenitors separated by their progenitor stages and antigen markers. This has been common fare in hematology for the past thirty years. But it appears not to have been done or even considered by Reichians the world over. Even with peripheral blood studies, such separations are standard in hematological research. Dr. Correa, one of the authors, together with Prof. Axelrad at the University of Toronto, regularly isolated erythroid progenitors as 'primitive' as the BFU-E stage (burst forming units), or even the CFU-GEMM stage (multilineal progenitor cells) from peripheral blood of humans as far back as 1987, and grew them in serum-free defined cultures to produce thousands of RBCs per burst in vitro (13-17). Today, the literature on such procedures is extensive and trivial.
This simply means that there are plenty of RBC precursor cells in peripheral blood, which, given the required 'triggers' can divide and produce RBCs - in marrow or in spleen (where such responses, in the adult, are pathological). In normal individuals, 1 to 2% of all RBCs in peripheral blood are immature (and carry RNA, or RNA and DNA); these are weeded out by the spleen.
Finally, once more, no data is provided on this vaunted DNA study of supposed RBCs. Yet one finds Demeo ready to pull the trigger and take the next giant leap forward: T-spikes from crenated RBCs (what he calls 'bionously-deteriorated RBCs") make their own DNA! Quick, report that to the Academy of Sciences!
Well, the Academy may as well also know that we have repeatedly conducted all sorts of diagnostic procedures to ascertain whether T-spikes carry any DNA or RNA. The fact of the matter is that even simple histochemical staining methods shows that no T-spikes carry either one or the other, and thus puts to final rest the erroneous notion Reich had that these spikes were the source of cultivable T-bacilli or PA bions. No, T-spikes from crenated RBCs do not create their own DNA - because they have none!
1. Demeo's rehashed little rubric on the Orgone Motor
Now we come to the Orgone Motor. If the truth be told, there is not much that Demeo has to say about it that has not been better said before, including by ourselves. But we will track all the slips, all the little lies and distortions here, too. The first fudge comes as a footnote to the title "The Orgone Energy Motor". Demeo claims that the present PP5 article (1) is a pamphlet originally circulated by him since 1986. Well, this may be true about the first page, but not part of the second and certainly not the third! Demeo fudgingly delineates the boundary by saying, about three quarters of the way into the article, "To the above, the following points can be added", but neither signals that this sentence, and the 'points' themselves, have been added after the original 1986 date, nor indicates the additions he has made in the body of the text preceding the "added notes".
Here is a priceless new addition IN the body of the supposed 1986 text:
"The [orgone] motor appears to have been initially connected to [the GM apparatus'] high voltage DC source, as a method to "priming the pump" [sic! gibberish!]."This perfect piece of nonsense illustrates how thoroughly DeMeo and Nicholas Reiter deserve each other: put any DC potential across a Spinner motor, OR ANY AC MOTOR, let alone a high-voltage one, and it will cease spinning. This is elementary! - though clearly not for this intrepid team, bent on as rapid a manufacture of disinformation as they can muster.
Here is another gem. A year ago, these authors queried Demeo about a statement regarding William Washington that appeared in the 1986 monograph: "William Washington has recently surfaced during a visit the Wilhelm Reich museum, however, and more information about the episode may be forthcoming". Demeo told us that he could not provide a reference to the episode, that he doubted it ever occurred, and that the statement should be removed from the pamphlet. Yet, removed it never was - it still stands, in all its glory, in the 2002 version: another little insinuation to strengthen the edifice of Reichian mythology. Every contribution counts.
But what truly shines through the new additions is the inability to grasp anything whatsoever of value regarding the Orgone Motor (2). Palpable everywhere is Demeo's desperation to beat the Correas, to master the Aether Motor and the extraction of orgone energy from vacua - as if somehow we were in competition... The frantic suppression of any reference to our work is exemplary.
In the subreptitious "points added", Demeo begins (point 1, added in 2001 - as we know from a copy of this very same article that Demeo gave us when we invited him for a demonstration of the Orgone and Aether Motors) by venturing the possibility that the orgone motor runs on nothing other than DC currents: he anecdotally refers to how batteries that have died regain charge in the ORAC, mentions potato power en passant, and then stubbornly returns to the same amazing stupidity for which we took him to task in our response to his so-called 'Constructive Critique' of Volume 1 of Experimental Aetherometry (3): that an orgone accumulator may spontaneously charge up an electroscope! Even an accumulator whose cage is not grounded will not do that. The only way to charge, inadvertently or not, an electroscope placed inside an ORAC is by rubbing its case against the Faraday cage on a very dry day, or by unwittingly conferring electrostatic charge to its leaf-stem system. By charging the case, a potential will develop in the electroscope over a short period of time. And in our First Volume of Experimental Aetherometry, which Demeo has supposedly studied, we have dismantled these myths about spontaneous electrical charging of electroscopes and RIGOROUSLY demonstrated how the effect of ORACs upon electroscopes is strictly non-electric, in the sense of not deploying any monopolar "electrostatic" charges!
Then comes his point 2 (added in 2002), where he writes:
"2. In the mid-1990s, a public debate occurred on internet between researchers Doug Marett and Paulo Correa suggesting that, besides the KS-9154 spinner motor, there were other variations such as the KS-8624 which were of similar construction. They additionally discussed the use of aluminum for construction of the rotor cup, confirming this author's belief that the device worked by virtue of eddy currents - which remain a mysterious force in nature, hardly understood in a deep manner though put to practical use by engineers."Now, the actual lie in all this does not so much concern our public controversy with Douglas Marett (from which, with his typical 'male-feminist' chauvinism, Demeo removes the female participant, Alexandra Correa) - which focused upon whether or not the PAGD-inverter technology was the same as Reich's OR Motor (Marett, by the way, withdrew the offending document as soon as our rebuttal went on line!) - but the casually dropped remark: "confirming this author's belief that the device worked by virtue of eddy currents". This is something which we , and no one else before us, came up with - certainly not the Reichian who, in the presence of C. Bird, E. Mann, and others, told us (in 1979) that Reich's motor had a flush aluminum-like rotor. Read the record: in The Correa-Reich Affair, we clearly state, for the first time in the literature on the subject, that Reich's Spinner motors (plural) were eddy-current motors - precisely because for years Douglas Marett erroneously persisted, even after he himself went to Orgonon and confirmed our observation of previous years that Reich owned another Spinner motor (the KS-8624; it was no secret, since the motor was on display!), in claiming that Reich's motor was an hysteresis motor. Which it certainly wasn't.
And nowhere in the 1986 pamphlet, nor in the Additional Notes appended in 2001 of which Demeo personally gave us a copy, is there any mention by Demeo of eddy-current motors. On the contrary - it was we who mentioned it publicly as far back as 1987, and taught it to Douglas and his twin brother David. This is where Demeo's 'belief' originates.
The two other "added points", which were already partly present in the document Demeo gave us last year, are puffed up with a characteristic and laughable mysticism regarding a technology that, aside from Reich and ourselves, no one else knows or understands or can claim to understand.
For instance, following the lead of the now-defunct Rothenberg, Demeo believes that a "clue" to the operation of the motor can be found in the supposed fact that Reich's motor "was regularly soaked inside a strong orgone accumulator" (2). Some "clue"! After having seen our demonstration of the principles of the Aether Motor, where a variety of special motors, including KS Spinners, were observed to run from simple two-layer ORACs, irrespective of whether or not the motors had been 'soaked' in an ORAC , Demeo has the courage of continuing to dispense such mystical idiocies.
But there is one more priceless gem, if somewhat sinister, added in 2002, which concerns an event in Demeo's 2001 seminar that so greatly focused on our then upcoming Aetherometry (to the First Volume of which we had, in good faith, given him restricted free access). This little jewel may well, one day, prove to be an indication of where all the disinformation that spreads from Demeo ultimately comes from: a cat hidden with its tail sticking out -
"A former Naval electronics engineer in attendance pointed out to the assembled group that the KS-9154 spinner motors were well-known in naval circles as "synchro motors", or more simply as synchros, and were widely used for radar targeting of large naval or anti-aircraft guns. One can, for example, find quite a lot of descriptive information on synchro motors in libraries and on internet."Now, well before that quoted 2001 Greensprings seminar took place - and note that Demeo, who at the time was still ostensibly on good terms with us, never mentioned this event (a real measure of his bad faith, for which he will now be chastised by our printing, in toto, the letter he wrote to us, during the same period, regarding our work and Reich's OR Motor) - we had already told Demeo, this time under NDA conditions, that military people often incorrectly referred to Spinner motors as 'synchros', and we even told him why this was erroneous - even if he has now forgotten it. And it was entirely the original research we did to uncover where, why, and for what purpose these motors were developed, that revealed to him some of the military genealogy and applications of such Spinners (4).
That he now attributes these allusions to a Naval engineer involved with his organization is either a vicious provocation or a sinister joke that gives the true breadth of the grotesque disinformation Demeo peddles.
It is, for us, hard to envisage how any Navy of the world would be interested in the poverty of science that Demeo dishes out in his Greensprings cafeteria. The only possible value he can have is that of a Timothy Green Beckley or a Jim Keith: intentional disinformation. Target: Wilhelm Reich. Second Target: Correas. (Demeo should join the Rothwell chorus: "I hate the Correas!"). Real objectives: arrest the further development of thought and knowledge about nature and history; plunge science into sheer nihilism by a complete disregard for method. The systematic distortion of Reich's thought being the tool to achieve these reactive and reactionary objectives.
This from a fellow who did not even know, at the time we gave him our Aether Motor demo, that KS stood for Kearney System, the universal system Bell employed for the classification of the parts it manufactured!
Anyway, we know today, far better than we did a year ago, exactly what it means "to be armored against the truth", and how it works. This is precisely what we have continually encountered amongst these Reichian circles during nearly three decades of dealing with them: they are, quite frankly, the most armored 'space-cadets' around. Precisely because their cults lack Potestas, their preferred weapons are suppression of understanding and obsessive distortion of events - most often through appropriation of the hard work of others. Our generosity has made us, for over two decades now, their target. They have sent us an unending supply of spies and have done everything they could to obstruct our work and bar us from access to Reich's material. On this, all Reichian quarters have behaved as one. The plague is now unquestionably in control of Reich's work. A plague of misfits. Already as far back as 1986, at a meeting which included Eva, Mann, Grad and the Marett twins and took place in Toronto (and we do know where), Paulo Correa - as was reported to us by the same Maretts - was declared to be, next to Carlinsky, the worst enemy of orgonomy.
Seeing Demeo's mode of operation in PP5 has enlightened us as to the desperate nature of the need that prompted him to write his most tendentious, ignorant and biased 'peer- evaluation' of the first Volume of Experimental Aetherometry. It now seems that this man's intention, from the beginning, was to carry out the vengeance of the Reichian cabal. If he can publish and sanction the kind of garbage he has printed in PP5, all else he has written, including what he wrote about us, can be nothing more than the gratuitous acts of a narcissistic buffoon.
Are these the people that purport to have something to tell us about conspiracies? If they ever had power, State Potestas, in their greedy hands, what would anyone imagine they could secrete other than the worst, most poisonous, most egalitarian, most militant, most pompous and least enlightened fascism?
About these people, we simply say - "fuck'em!"
2. The Reiter 'examination' of the KS-9154
Also a year ago, prior to our demonstration of the Aether Motors, Demeo handed us a copy of the N. Reiter article, "Examination of the Western Electric KS-9154 Motor". Reiter is a "Photovoltaics Engineer" whose particular passions are ghostbusting and protecting people against abduction by aliens, and who obtained a few KS-9154s for Demeo. He acts as an eager stooge for the latter, passing in his Background introduction two essential pieces of intentional disinformation.
The first piece concerns the story of the "thief" who supposedly stole the KS-9154 motor from the Wilhelm Reich Museum. Reiter claims that the "thief" took the stolen Spinner to a motor shop where "the mechanic on duty said, it is claimed (!sic!) that he had never seen such a motor before. (...) Supposedly the motor did not run when AC current was applied, nor with DC, but only slowly and jerkily when pulsed DC was applied" (5).
The reader is referred to the Appendix, entitled "The tribulated history of Reich's Spinner Motor(s)", where the true story behind Reiter's disingenuous account is reported to the best of these authors' knowledge. The "thief" was none other than Carlinsky, and he claims he wasn't acting alone. This is precisely what leads one to wonder why this piece of disinformation was included by Reiter to begin with, save to protect somebody's ass. Just note how Demeo and Reiter 'came across' their version of the events, with no reference other than "it is claimed"! But those who will read the story can make up their own minds.
It is not incumbent upon us to judge Carlinsky - we are only interested in the bare facts. Whatever psychotic attacks and silly or noxious ideas Carlinsky has had are irrelevant to this matter. For, over the years, we have come to realize, as that "tribulated History" shows, that individuals like Carlinsky are often manipulated by cabals of opportunists who later discard them to the dogs. But what is still more telling is the fact that the story, as recounted to one of us by Carlinsky (the horse's mouth...) in 1997, is certainly quite different from what Reiter reports - thus, once again, showing quite clearly that Demeo and his accomplices do not have the minimal concern for facts that should be the number one intellectual quality of any scientist. One may thus legitimately wonder whether the paranoid persecution that Demeo suffered at the hands of Carlinsky did not have deeper reasons than Demeo cares to publicly admit.
This vintage piece of disinformation by Reiter is accompanied by yet another, still more unlikely:
"Around the same time, in the late 1970's, I contacted Mr. Joe Daniels of Long Island, an electrical instrumentation engineer who claims to have acted as a consultant to Dr. Reich at the time of the orgone motor experiments. Daniels claimed to have been the one who procured the KS-9154 servo-motors for Reich, and that the units had come from off the shelf at a local surplus house" (5).After Demeo's insinuations about William Washington and his dubious and sinister usage of the 'Naval engineer', after Reiter's distortion of the Carlinsky incident - here comes Joe Daniels who secretly worked on the Orgone Motor (though he is never found or mentioned anywhere) and even claims to have purchased the very motors Reich used, for Reich himself (no less!), from a local surplus shop - no less!!
What utter bunk. Given what we have discovered about the origins of this and other Spinner motors, we most sincerely doubt that any of these motors could have been found anywhere in a surplus shop, because they were not declassified until 1953 (read our upcoming monographs on the subject), by which time Reich had already owned his KS-9154 for six years. Yes, this is a very interesting fact which Reiter's piece of pure disinformation entirely neglects - written as it was by someone who has not done his homework. The enigmatic Daniels (is he also dead by any chance?) did however give Reiter an alleged bone, by allegedly telling him that the "KS-9154 was typical of two-phase servomotors used at the time for positioning or instrument driving".
What else does Reiter have to say? Essentially he repeats the electric characteristics reported in the specification sheet quoted by Demeo in 1986, provides some lousy drawings of the motor and an exploded view of it disassembled.
He also performs the basic tests indicated on that specifications sheet , and concludes that "the actions resemble those of a standard servomotor". Next, he reports a total impossibility which can only be an indication of his complete lack of powers of observation:
"we tried connecting the green [in fact, blue] phase wires to a small DC power supply, at about 3 volts. Surprisingly, the motor began turning slowly. A pair of D-cell batteries was substituted with the same result." (6)The only way Reiter could have observed this, was if the other phase wires remained attached to a suitable AC supply - and the observation was made at contact or break, or with two wires anywhere inadvertently sparking across a DC (or AC) potential! There is no way that application of DC to one phase of these motors - whether or not the other phase is excited by AC - can make them move!!
From intentional disinformation we have thus progressed to misinformation - based, precisely, in the insufficient power of observation characteristic of those who are "armored against the truth". And in fact, without realizing the enormity of his misobservation, Reiter goes on to corroborate its misfit nature:
"Next, we took a 9-volt battery and connected it to the green phase [ie blue]. No rotation occurred, only a jittering (...). However, when we taped one green wire to a battery terminal with the other firmly connected, at the moment of contact the motor spun rapidly for a few turns. Thus it appears to respond to fast current spikes or pulses!"My, my oh my! If our names were not anathema for Reichians - and Demeo's acolytes in particular - Reiter might even have referenced our PAGD inverter patent for the direct electromechanical transduction of plasma pulses! In this patent (7), we long ago demonstrated how a variety of motors, explicitly including two-phase eddy-current motors (Spinners), can be made and tuned to respond to a specific plasma discharge regime. In our Reich-Correa Affair (8) we also discuss how they can be driven from other plasma pulsation devices, such as strobotrons.
But, forget about us - Reiter could also have given some credit to Tesla , since it was Tesla who first reported that a variety of AC motors of his own design could be made to respond to pulsed discharges! Ah, but Tesla, too, is anathema to these Reichians...
Instead, it appears as if it was Reiter who came up with this lame observation: it responds to spikes!
After such nullity of research, Reiter then comes to the following conclusion, in the course of which he manages to improperly classify the supposed subject of that research, the KS-9154 Spinner:
"The KS-9154 (...) falls under the category of a drag cup or reluctance cup motor. The theory of operation is reasonably straightforward" (9)and he goes on to 'explain' the induction and action of eddy-currents.
No, Mr. 'optical engineer' Reiter, drag-cup motors are not RELUCTANCE motors! Reluctance motors are synchronous motors devoid of drag and with minimal lag, in which the secondary circuit has salient poles that function without DC excitation.
So, what is the upshot of Reiter's paper?
On this, at least, Reiter is honest:
"We do not know whether Dr. Reich ever succeeded in running a motor entirely from the orgone, without AC on one phase." (9)And since he has known - from Demeo - for nearly a year that we have not only succeeded in reconstructing Reich's OR Motor but also gave, a year ago, a demonstration of the same - as well as of our own Aether Motor - to Demeo, who witnessed in our laboratory Spinners being driven from ORACs, ground and antennas, what follows next is a striking testimonial to the extraordinary degree of suppression which our work deserves in the eyes of Demeo's acolytes:
"If William Washington is still alive, he is probably the only person who might possibly know..." (9)So, after the honest statement, comes the dishonest one. For, as Demeo and Reiter know, we know, and know well. Reich's published work nowhere indicates that he had been able to move any Spinner without a subsidiary input of electricity, which would have to be AC, to one of the motor phases - just as Reiter reasoned. Moreover, from our own archeology of the OR Motor, Reich also needed a second input of electricity to drive the tube circuitry which he employed to synchronize and amplify the "orgone phase". It is very likely, in fact, that one of the main reasons why Reich became so concerned with the disappearance of Washington was because the motors the latter was presumably building would be crucial precisely to an attempt at bypassing the need for both inputs of electricity. But Reich never had a chance to pursue this further.
So, the fact is, WE are the only people who are alive and know how to run an OR Motor without those two inputs of electricity - we, who are the very object of the sordid suppression carried out in this 'rushed to publication" PP5!
3. Demeo on 'Free' energy... from the eighties.
The Reiter article is used by Demeo as a springboard for a few articles of his own on alternative energy ("The Earth-Atmosphere Electrical Potential as a Possible Source of Energy, PP5, p.225; "Renewable, 'Free' Energy from Nature: Personal Experiences and Net-Energy Analysis", PP5, p. 227). He comes, at last, to study the work of Oleg Jefimenko, from which he takes all his ideas (save for the use of a radioactive source to further increase the potential of the antenna to ground) and to which he stingily gives a bit of credit, stating that the work pertains to "what is perhaps the only genuine and fully proven "free energy" type of motor, using electrostatic principles" (10).
But why does Demeo choose to go this route? Here is his answer:
"It is included here, as the principles appear related to Reich's orgone motor."A perfectly gratuitous and unfounded assertion! Which principles? How?
Demeo claims that this particular article was penned in 1980 for a seminar. But we know the real reasons why it is being presented in this PP5 and why Demeo made the above preposterous statement. These reasons are most interesting to examine and follow through. As any reader can ascertain with a minimum of effort, Demeo's criticism of our Volume I of Experimental Aetherometry is inextricably rooted in Demeo's conviction that orgone energy is essentially the same as the action of electrostatic charges. He goes through all kinds of contortions, as does Baker with his "novel" meter, but what they end up measuring is always and only DC potentials or, what is the same, electrostatic potentials. They fervently want orgone not to be the same as electricity - but they proceed to amalgamate it to monopolar, electrostatic electricity, often confusing it with negative electricity - while entirely disregarding the simple aetherometric facts which demonstrate that there is another type of electricity, not monopolar but ambipolar, not "electrostatic" but "electrodynamic", not inertial but massfree, with a spectrum which we alone have identified and which is now published!
In our earlier Counter-Critique to Demeo (3) we dismantled (once again) these tired misconceptions, by drawing attention to our published experimental work which clearly demonstrates that the electroscopic and thermal effects of ORACs are not electrical, not electrostatic, and not explainable by monopolar electric fields. But Demeo is an incredibly stubborn individual, and so he goes to his warehouse of misconceptions looking for materials from which to build himself a barricade against the aetherometric onslaught. He is convinced that ORACs can spontaneously charge electroscopes (which they cannot); he is convinced that Reiter is right - that DC potentials (incorrect), or at least pulsed DC (correct), are sufficient to drive the second phase of a Spinner motor (as if the latter could not be done with any other ordinary AC induction or synchronous motor!!); he knows that Baker is cunningly making DC measurements; and he remembers that Jefimenko succeeded in driving electrostatic motors from atmospheric electrostatic charges obtained from either antennas or balloons (which prompts Demeo to carry his notional antenna to...the ionosphere! By balloon).
Now to the essential. Armed with this combination of truths, half-truths and errors, Demeo also remembers how we demonstrated to him a Spinner Motor being driven from a 10 meter tall outdoor antenna in the middle of the yard, and the ground.
So, he thinks he has foxed us - that he has figured out how we must be running our motors: by a combination of Jefimenko with Reich a la Reiter. Here it goes, the deep, as yet unwritten thought of these idiots, which we can surmise at a distance:
"With one phase being provided by AC, and the other connected so that the electrostatic charges from an antenna can trigger a tube to produce pulses fed to the other phase, the Correas could have easily made their motor move".
No, neither Reiter nor Demeo wrote this - but we are anticipating their PP6, where they will put together their brilliant conclusions to design what we could call the 'FOXED' 'OR MOTOR' and variants, as shown in OUR Figure 6.
You see, dear or undear reader, Demeo & Co's reasoning is so mechanistic and attached to monopolar electricity, that this is likely to be their best shot. That's all they know in life. Of course, the pulsed arrangement would work, even though erratically and unreliably. Not with a 10 meter antenna - very anomalous weather conditions would be needed for a 10 meter antenna to develop high-end electrostatic potentials like those of 120V/meter reported by Jefimenko , with sufficient current to trigger a suitable plasma pulsation device. To bypass the need for a tube, one might even employ any of a variety of mechanical devices that could be made to discharge interruptedly, such as pendulum clocks, or others which Demeo cites (10) - without, once again, giving any credit whatsoever to Tesla, who first invented them and first described them in his patent for an apparatus that captured ambient radiation of precisely monopolar charge fluxes (be they muons...) - the same Tesla who actually inspired part of Jefimenko's work (not to mention Reich's). Vintage Demeo - does not read the literature, suppresses relevant literature and appropriates as his own the work of others.
However, in his attempt to figure out the Aether Motor - without so much as a mention of the demonstration we gave him! - Demeo is sorely wrong and barking up the wrong tree (just as he was when he smeared our Aether Motor demonstration with the absurd charge that we must be inadvertently capturing some RF from power lines and such). First of all, we have never employed AC power to run any of the phases of our Aether Motors. Moreover, as we amply explained to Demeo and have demonstrated by way of a variety of experimental techniques in our published two volumes of Experimental Aetherometry, neither the Aether Motor technology nor Reich's OR Motor technology employ ANY SOURCES OF electrostatic or monopolar electricity - rather, they both employ the capture of nonelectric latent and sensible heats and the conversion of those heats into ambipolar electricity. What sources the motors is Aether energy in its two forms: electric ambipolar, and nonelectric (latent heat).
Demeo will of course continue along, buoyed by the "space-cadet feelings" of Myron Sharaf, holding on to the belief that he can reduce the entire matter of an Aether Motor or Converter to electrostatic potentials plus the Factor Y which he still knows nothing about! Writes Reiter:
"Myron Sharaf (...) insisted that while he did not know what the "Y" was, he certainly felt that it was a physical component or "thing" rather than a wiring scheme or connection geometry" (9).Yes, they are doing a lot of 'feeling', Demeo & friends. They may as well ask a Ouijee board. Ah, but now that they have embraced one of the Maretts as their own, maybe he can tell them a few secrets about the Correas which he once promised to be mum on? Hope springs eternal. After all, this Marett - in the presence of witnesses - was also rewarded with a demonstration of our Aether Motor in 1999...
So, in keeping with the dirt permeating this PP5, Demeo manages to write a rubric on "Renewable, 'Free' energy from Nature" (11) where he omits not just our work on plasmas and the Aether Motor, but just about every work deserving of a mention, such as Aspden's, Chernetsky's, Spence's, Shoulders', Graneau's, Mills', not to mention "Cold Fusion". Oh yes, an earlier version of this article was written by Demeo in 1981... Anyway, we have just given him some excellent ideas for a new PP. May the Aether have mercy on his readers.
4. Demeo's two 2001 letters to the authors re his witnessing our demo of the OR and Aether Motors
First Letter, by e-mail:
Subject: Thanks
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 12:16:13 -0700
From: James DeMeo
To: Paulo & Alexandra Correa
Dear Paulo, Alex and Malgosia,
I arrived home late on Monday night, and aside from the airline losing my bag (nothing critical, but a headache), the trip was uneventful.
Thank you all so very much for your hospitality during my visit, and once again, for sharing with me the findings and experiments which are so obviously the product of a lot of hard and focused work. As I said previously, this is the first time in 30 years where I have seen this aspect of Reich's work, with the motor, so clearly demonstrated. And, of course, you have broken into new territory which is pregnant with possibilities. I intend to write you a letter, confirming my trip and your demonstration of the apparatus, which you can use in any manner you wish. Also, if you need to provide an outside reference, please feel free to give my name to persons whom you might wish to have an outside positive opinion of your work.
I've read the two papers you gave, and find myself in very large agreement with only a few small critical points that I can relate to you later on.
Again, seeing the motor turning with the flashing light from the vacuum tube provided a most wonderul [sic] vision into a better future.
Aside from my writing you the letter, please let me know, if there is anything I can do to assist your efforts.
Warm regards,
James
-----------------------------------------
Second Letter (hand signed formal copy sent later)
Dr. Paulo and Alexandra Correa
22 May 2001
Ontario, Canada
Dear Paulo and Alexandra,
In this letter, I wish to recount my observations during a recent visit to your laboratory on May 12-13. Firstly, let me express my thanks for your personal hospitality and professional openness about what surely is a most controversial set of subjects. As you know -- and I think this is one reason why you invited me -- I have been investigating the subject of Wilhelm Reich's cosmic orgone energy motor and collecting every scrap of information on the subject I could find, since the early 1970s when I firstly heard of the subject. Following my visit to your laboratory, and seeing your various demonstrations, I can state quite openly that you have done more work on this subject than anyone I have ever met, and it surely appears that you have solved the riddle of Reich's undisclosed "Y-Factor", and progressed significantly far on your own to stand at the edge of producing practical applications.
Specifically, your first demonstrations were of the PAGD device, which uses a vacuum tube configuration similar to Reich's (superficially, at least), but with much higher voltage tensions and at only moderated vacuum pressures. One set of batteries created the charge necessary for the PAGD to develop some form of cascade-effect (my words) which was tapped to charge up a second set of batteries. The computer program you developed indicated the energy required to sustain the phenomenon was less than the energy developed from it. On this particular demonstration, I would repeat a suggestion made to you at the lab, that you should try and develop the proper circuitry to make a self-sustaining reaction that would allow the recharging of a single bank of batteries which also would run the process, and simultaneously allow the excess energy to run other apparatus [The immediatism and ease of this statement shows how Demeo fails to recognize that secondary batteries cannot be charged while being discharged; David Marett also thought that ten years ago, when we first demonstrated to him the PAGD converter under NDA; Jed Rothwell, who is even brighter, still thinks so to this day...].
While the PAGD demonstration may in fact be the more remarkable development for eventual practical power-production, on a more personal level I found your demonstration in the smaller lab room on the second day to be even more delightful. Here, you showed me several of the "spinner" type motors originally set into motion by orgone energy by Reich, which you were also able to accomplish. The spinning of the motors from the pulsatory energy derived from the vacuum was a marvelous demonstration, and in fact appears to be a much simpler arrangement than the larger PAGD apparatus, since this latter demonstration does not require the large banks of batteries, nor any computer program to tell you something unusual is going on! I observed the spinner motor and vacuum tube as powered by the orgone accumulator, and by antenna with earth-ground, using an electronic circuit which remained undisclosed, but which constituted the Y-factor.
The simultaneous demonstration of the orgone-charged GM tube was almost equally enchanting to observe, as in my own lab, so far I have only observed spurious explosions of counts, or erratic counts, from such charging -- never the smooth effects observed at your lab, where incremental approach of the apparatus to the accumulator yielded incremental increases in the cpm. Along these lines, it might interest you to learn, that upon my return back to Greensprings, the neutron counter I had been charging in the orgone room yielded something approaching several thousand cpm (neutrons only) in a burst that lasted a full three minutes -- something only classically observed inside a nuclear reactor, I imagine. The phenomenon would probably have continued for some additional minutes had I not gotten terribly curious and removed the probe from its hard plastic sphere of moderating material, whereupon the counts immediately ceased, and would not return again after re-insertion of the probe. Such is the nature of these marvelous orgone phenomena. [What Demeo treasures as "marvellous" is the fact that his observations are irreproducible because he doesn't understand them.]
Returning back to your own experiments and demonstrations, it seems clear to me, that you should make your best effort to bring these discoveries to the world. I agree with you totally about the incredibly crazy condition of the human species, but as a student of history also can see that even a clear and compelling demonstration and applications program would not automatically find acceptance. People will resist it, much as the airplane was resisted. The darker side of things, I feel you can control by deciding what to release to the public, and what not, and rely upon friends to keep the discovery clear enough to the point that the socially-revolutionary aspects connected with energy- in-space, and with even the social discoveries of Reich, are all carried along with the tide.
Upon returning home, I had a conversation with Eugene Mallove, who also is a supporter of your work, and one of his ideas I found to be excellent. This is, on the assumption you cannot get the full amount of funding you seek for full-scale applications, that with more modest funding, start to make demonstration apparatus, self-contained devices which can be sold to anyone in the public for a fee of several thousand dollars, as examples of a working free-energy device. These would serve several basic functions:
I am truly positively excited by what you have shown me, and you can give my name and a copy of this letter to any persons who might want an outside independent evaluation. Let me know if there is anything I can do to assist in the development and bringing forward of your work.
With kind regards,
James DeMeo, Ph.D.
Director
--------------------------------------
5. A simple demonstration of the diurnal variation of the Aether Motor
Demeo did not just witness the OR/Aether Motor demonstrations - including the experience of driving the Aether Motor from his own body energy (!) - at our laboratory, a year ago; he was also shown incontrovertible evidence that leaves no doubt about the nature of the Aether Motor, including the diurnal variation in its speed. One of the graphs we showed to Demeo at that time is reproduced here as Figure 7: it illustrates this diurnal variation for a week-long test in the early summer of 1999, and clearly demonstrates that all daily peaks of motor speed systematically follow the slowest registered speed of electroscopic leakage (measured by the method of timing the leaf-fall over a 10° angle in the proportional part of the calibration curve), typically in the mid to late afternoon. Notice that on the rainy day (72-96h), the electroscopic discharge was practically instantaneous, and the motor slowed down but kept rotating. Also note that, with respect to the earlier Fig. 3A (the muon results of Poirer et al), it is apparent that the asymmetries increase towards late afternoon in EST, when the muon flux is maximal. Under these very conditions, if there was a link between the muon flux and the speed of electroscopic discharge on sunny days at ground level, we should have observed the very opposite of what is shown in Fig. 7: it would be the troughs in the timed electroscopic discharge curve - not the peaks that tend towards arrest of the discharge - that would coincide with the motor accelerations! Moreover, since the muon effect is asymmetric with respect to charge polarity, one might expect leakage to accelerate more than seepage. Observation, however, teaches otherwise: not only did both leakage and seepage decelerate, but their rate of deceleration was identical. These are final proofs that the Aether Motor is not driven by muons - nor 'neutrinos', which exhibit the same intensity pattern, diurnal variation and asymmetries as muons (et pour cause). Reich's OR Motor and our Aether Motor are driven by massfree energy - 'primordial cosmic energy', whether in nonelectric or ambipolar states - and not from the energy AFTER mass that composes the massbound high-energy cosmic rays and their secondary decay products. The diurnal variation of the Aether Motor is therefore entirely the result of the modulation of solar radiation by the Earth's rotation.
This is ample evidence for the simple fact that the kinetoregenerative phenomenon and the Aether Motor vary in parallel.
Not shown here is another graph where these peaks in motor speed coincide with the highest To-T values registered each day inside the ORAC driving the Aether Motor circuitry.
We have one last request to the reader: forget the professional skeptics who never read Reich, let alone tried to understand him. Like Rothwell, they would not bother with Reich, any more than with Tesla, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Aspden - the entire world of actual thought. Their skepticism is only for show.
Just ask yourself this:
Who conspires against whom? Who betrays signed agreements and friendships? Who glibly suppresses information? Who cares nothing about what is said and written? Who claims science but discards method? Who has been publicly challenged to produce data and references and has come up with none?
"Of all passions, the one which is most unknown to ourselves, is lazyness; it is the fieriest and the most malignant of all passions, even if its violence is barely detectable and its damages are rather hidden." | |
La Rochefoucauld, "Suppressed Maxims", 1665. |
There is a Polish expression to describe those who speak without thought: "They say whatever saliva brings to their tongue". This expression aptly applies to this PP5 of Demeo. Whatever 'science' can be glued with spit.
The veritable barbarities of Demeo & Co in the PP5, are a kind of distant and not so distant echo of Leftism mixed in with New Wavism. It is a crypto-Marxism, just as it is a crypto-Freudianism or a crypto-Reichianism. Undoubtedly, Debord would remind anyone that this "milieu possesses nothing but its good intentions, and it wants straight away to consume illusorily its means, solely in the form of the pronouncement of its hollow pretensions" (thesis 26 of The Veritable Split).
Instead of submitting Reich's work to scrutiny, coming up with proper controls and, in a word, contributing to the scientific process in the scientific spirit - precisely by furthering the work of Reich, giving him his due (which is no small quantity) and correcting his errors when possible and necessary - instead of this simple program, the reader gets an unending stream of errors, suppressions, misobservations, simplistic reductions, unfounded claims, meaningless 'data', wild conjectures, unimaginative notions, misinformations and disinformation.
We will not compile a formal list of these shameful and devastating betises. But we will remind the reader, in short form, of what he or she will have 'learned' from this belated, long-announced Pulse of Planet: that nomads are antifemale; that the State and war appeared around 4,000BC because of the antifemale prickishness of chauvinist nomads; that the Sahara resulted from this armored patrist way of nomads (who must have gone around dropping sand from their saddlebags and carts); that before these nomads came crashing along, there existed an idyllic matriarchal world where nothing ever got killed; that individuals interested in orgonomy always end up as spaced-out space-cadets; that you must love your REG before tucking it into bed every night; that orgone charges are not electrostatic or electrical, yet are measured with DC voltmeters; that muons might rotate the planet, which could also be rotating from North to South without anybody having noticed; that Demeo has such a potent aluminum cloudbuster that it once triggered a violent storm in minutes, and might have triggered el Niño in the years 1997-1998; that at the tropics the orgone envelope suddenly begins turning back (easterlies); that the children of Eritrea now play on the green savanna again; that protocells range from contaminant fungi (begrudgingly alive) to crystal precipitates (that can be felt to be almost alive); that mung beans can be stressed by cold; that RBC crenation spikes carry DNA; that Jefimenko had already discovered the OR Motor; that Spinners can rotate with DC; that Oranur is not an anomalous increase in radiation counts, but an anomalously insignificant decrease; that there was a thief of Reich's KS- 9154 motor whom Reiter was in secret contact with; that Reiter knew the real McCoy who got those motors for Reich (though he neglected to tell Reiter about the KS-8624); that the US Navy attends Demeo's seminars; that Spinners are called reluctance motors because of their reluctance to cough out the secrets of the Aether Motor; that it is all a matter of 'feeling for' Factor Y. It is not an heretical notebook, but an hysterical diary. For laughs.
Ah, we almost forgot - the contribution of Brassband to what he calls "a new consciousness" and a new perspective on ORANUR:
"I have long wanted to put an REG inside an accumulator to see if there was any change in the former's output. Unfortunately the devices are a bit expensive and until recently I had only one of them and have been afraid of 'changing' the device a la oranur'" (sic, PP5, p. 154)The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum - on both sides of the avenue. They have despoiled intelligence from its rightful inheritance: science, functional thinking. They have made a mockery of the inquisitive spirit. They have fanaticized and obfuscated the political consequences of scientific research. To interact with them is to be forced into the conclusion that they are some kind of apes who have evolved, and continue to evolve, at ever faster paces, from humans.
As Darius Jedburgh tells a wiser Ronnie Craven at the end of "The Edge of Darkness":
It was the time of the preacher
in the year of '01
now the preaching is over
and the lesson's begun
It was the time of the preacher
in the year of '01
when you think it's all over
it's only begun
Gaia, May, year of '02
by Paulo Correa, MSc, PhD
"You hold your life in your hands, don't entrust it to anyone else, least of all to your chosen leaders." | |
W. Reich |
This is an archeological note on the tribulated fate of a spinner motor that Reich once owned, and with which he conducted his Orgone Motor demonstrations. The story begins with a passage in our 1996 "Correa-Reich Affair" where we argue that Douglas Marett should by then have been well aware of the nature of the KS-9154 motor as an eddy-current spinner, since Gary Mann had told us and Prof. Mann, back in 1979, that he had disassembled the motor in question, etc, etc. Given that we had recounted this information to Marett, he already knew, in principle (see ahead), all there was to know about this Western Electric motor well before he went to Orgonon in 1984, at which time he, too, disassembled the KS-9154, as well as the KS-8624 that Reich also owned. At the very least, the Gary Mann story established that someone, before Marett, had already disassembled one of the same motors. What we did not yet know was just how many others had done so before him!
One more word of introduction is in order - regarding an altogether different topic that becomes incidental to our story. For years, there has been a severe dispute between a fellow named Joel Carlinsky and James Demeo, regarding the cloudbusting practices of the latter. Carlinsky poses as a competitor of Demeo and has once claimed to me to have been the only certified orgonomist ever "issued" by Eva Reich, for all that that's worth. In his attacks on Demeo, he claimed that Demeo did not follow Reich's protocols in cloudbusting (he may well be right on this), and went as far as ascribing to Demeo the responsibility for a series of deaths following a cloudbusting operation in Africa. Carlinsky presents himself as a defender of Reich's work on cloudbusting against the ecological disasters he claims to have been brought on by "irresponsible practices" such as those of which he accuses Demeo. Demeo, argues Carlinsky, suffers from the "Reich complex", and Carlinsky wants to expose him, doggedly pursuing Demeo at various public conferences. Demeo, on the other hand, is convinced that he has done nothing wrong with his cloudbusting experiments - much on the contrary. We are now very inclined to agree with Demeo that his cloudbusting could not have done anything wrong or harmful - simply because it is in fact most unlikely to have done anything at all. Furthermore, Demeo has openly suggested that Carlinsky is acting for the government (a "CSISOP agent") with the purpose of discrediting "orgonomy" and, most specifically, Demeo's work in cloudbusting. When the now defunct Spoon Collective Orgonomy Mailing List (OML) carried Carlinsky's attacks, back in February of 1996, an intense war of arguments ensued, which finally (on December, 23 1996) resulted in a decision on the part of the listowner to close down the list. This controversy was in full swing on November 10, 1996, the day when Douglas Marett first released on his homepage the article on our work that we ultimately rebutted in "The Correa-Reich Affair".
On November 15, 1996 - five days after Marett published his article - Carlinsky (of whom we had never heard before) telephoned Labofex "to talk to Dr. Correa". On the 17th, he tried again and explained (without quoting Marett's homepage) that he wanted to know "if the Correas had discovered the secret of the Orgone Motor". At the time of Carlinsky's second call, we had just been made aware of Marett's ongoing campaign against us through a fax from M. Carrell. We dryly told Carlinsky that the PAGD/IVAD technology had nothing to do with Reich's Orgone Motor.
As we started to look around on the Web, we soon realized that Marett had posted on his own homepage a link to Demeo's homepage, and that Demeo also figured on the recipient list of a disinformation email that Colin Quinney posted to the Vortex list in support of Marett's article. Furthermore, we had heard over the years that Marett was in some form of contact with Demeo. So when we stumbled upon the OML records of the Carlinsky dispute with Demeo, and a request from Marett for more information on the same, I decided (on December 11) to call back Carlinsky and to find out more about this sordid mess.
As a result of this conversation, I wound up talking to Carlinsky again a few days later (on December 16), shortly after our own web page, containing the "Correa-Reich Affair", was released. First, he offered that he had taken upon himself to inquire with Moray B. King as to whether there was a connection between our discoveries and the Vacor work of Reich, and that Moray had told him absolutely not. Next, Carlinsky informed me that he had already read our article, and wanted to ask me a question regarding the Gary Mann story which we related there. The question was whether I could be sure that the motor that Gary Mann had examined was the KS-9154. I told him that I had no way to ascertain this, that this was solely what Gary Mann had said at the time. Then he asked if I knew how Gary Mann had obtained his motor, and I told him that I thought it had come from one of the Bakers. He wondered if I remembered when this had supposedly happened, and I told him that as far as I could remember it might have been in the 1973-5 period. I asked Carlinsky for an explanation of why he was making these questions, and he volunteered that he had just phoned Gary Mann who did in fact confirm the story as we related it, except for the simple fact that Gary denied that the motor was the KS-9154! In light of what Gary had told us in 1979 I thought this to be a blatant lie, and I told Carlinsky so. But I was not exactly ready for what was to come. First Carlinsky asked me whether the Baker in question was Ellsworth or Courtney, the son. I was not sure, though Courtney was my recollection. At this point the fellow interrupted me:
"You don't really know who you're talking to, do you?"
"No more than you do. We are both unknown to each other."
"Well, it was I who stole the motor from the museum and gave it to Courtney Baker who in turn, I believe, from what you have just told me, passed it along to Gary Mann. I believe what you've just told me is true and that Gary Mann is lying for obvious reasons, as he doesn't want to put in jeopardy Courtney's trust in him, nor does Courtney wish it to be known that he had the motor for a while before it was finally returned to the museum and the custody of Higgins."
This was quite a stunning revelation, so I insisted on further confirmation:
"So, in fact, it was the KS-9154?"
"Yes, it was. The very same motor."
"So what did you do with the motor? Did you disassemble it? "
"Yes I did and I had it examined by different people."
"Are you knowledgeable about motors?"
"No, not really."
"Were those who you took the motor to knowledgeable about motors?"
Here Carlinsky explained that he first took his loot to a local shop specializing in the repair of ordinary electric motors. He volunteered that the motor had been analyzed by the senior technician and was deemed to be an hysteresis motor. I asked him whether the technician in question had opened the motor and he said he did, and that he even tested it with a magnet. When I asked him whether there was any reaction to the magnet, he first gave a categorical no. I retorted that if that was the case, it could never have been an hysteresis motor. Carlinsky came back arguing that this very fact had puzzled the technician but that the man had concluded that the rotor was made of aluminum. Carlinsky was insistent on pursuing his story without my constant interruptions and he put the emphasis on the fact that both this motor technician and another technician, XXXX, who "works for local TV Channel 22", had been very puzzled by the construction of the motor. Pointedly, I asked Carlinsky whether either technician had measured the resistance of the coils, but he could not recall. Clearly, Carlinsky knew nothing of motor technology, even though he had taken it upon himself to steal the motor Reich had used. I pushed him by making him see that every hysteresis motor will have a permanent magnet mounted over an aluminum core and thus, if the reaction to the magnet was negative, there was no way the motor could have been an hysteresis motor. Then I noted to him that this agreed precisely with the observations relayed to us by Gary Mann: the rotor was made of solid aluminum, not of any permanent magnet material. But what had become apparent was that many before Douglas Marett had managed to open Reich's motor (in fact Douglas Marett only succeeded in completely opening the KS-8624 Motor, apparently because the tape on the wires of the KS-9154 was placed so that the stator elements could not be pulled apart to expose the rotor). And many others had stuck their fingers in it looking for the key to the enigma of free energy - as if the key lay encrusted in a piece of metal awaiting the greediest seeker. To find out just how many we could count, I asked Carlinsky:
"So, let me get this straight. How many people have opened and taken this motor apart?"
"Well, I took it apart myself."
"...and so did the technician you took it to as well as Mr. XXXX?"
"Yes."
"And then Courtney Baker?"
"Yes"
"And then Gary Mann. That means that at least 5 people before Marett have opened this Western Electric motor"
In fact, I thought it probable that Courtney Baker had taken it to at least another 2 "experts", if not more. I pressed Carlinsky further for details and queried him as to why he did not write something on the subject. Carlinsky invoked the Statute of Limitations and commented, mysteriously -
"This stuff is still going on!"
I pressed further as to his motives for stealing the motor in the first place. At first, he gave me a reread of the Higgins/Raphael good-cop/bad-cop-routine episode that we narrated in our Correa-Reich Affair: dwelling on his intolerance of Raphael's attempt to psychoanalyze him, Carlinsky admitted that "in his youth he did a lot of silly things" trying to get a hold of as much of Reich's stuff as he could. Then, when pressed even more strongly, he made another candid admission:
"What you don't know is that I have been charged with burglarizing Orgonon."
"What do you mean? Somebody put you up to it?"
"Yes, I was young then."
"Well, why don't you come clean with it?"
"One day, one day, but it's still going on."
"Who put you up to it?"
"I cannot say any more."
"Well, not so fast- was this government?"
"No, no, no..."
"Then, what - the Church of Scientology?"
"No, even though I too was involved with them also at a time."
"Factions struggling for control inside of orgonomy?"
"Yes, something like that. I cannot say any more."
"Did Eva Reich put you up to it?"
"No, no, no...By then I was no longer involved with Eva."
Later in the conversation, I tried to get back to this topic but to no avail. Clearly, however, Carlinsky felt that our description of the Gary Mann episode had touched a key whose true history he was anxious to reveal to me.
But the real punchline of this story lies outside of the story itself. As we now know, of the two motors that Reich owned, only the KS-8624 has an aluminum rotor. The KS-9154 rotor was made of copper. Thus, Carlinsky stole the wrong motor from the Reich Museum: instead of the famed KS-9154 that Reich used for his Orgone Motor demonstrations, Carlinsky stole the KS-8624. Hence, also, Gary Mann was right when he later corrected himself, in 1996, by telling Carlinsky that the motor he had disassembled was not the KS-9154. The object that all these people, in greatest hush, coveted, labored to obtain, passed to each other and took to experts to examine, in the hope of discovering the Key to Reich's Secret, was not at all the one they thought Reich's Secret was associated with.
Even more amusing, however, is the fact that, for purposes of response to ambipolar energy synchronous with pulsed plasma discharges - as we will demonstrate with video, very shortly, in Berlin, at the Binnotec 2002 Conference - the better of the two motors is the KS-8624. The irony is complete: the wrong motor they were chasing was...the right motor, after all.
Maybe what had moved Carlinsky or Baker or Marett (or still others) in this story is not all that different from what has moved me in my own interest in Reich's work. But these people seem to act as if possession of a talisman could help them decode the knowledge they neither possess nor understand nor, what is perhaps yet more fundamental, really desire to understand. They are satisfied to know nothing about motors - not even the most elementary things - but hope to be granted a sudden revelation if they manage to lay their hands on the sacred relic, soaked with the Master's mystique. In part at least, one might regard this syndrome as a result of both Reich having willed in his testament a 50 year period of silence, and Mary Higgins' much misguided custodianship of the archives. Be that as it may, the disciples and followers of Reich seem to have settled, long ago, into a routine of willful ignorance, bitter infighting, intrigues, and disinformation (exemplified by Reiter's apocryphal and disinforming story of the unnamed "thief" in PP5), each behaving as if he was part of an intelligence operation and accusing the others of the same - when, in fact, they pose no threat to the powers that be, which are more than happy to let them carry on exactly as they have been doing. For they do well what they do best on their own - misinform and disinform. The extent of the knowledge these fans of Reich have acquired is entirely based upon the confabulations they imagine they could deduce from the dead bones of Reich. As if the secret of the orgone motor resided in the construction of the Western Electric KS-9154 or KS-8624.
Now that the secret of the OR Motor and the secrets of its improvement - in the form of the Aether Motor solution we have devised - are gradually coming out, these creatures from the shadows should once again be able to return to whence they came. We believe that, on our account alone, Reich has not tumbled in his grave. May we have put an end to the age of mystical Reich fandom, the age of free - and not so free - agents of disinformation. May we have shown unequivocally that the Reichian enemies of Reich's work are servants of Power, and not seekers of knowledge.
1. Pulse of the Planet #5, 2002, "Heretic's Notebook", Research Report and Journal of the OBRL, Inc., Ashland, Oregon. Henceforth referred to as PP5.
2. Levi-Strauss (1949) "The elementary structures of Kinship", Beacon Press, Boston, MA (Transl. 1969).
3. Clastres, P (1974) "Society against the State", 1977 transl. Mole Ed. , NY, NY.
4. Idem, p.89.
5. Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1986) "Treatise on Nomadology", extract from Mille Plateaus, Semiotexte, NY, NY, p. 11.
6. Donner, F (1982) "Shabono", Delacorte Press, NY, NY.
7. Leach, ER (1963) "Rethinking anthropology", University of London, The Athlone Press, NY, NY.
8. Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1972) "Anti-Oedipus", The Viking Press, NY, NY, p. 190.
9. PP5, p. 19.
10. "Anti-Oedipus", op. cit., p. 192.
11. Demeo, J (1998) "Saharasia", OBRL Inc, Greensprings, Oregon, p. 284.
12. The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol I, Part 1, "Prolegomena and Prehistory", 3rd edition, 1980, p. 312.
13. PP5, pp. 21-22.
14. Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1987) "A thousand plateaus", University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p. 353
15. Gowlett, J (1984) "Ascent to civilization - the archeology of early man", Alfred A. Knopf Inc, NY, NY, p. 161.
16. Ferrill, A (1985) "The origins of war", Thames & Hudson, London, England, p. 23.
17. "Saharasia", op. cit., p. 286.
18. Renfrew, C (1987) "Archeology & Language - the puzzle of Indo-European origins", Cambridge University Press, NY, NY, pp. 202-210.
19. "Saharasia", op. cit., p. 327.
20. Hapgood, (1966) "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings", Turnstone Books, London, England, 184-187.
21. Claussen, M et al (1999) "Simulation of an abrupt change in Saharan vegetation in the mid-Holocene", Geophys Res Lett, 26:2037.
1. PP5, p. 47.
2. Condon, EU & Odishaw, H (1967) "Handbook of Physics", McGraw-Hill Book Co, NY, NY, p. 9-273.
3. Kraushaar, W & Clarke, GW (1962), Phys Rev Lett, 8:106.
4. Condon & Odinshaw, op. cit., p. 9-274.
5. Condon & Odinshaw, op. cit., p. 9-303.
7. Kane, RP (1965), Proc. Symp. Cosmic Rays, Elem. Particle Phys. Astrophys., Bombay.
8. Webber, WR (1965), Univ. Minnesota, School of Phys. and Astron., Tech. Rept, CR-76; Freier, PS & Waddington (1965), Phys Rev Lett, 13:108.
9. Condon & Odinshaw, op. cit., p. 9-304.
10. PP5, p. 177.
11. Condon & Odinshaw, op. cit., p. 9-314
12. Reich, W (1951) "The Oranur Experiment - First report (1947-1951)", The Wilhelm Reich Foundation, Orgonon, Rangeley, ME, p. 194.
13. PP5, p. 147.
14. PP5, p. 151.
15. PP5, p. 156.
16. Reich, W (1939) "Three experiments with rubber at the electroscope (1939)", republished in Int J Sex-Eco & OR Res, 2:144.
17. Correa, P & Correa, A (2001) "To be done with (An)orgonomists: conversations with (hopefully!) the last one - a complete response to J. Demeo's attack on Aetherometry", Akronos Publishing, http://www.aetherometry.com.
18. PP5, p. 182.
19. PP5, p. 183.
20. PP5, p. 190.
22. PP5, p. 200.
23. Dutta, D & Herath, S (1998) "Global Flood Disasters during the period 1997- 1998", International Center for Disaster Newsletter, Tokyo, Japan.
24. PP5, p. 203.
1. Reich, W (1951) " 'Cancer cells' in Experiment XX", OEB, 3:1.
2. Reich, W (1948) "The Cancer Biopathy", Farrar, Straus & Giroux, NY, NY, 1973 Reprint, p. 65. Henceforth referred to as CBP.
3. CBP, p. 62.
4. CBP, p. 70.
5. Grell, KG (1973) "Protozoology", Springer-Verlag, Berlin, DE, p. 44.
7. PP5, p. 81.
8. PP5, p. 88.
9. Hawker, Lillian, ed. "Microorganisms", 1978, Edward Arnold Publishers, , University Park Press, p. 98.
10. PP5, p. 168.
12. PP5, p. 110.
13. Correa, PN (1991) "An improved serum-free medium for the growth of normal human circulating erythroid progenitor cells and its application to the study of erythropoiesis in Polycythemia vera", Ph.D. Thesis, University of Toronto, Canada.
14. Correa PN, Axelrad AA (1991) "Production of erythropoietic bursts by progenitor cells from adult human peripheral blood in an improved serum-free medium: role of IGF-I", Blood, 78, 11:1.
15. Correa PN, Axelrad AA (1992) "Retinyl acetate and all-trans-retinoic acid enhance erythroid colony formation in vitro by circulating human progenitors in an improved serum-free medium", Int J Cell Cloning, 10:286
16. Correa PN, Axelrad AA (1995)"Serum-free basal and culture medium for hematopoietic and leukemia cells", Mar. 14, USPTO, Pat.# 5,397,706, U.S.A.
17. Correa PN, Axelrad AA (1999)"Cell culture medium", October 10, Can Pat. #2,123,094.
1. PP5, p. 219.
2. PP5, pp. 220-221.
3. Correa, P & Correa, A (2001) "To be done with (An)orgonomists: conversations with (hopefully!) the last one - a complete response to J. Demeo's attack on Aetherometry", Akronos Publishing, http://www.aetherometry.com.
4. Correa, P & Correa, A (2000) "The rediscovery of the orgone motor: (6) AC Spinner motors - from Tesla's first Aether Motor to the Western Electric Spinner Motors, a complete history", Akronos Publishing, ABRI Monograph AS2-21, available soon.
5. PP5, p. 222.
7. Correa, P & Correa, A (1995) "Electromechanical transduction of plasma pulses", USPTO Pat. #5,416,391, May 16.
8. Correa, P & Correa, A (1996) "The Correa-Reich Affair", Akronos Publishing, http://www.aetherometry.com.
9. PP5, p. 224.
10. PP5, p. 225.
11. PP5, p. 227.