First meeting at ABRI, March 20, 2002
    1 - Discovery and identification of the electric Aether
          (Update on ABRI's research)
    2 - Energy, the global state and the politics of science

Second meeting at ABRI, April 18, 2002
    3 - How nothing is left
    4 - From the molecular to the aetherometric

Appendix 1 - 911 and its consequences

Appendix 2 - Oriana Fallaci: On Antisemitism

Participants -

LB - Master Luis Balula, Arch. Prof. at the University of Lisbon, hon. member of ABRI
PC - Dr. Paulo Correa, R&D Director, Labofex; Chair, ABRI
AC - Ms. Alexandra Correa, Administrative Director, Labofex; Co-Chair, ABRI
MA - Dr. Malgosia Askanas, Chair, Operations & Oversight Committee, ABRI
LMF - Ms. Laura McFinlay, Communications Director, Akronos Publishing

1 - DISCOVERY AND IDENTIFICATION OF THE ELECTRIC AETHER
     (UPDATE ON ABRI'S RESEARCH)

LB - Akronos has now completed publication of the entire second volume of Experimental Aetherometry. Your last three reports - the 17 series, as you call it - and this upcoming communication at the second Berlin Conference for Innovative Technologies (1), open up an entirely new direction in physical and biophysical research. You have now unveiled the full spectrum of electric aether energy, for both orgone and DOR. What reaction do you expect from the rest of the scientific community?

PC - Whatever is in its best interest. Up until now, it has blocked practically all doors to the consideration of Aetherometry. Even the margins are mostly silent about it or antagonistic to it. At least they admit they have nothing intelligent to say about our work. But the monographs continue to be sought, and there are some serious students out there that regularly give us or Akronos feedback. Most interesting is to realize that they come from all sorts of directions - not just science or mathematics, but also music, architecture, and so on.

AC - These last three monographs - the 17 series (2-4), as you say - pose both experimental and speculative challenges to basic physics. They identify, for the first time in the records of science, the complete energy and frequency spectra of massfree ambipolar radiation, OR and DOR. And they demonstrate how the electric Aether - what we call ambipolar energy - constitutes the driver behind a variety of fundamental physical processes, such as stellar radiation, the allotropic cycle of oxygen and water in our atmosphere, the cosmological creation of electrons with a minimum of kinetic energy, and the anomalous acceleration of heavy ions by certain types of plasma discharge. At the same time, these reports place a final set of boundaries on what one can or cannot do with electromagnetic energy, while enunciating, at last, the physical principles that functionally connect all blackbody photon production to the ambipolar energy spectrum.

PC - Tesla discovered ambipolar electric radiation, and Reich experimentally demonstrated the existence of massfree radiation of two types - OR and DOR - according to whether the effects were beneficial or detrimental to living systems. Tesla was convinced that ambipolar radiation could not be reduced to either fluxes of monopolar charges or to electromagnetic radiation, but he failed to adequately distinguish it from either one. Likewise, Reich failed to provide the energy and frequency spectra of OR and DOR radiations or to concretely identify his concept of 'orgonotic charges' - which share, at one and the same time, both electric and nonelectric characteristics. In fact, to make matters worse, he attributed to OR the two nonelectric phenomena he had discovered inside ORACs and simple Faraday cages, while claiming that OR partook of the characteristics of electrostatic energy.

AC - For the past half-century, scientists and philosophers - even those rare ones who claimed to follow Tesla or Reich - have blissfully ignored these discoveries and the concrete physical difficulties they pose. To this day, no one has found the spectrum of massfree electric energy, described its characteristics, or studied its physical interactions. We alone have. Orgone energy has remained mythical, when not simply reduced to negative ions, beneficial photons, fantasmatic neutrinos or heavy leptons. Take your pick.

PC - In the first (2) of the three new communications, we experimentally show how the 'dual orgone effect' discovered by Reich - thermometric and electroscopic - can be obtained by simple transformations of Tesla radiation generated in the OR spectrum. In other words, how latent heat and electromagnetic energy can both be obtained from the interaction of ambipolar radiation with Matter. Hence we are led to conclude that the nonelectric effects of the ORAC are ultimately driven by conversion of ambipolar energy of the orgone type. In a roundabout way, then, Reich was correct in attributing these two anomalies - thermal and electroscopic - to orgone radiation, but they are both indirect results of OR ambipolar radiation, not direct ones.

AC - We conclude this first communication by using solar radiation as a means to introduce the entire frequency, wavelength and energy spectrum of ambipolar electric radiation, as well as the physical processes involved in the production of blackbody photons. For the first time, the spectra of DOR and OR are clearly identified - and so is their nature as massfree ambipolar radiation.

PC - Then in the second communication (3) we apply the developed methodology to identify and stratographically 'seat' the solar-sourced OR and DOR energy impulses that drive the allotropic cycle of the most basic atmospheric components: oxygen, ozone and water. The very atmospheric stratification of the cycle indicates that the problem of absorption of the energy of the electric Aether has been badly posed. The very allotropism of the cycle betrays the existence not just of an orgone envelope, but also of an outer DOR energy envelope or envelopes surrounding the planet.

AC - The third communication (4) gave us great pleasure to write - aside from our obvious interest and desire. It proposes a totally different analysis of the microwave Cosmic Background Radiation - one that demonstrates how this cosmological blackbody is permanently being issued from the kinetic energy of cosmological electrons, and therefore constitutes an indirect proof for the existence of a Cosmic Background Orgone Radiation (CBOR) which we now map onto the spectrum we identified and defined in the first of the three communications. In accord with aetherometric thermometry, we propose a very different temperature profile for the microwave CBR.

PC - We also propose an aetherometric model for the asymmetric creation of cosmological electrons from the matrix of Space and Time - and suggest that the CBOR is generated in the very process of asymmetric creation of Matter.

AC - Then we challenge radioastronomers and NASA to determine whether or not we are correct in predicting that other marks of the identified CBOR should be found from cosmological baryons (hydrogen and helium in particular), in the radio CBRs which we aetherometrically predict baryonic Matter will generate and 'we' should be able to detect in extragalactic space.

LB - It sounds like you're having a lot of fun, now that you've taken your gloves off.

PC - Well, the simple conclusion these three reports lead to is - there is no longer reason to view the microwave CBR as a twisted proof of relativistic cosmology. One can no longer continue to take the microwave CBR as a sign of an originary explosion of Space. General relativity and all its modern revisionist interpretations are simply wrong. At the confines of Space, in the 'vacuum', nonelectric Aether is constantly converted into electric Aether - with Matter being permanently generated and resorbed in the process. The microphysical pathways have now been identified - despite the inertia of an entire epoch, the inertia of officiating scientists as much as the inertia of protesting or 'alternative' scientists.

AC - There are other ways to live on this and other planets than by fighting for land, glory, race, religion, gold or black gold. But to change ourselves we have to become as much artists or creators of our future as we have to learn the bioenergetic language of the cosmos, and thus become scientists, like it or not. With all the errors it contains - and for which we alone are responsible - this is our contribution to that learning - part of our creation of a different becoming.

PC - Orgone energy is not synonymous with Aether, or aether energy. Orgone energy is merely a constituent of that portion of the Aether which is electric - and which we denote as ambipolar radiation. Most of the electric Aether exists in the form of orgone, but - as we have now demonstrated - the highest portion of the frequency spectrum of the ambipolar Aether is entirely formed by DOR radiation. All living systems are, at the most basic of levels, open energy systems that convert nonelectric aether energy - whether or not attached to molecular substrates as their kinetic energy - into ambipolar electric radiation that secondarily determines both the monopolar electric and the electromagnetic manifestations, including sensible heat. Living systems deploy consistent modes of aether radiation, whether electric or nonelectric - which we can measure and ascertain with aetherometric tools or apparatuses. In some of the communications coming out soon, we will report on our studies of detection and measurement of the aether radiation fields of the human body.

LB - One of your ongoing developments at ABRI is such an integral biophysical radiation meter. You have now given several demonstrations of this device which - unlike, say, Kirlian photography or its derivatives such as the GVD method of Korotkov - operates entirely passively to detect three different or distinct field effects. This kind of technology would constitute an excellent introduction of others to Aetherometry. How has that work progressed?

AC - Several prototypes have been created, with increasing sensitivities. We have used these in demonstrations to private parties. Mr. Uri Soudak and Dr. Eugene Mallove are currently trying to arrange financing for these field meters and other products that are technological spin-offs from the aetherometric research at the ABRI. We continue to seek funding for ABRI, but that is another story.

PC - Some of these other products are equally excellent introductions to Aetherometry and Aether energy technologies. Did you read the letter that Dr. Mallove recently wrote - where he describes them?

LB - Yes, and in that context - are you going to provide more details about this mysterious wheel that turns on its own?

PC - You know, all the work has been somewhat delayed by the ongoing closing down of our plasma physics laboratory - and everything that follows from it. The action of the wheel is still under study. We know that it responds to both the magnetic and electric fields of moving monopolar charges - since we can emulate its action with traditional circuits. But in the process of investigating the action we ended up with two very distinct principles of action. One is electrical and varies diurnally in parallel with the ambient conditions that promote expression of electrostatic phenomena, whereas the other deploys a distinct diurnal pattern that is instead associated with geomagnetism and the constantly varying formation of persistent ambipolar radiation spin-structures in the atmosphere and on the ground. But we'll see where this leads us. Right now we have our hands full.

2 - ENERGY, THE GLOBAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF SCIENCE

LB - I also read the recent letter of Prof. Axelrad, and I am struck by the fact that now, more than ever, there should be a concerted effort to find the conditions you need to develop the energy and transportation technologies you have created. Instead, the US government is talking about opening up Alaska to oil exploration - in the vain hope of ridding itself from Arab Oil.

[LMF's Editorial Note: a vote in the US Senate on April 18th precluded opening Alaska up for exploration]

PC - It was in "The Formula" that Marlon Brando, in the role of a Rockefeller, tells the detective - "We are the Arabs!" A timely realization, just as it is given us presently to realize how correct Voyer is when, with his Hegelian method, he arrives at the conclusion that the only Israel there ever was is the US - the veritable engine of modern civilization. "We are both the Arabs and Israel!" - that is the fundamental equation of modern capitalism which every anti-Semite tries to hide.

MA - ...And maybe even the reason why Europeans have for so long been quite adroit at sowing discord between Semites - between Arabs and Jews. After all, perhaps it is - as Nietzsche put it - at the feet of Christianity that we should lay the wreaths for this calamity of unending cycles of anti-Semitism, including the unending production of bully-cultures that distort even the nomadic spirit of Islam and transform the entire urban environment into one gigantic and continuous Beirut. And, you know, Medellin is no better off than Ramallah or Kabul or Jakarta or São Paulo.

PC - Yes, the terrorist - as Debord once noted in his Commentaries - is not an outsider in this global world; the terrorist is at home in the system. Terror in all its forms - not just by the bomb - has been grown and cultivated by the system, it is a product of the system. Underlying all mercantile exchanges there is the terror of poverty, spiritual and material. Combine this with fanaticism, whether it is the 'Terror of God' or any other variant, and you have every major form of fascism. Today the terrorist has been made into a serious contender who seeks control of the urban territory virtually everywhere. More and more, the rebellion of desperate youth is channelled in these suicidary, self-defeating directions. Behind the stupidity of terrorism, you can sense the desperation of a million failed rebellions and thwarted desires. This first decade of the XXIst century echoes the breakdown of the 20's and the 30's. But it is a perverse game, this time around. It is, so- to-speak, 'engendered' with all parts, as a crisis of the global values brought about by globalization itself. Likewise, and in direct connection with the problem of wholesale terrorism, the energy crisis has been entirely grown by the system - beginning with the uncontrolled folly of human reproduction and the integral urbanization of the territory, including the seas and near-space. So now it is Alaska - and on and on, till we destroy all that is left of this very dear planet.

MA - ...and if we don't destroy it, it will all be fenced in.

AC - It's not the green groups or the anti-globalization protests that will stop this infernal machine. If anything, they too are an intrinsic component of the system - where protest is manipulated by those vying for a say at the global level, beginning their careers as politicians on the barricades in the hope of becoming - like Jorge Castaneda, the present Mexican minister of Foreign Affairs - players in engineering and managing the Global State of Peace. As it was yesterday by fascists, maoists and all other sorts of self-assumed vanguards, the enthusiasm and fire of youth is manipulated by last-ditch prophets who are totally ignorant of what science and technology can and will do and are mindful only of their future as bureaucrats of this International State.

PC - The silence about Aetherometry and the PAGD technologies among green and anti-globalization groups is simply astounding. These groups are nothing but a soft and warm cradle for protest, where one can avoid critical political and scientific questions - like those the SI raised four decades ago about the subservience of Life to Survival, or the integral urbanization of the territory, or the betrayal, by the Left, of any and every project of liberation of desire. The protest today is soft and unimaginative - more like a circus or a carnival, mixed in with some Zengakuren martial arts. Nothing is left but the mythical democratic struggle against the Empire of Star Wars. Pretty soon we'll be spending two hours a day sorting, treating and preparing our garbage so that the local reprocessing company - which our Borough hired - can remain profitable and continue to pick up the garbage as a special favor to us...

LMF - It's a frightening prospect - further and further recolonizations of leisure-time, achieving a complete occupation of the time of the living. And more and more arbitrary laws and technical regulations to go with it.

LB - On the subject of colonization of Time we have the dreadful experience of contemporary city growth over larger and larger metropolitan regions. It is the worst-case scenario. People are simply resigned to live piled up (Europe), or spread out (America) over immense suburban territories, organized in (dis)functional families with multiple cars, commuting 2-3 hours every day to work and back - without complaining much, and thinking it is just "natural". The only time spent in the public realm (remember the Agora?) is now spent inside a car in traffic lines, competing with other citizens for a few square meters of asphalt. It means 45 full days of waking life a year isolated in a car. Even the most bland critique must point out this fact as a great loss, don't you agree? Of course there are alternatives for urban growth - which in itself should be regarded as avoidable - but most developers don't even want to listen to them, because business is going fine along the present lines. Meanwhile, cities are swelling over the landscape and their citizens are losing ground, civic ground. You see, the more "consumer rights" one gets, the fewer civic entitlements are supposed to be granted.

PC - Effectively, all has been parceled out - the body of the earth, the means of creation, the collective agora and its just rights, the control of one's lifetime. The promise of History avows itself rather distinct from the promise of savage cultures - not the creation of a sovereign individual, but of tired and handicapped psychopathic entities that live from fictions alone. The development of the car-based civilization is unsustainable; and so is the continued urbanization of the territory or the demographic explosion; or the solution of the energy problems by conservation and the building of more coal and nuclear plants. We are witnessing the sunset of our civilization - and it is going down in gasps of madness, with plenty of ado about nothing.

AC - Like the grand problem of energy. Everyone clamors for an easy solution - from the taxi driver to the government bureaucrat. But do they want to do something for it? Oh yes - you bet they do! The taxi-driver will buy the newspaper as the scientist will buy the research journal and the bureaucrat will read a report. And, certainly, research monies will be granted, here and there, for accepted 'esoteric' research, most of which is conducted in camera - in military, governmental and corporate cameras. After all, a breakthrough in energy, too, can constitute a military and geopolitical advantage. From fission plants to thermonuclear fusion, cold fusion and the entire free-energy market, everybody has been doing the best they can to resolve the grand problem of energy! And everyone expects that whoever resolves it will become rich overnight! Accordingly, it has become common sense to expect, by the same token, that the solution should pop up any time now and be given on a platter to humanity - to save the world, to save mankind, to make America independent from Arab Oil, to achieve the State of Peace, and so on, all those easy solutions and slogans with which the common man has been indoctrinated and can vibrate. For those are the reasons invoked for interest and action in finding a solution to this grand problem.

PC - But there ain't any solution, save an impossible radical turnaround in our history, society and science. Our scientists cannot find the solution to the 'energy problem' simply because they are corporate scientists, already committed to subject science to profits no matter whether the consequences are mortiferous and malignant; already committed to the inflation of their discoveries for purposes of equity marketing, already committed to a 9-to-5 job and an over-specialization in imaginary details. Their own inventions are no longer their own, and they are never really responsible for them or their use - from day one these inventions are the collective asset of the corporate, military or bureaucratic institution that hired the scientific workers. These scientists are paid to do their work - and not paid to go off on experimental research journeys where they have to question basic science, or to read the works of Tesla and Reich and Aspden. If ever these matters come up, it is because some military, intelligence, bureaucratic or corporate design already lurks as the impulse to do science. Well, science - or better, nature - does not very well lend itself to this utilitarian and fragmentary approach. For a while, it might work, because people have hopes and dedication - and it takes both to become a scientist. But the golden age of science is indeed passé. Precisely because social mechanisms have stifled all scientific research by suppressing individuality, creativity, singularity, while fostering a 'science by consensus'. Science, like energy, is a political problem.

LB - I certainly can follow your gist - energy is no different from all the 'grand' or 'molar' problems of this 'planetarian world'. It is a political problem - one that devolves back to the social structures of contemporary society. Would there be deforestation of the Amazonian basin if the Portuguese and Spanish colonialist imprints had not triumphed all the more once South-American countries obtained their independence?

AC - ...and then, American capital got into the act, inciting even greater destruction and class-warfare in those countries, transforming them into banana-republics, condemning masses of mixed human peoples to a senseless life of utter impoverishment, uncontrolled reproduction, destruction of nature and final genocide of the indian cultures in that Amazonian basin. And the deforestation will not stop - not by bribing the last indian reservations with educational facilities, video cameras, private guards and helicopters - anymore than these cultures will be able to exist as independent entities within the enveloping capitalist civilization. One or two might make it as museum showpieces, but it is all folklore for the benefit of tourism. The pace of civilization has only intensified - and it really doesn't care whom and how many it will impoverish, as the recent crisis in Argentina has poignantly illustrated. The fact is, there are no easy solutions to the energy problem, because any real solution will have to be a political and social one - even if one succeeds in commercializing a technology.

PC - The much-trumpeted solutions are showpieces, neat façades put up to calm the jittery masses of people. From the manufactured power-crisis in California to the fall of Enron and a supersecret National Energy policy, it's all a great deal of improvisation with nothing - sort of a modern Stone Soup of politics. After all, what is it that the American State can, at best, within the narrow margins of the global energy racket, hope for?

AC - Alaska and conservation - and more Alaska than conservation: that is the Cheney message that encapsulates this 'secret'. And if not Alaska, somewhere else - Mexico, Venezuela, and so on. And, one day, Alaska will be back in the pot.

PC - Moreover, any strictly-speaking energetic solution to the energy problem could never appear on a platter. Only the deluded mens capta manufactured by what Debord most aptly described as the Spectacle could believe this. If there were easy solutions to the energy problem, the system would have long ago discovered them. However, everyone knows that even when partial solutions are discovered - as was the case with photovoltaic cells - the valuation of materials and products undergoes rampant inflation and the technologies are bought by large oil, nuclear or chemical consortia, in order to make their use obsolete before widespread utilization can take place. And still the fact remains that there are no easy technological solutions to the energy crisis - for it is an engendered and manufactured crisis from every social angle one chooses to consider it.

AC - Looking at the energy problem from a micro-perspective, however, also leads to this realization that there are no easy solutions. If there is a scientific and technological solution to the energy question and it has not been found by our academic researchers, then we have to conclude that their method of thought is simply not adequate to the object of investigation. The energy crisis is, therefore, also a marker of the insufficiency of that thought. How then can the public, the media and the scientific establishment demand that any such discovery be given to them on a platter? Do they seriously expect not to have to change their thought in order to understand it and their lives in order to implement it?

PC - Now, at last, we are coming close to the core of our Aetherometry project. It is all about what Feyerabend hated the most and Kuhn knew the most, but not best: a change in Method that permits us to obtain answers from previously unremarked or discarded facts in basic science - in basic physics, in basic chemistry and even in basic biology. There can be no utilization of aether energy devices unless several conditions will permit it, and one of these conditions is precisely the acquisition of an entirely new scientific understanding - physical, mathematical and biological. This can only come about as a result of a very different spirit. Given on a platter, any real solution can only be marketed as a disneyfied commodity. Its science will become hidden from view, its understanding will at any time be susceptible to being co-opted by any form of caricature, and its benefits will be few or none. And if such a breakthrough in science is bound to also open the doors to other, most unsavory, uses - in warfare, mass-destruction, mass-control, and so on - then knowing is no longer merely an arbitrary condition, or even a required condition for using (intelligently or not) an altogether different technology, but the only ethical imperative there is: for it becomes, then, the precondition for not slipping back into further barbarism. If that is the case, and knowledge has become politicized to this degree, then how it is embodied and released is of primary importance - and in our case, our sole responsibility. In his upcoming Berlin Lecture, Harold Aspden concludes that the energy problem will not be solved until the day that a scientific explanation for the source of excess energy in a variety of anomalous devices is "well understood and endorsed by the energy research community". You know what? He is totally on target. Even the silly Rothwellian notion that only a gizmo will do, still depends on this condition enunciated by Harold: can a theory adequately explain it? - and the rest of physical knowledge, by the way? It follows that the whole problem from a societal viewpoint is just this: what theory, what understanding, what scientific explanation is to be comprehended and 'endorsed'. You see, this is where one gets into trouble - because it is not clear, by any stretch, which theory of the Aether can account for all the experimental observations and provide the correct mathematical solutions. To me, this means that, once more, it matters very much to create the most adequate material conditions for the experimental exploration of just such theories - about the structure of the electron, the source of free energy, etc - and in particular, in our case, to develop a theory that would properly account for our experimental observations that do not tally with any existing theories, even Aspden's. For us, it is critical to find the correct infrastructures for this endeavour. Since we believe our theoretical work provides answers where no one else's has, and that these answers are both theoretical and practical, I do not feel towards present-day humanity the slightest moral or ethical obligation that would lead me to want to release all the technological and scientific work we have conducted in the chapter of energy - energy physics and the energy problem of present-day society - and give it away, so to speak, without seeking protections and strategies of divulgation and commercialization. Yes, there are always those who feel thereby entitled to want to rob us of this work. But like Mocenigo, they do not realize how much they have to learn if they are to understand anything - and if they should learn that much, they, too, would have to change and abandon their perverse or malignant ways, because this knowledge is rather unforgiving of slackers and baseness. On the contrary - I view as an ethical obligation the study of Aetherometry by those who purport openly to have either an interest or a disinterested passion for a physics of energy, or a bioenergetics, or a concern about solving the energy problems of the world, or learning about the nature of bioenergetic fields. Precisely because I know that in the mouths of most of these people these are just empty declarations - they have no intent to study or learn, they have no stamina to work through the concrete micrological problems, they have no desire to think, they have no intent to follow through a continental shift in science; they will happily settle for marketing a few ill-conceived gizmos that could transiently pass for the real thing. A poor man's substitute. The dream of the marketeer. If they manage to choose the right horse, they'll have a free ride!

MA - Yes, the way that society thinks about this seems to always revolve, in one way or another, around the concept of 'free lunch'. On the 'establishment' side we have the position triumphantly articulated by Peter Zimmerman in his grotesque speech to the APS: The Second Law of Thermodynamics guarantees that there is no free lunch. Here it is, in the man's own inimitable words:

"That is why at every possible turn do what you can to educate people that there is no free lunch, the first and second laws of thermodynamics remain valid you cannot scoop free energy from the zero point energy of the vacuum you cant reach out and grab the positrons and put them on that shelf. I'm sorry that's what they're talking about doing."

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch and we as physicists can have a free lunch for a hell of a long time being respected and consider the work we are doing is something very useful. One thing we're going to have to do is be our own defence council on this and try to do whatever we can to remind the public that there is a difference between pseudoscience, junk science on the one hand and real science on the other. "

PC - This is the idea of collective salvation: it will arrive by some Hutchinson phenomenon that no one can understand, even those like G. Hathaway who claim to have studied it. But gratuitous tinkering will never lead to serendipity, let alone understanding. A great deal of noise is made around these half-baked, incomprehensible and irreproducible 'experiments', while, at the same time, a great vacuum is made around the aetherometric effort. And yes, that is how society prepares for what is imagined as the essence of the new energy revolution - by hoping for a miracle, whether in the jungle of relativistic hypotheses or in the trenches searching for serendip.

MA - Yet there is no lack of vision of how this 'energy revolution' is to be ushered in. In fact, it is anticipated that this ushering of what is always said to be just around the corner (and praise be to those who continue to uphold their optimism in the face of all the disappointments they receive daily from sluggish inventors!) will occur by means of a simple mechanism. First, through the tireless - though tasteful - self-promotion campaign on the part of the inventor, news of the phenomenon will be thrust upon the attention of some sufficiently important segment of the scientifico-technico-financial establishment, which, given the phenomenon's aforementioned power and indisputability, will neither have nor want any choice but to certify and embrace it as legitimate. Immediately, the embraced phenomenon will become embraced again - in the manner of Chinese doubly-sautéed pork - this time by the visionary investor who not for nothing is called an 'angel investor'. Note that this is a term whose opposite is not, as you'd expect, 'devil investor' - investors are never devils - but 'venture capitalist'. Now, this angel from heaven has, all this time and tirelessly so, been desirously flapping his or her wings in the wings; and once the double embrace has been completed - poof! - revolution. As in all windfall schemes, it is essential that this 'revolution' should occur precisely as a, so to speak, serendipitous graft on the existing socio-economico-scientific body, from which it derives its nourishment and which it therefore must otherwise - apart from the revolution, of course - leave intact. For only while intact can the existing body bestow the indispensable legitimacy without which, indeed, no lunch can be a lunch and no angel an angel.

PC - Indeed, the basic angel needs you to perform his miracle - he has no cacao, but if you will be willing to serve heavenly designs, he and you could make a fortune...

MA - I've had the supreme pleasure of seeing some of these designated purveyors of revolution, these 'angel investors' and their middlemen, in operation, and they are a total riot. One day, out of the blue, such a would-be investor suddenly contacts Paulo and Alexandra, by phone or email. It is always a matter of highest urgency. It should have been done yesterday. Even though some of the inventions have been around, in the public records, for years, without the investor taking the slightest interest, on the day when any happens to catch his attention it acquires the character of an emergency about which immediate steps must be taken so that the would-be angel can immediately, on the spot, fulfill his sudden need to become of 'great assistance' to P&A. The urgency of the situation requires that P&A drop everything and devote themselves totally to the project of fulfilling the angelic need, which - as one should never forget - is totally coincidental with the need of humanity at large.

LMF - This seems to be a general sickness of American businessmen, this immense sense of self-importance that reminds one of nothing so much as a spoiled child, but is in fact considered a stamp of ultimate maturity.

MA - Quite. Now, while the paramountness and urgency of immediate action seem to be common to all the approaches by would-be investors, the exact minutiae that are demanded vary somewhat. Usually the investor puts forth some kind of a plan of action which, while having all the trappings of common-sense business proceedings, resembles the chess game that Chichikov plays with Nozdrev in the "Dead Souls", in which every time Chichikov's attention is on one part of the board, Nozdrev makes an extra moves somewhere else. For example, instead of signing P&A's non-disclosure agreement, the investor attempts to substitute a 'mutual' non-disclosure agreement, which, under the pretense that both sides equally have secrets to disclose - as if it wasn't only the inventor who had something to disclose and something to lose - would wind up leaving P&A's protection dependent upon non-violation of obscure conditions of 'mutuality'. Or, P&A may be presented with a 'routine business agreement' whose fine print, if properly interpreted, obliges them to lose their shirts if the invention does not work the way the investor wants it to. Or, alternatively, the 'business agreement' stipulates that P&A relinquish control over their invention and have no say in how it will be developed and used. Or there is no 'business agreement' suggested at all, and it is demanded that P&A give a detailed demonstration of their inventions to the investor and his 'engineering staff' with no preset conditions of intent, acceptance or funding. Or, in fact, the engineering staff is already busy trying to reproduce the invention, and P&A are expected to provide unlimited free consultation and help - in the name of Humanity and, of course, the impending free lunch. So then P&A say "no" to all this - "no" to the so-called mutuality, "no" to the booby-trapped provisions of the proposed 'agreement', "no" to loss of control, "no" to wasting their time giving free demonstrations for the asking. They want the investor to sign their own non-disclosure agreement; they don't think they should be required to stake their shirts or survival on the correctness of their science; they want to negotiate an acceptable business plan; they want a clear and binding declaration of intent from the investor before they themselves invest their time any further. Chances are that the investor, who a moment before found even the slightest delay intolerable, will fall silent, never to be heard from again; and P&A will have confirmed their notoriety of being 'difficult', antisocial, devoid of conscience, afflicted with 'inventor's disease'.

But let us assume that the investor is persistent enough to keep his cool in the face of this 'initial hurdle'. And neither does he lose his cool while P&A lay out for him what we might call the Two Essentials: one, that what is most important to them is to be able to continue the research they are currently involved in, and they will not be interested in any financing arrangement which does not permit them to do so; two, that any initial independent validation of their inventions has to take place in their own laboratory, where it can be protected from duplication and careless or dishonest testing. All this is fine, the investor says; he understands and accepts everything; the important thing is to get going. He continues to push for an actual face-to-face meeting, which - as P&A stipulate - may or may not include a demonstration, depending on how things go. The investor, by the way, always assures them that the only way things can go is splendidly, and that the encounter will result in a complete meeting, if not even melding, of souls and minds. He can feel it in the very core of his being. His visit with P&A will be, as Manilov said about Chichikov's visit, "a treat destined to convert this day into a gala day, a true birthday of the heart."

LB - All the greater an occasion as the 'angel' has the right heart and brains, but lacks everything else.

MA - Yes, when I say 'investor', you have to understand that this persistent person in question usually is not the investor himself - the person in question, most often, does not himself have any money to invest. What he says he has, instead, is 'important contacts in the business community', 'proven communication skills', and a supposedly consuming interest in bringing new energy technologies to the thirsting people of this planet. Alternatively, he may be vague on whether or not he himself has money to invest, in which case he may be the CEO of some company whose name is suggestive of future- mindedness, plentiful and cheap energy, wholesome technology, environmental cleanliness and/or assorted noble pursuits.

AC - ...And his resume usually features a lyrical passage about wife and children, and a manly passage concerning his athletic exploits in areas such as golf, polo, and endurance sports.

MA - So then the gala day arrives. We see this investor or communicator - this angel, in brief - appearing on P&A's doorstep: a treat which may or may not involve P&A having to drive a distance to pick him up. Soon after the initial pleasantries and settlings down, the angel finds some way of making it known that his overarching interest is in helping humanity, and in particular the poor in Africa or in India. It is in fact a constant source of regret to the angel that in his youth, instead of following the path of financial angelic-ness, he did not follow the path of the great Albert Schweitzer or the great Mahatma and devote himself to improving the lot of African or Hindu children. But since he didn't, he now wants to do his second best and bestow upon Africa, India and their children the benefits of free energy. After this baring of his deepmost humanity - and a host of such variations on a theme - our man may well feel that the anticipated meeting of souls is a done deed and that he has earned his right to a demonstration. If that's not the next item on the agenda, he may become listless, lose all interest, and leave soon thereafter, never to be heard from again. But if he's the type who is into endurance sports, he may decide to stay put whatever comes. If he hasn't already done so, he signs the non-disclosure agreements and steels himself for the next step, in which he is presented with P&A's proposed funding structures and business plans. Boosted with some strong coffee, he sits down to study these documents. He makes an effort to memorize some of the details and takes notes of others. He shows his memory and understanding of what he read in the subsequent discussion of these details with P&A, a discussion which once again submits to his attention the Two Essentials. He understands everything, flinches at nothing, and is in total agreement with the principles.

I am outlining to you the steps of this process to show that by the time this fellow is given the actual demonstration, he has been made aware, more than once, of what P&A are after, and has expressed, more than once, his basic agreement with it. So let us say that now P&A decide to proceed to a demonstration of their technologies. And what does the fellow see during such a demonstration? He sees what Gene Mallove and Uri Soudak and Arthur Axelrad saw and what they describe in their letters of support. He sees a working PAGD system; a working Aether Motor which operates, so to speak, on thin air; a device which, as they watch, charges a battery from nothing but two grounds; a working device in which a gold leaf loses more than 75% of its weight. He is given explanations of the circuits, a summary of the theory (which he mostly sleeps through), graphs and charts of input and output parameters, evaluations of potentialities and limitations, visions of possible applications. He is told that the devices he sees are prototypes and that significant research and development are required to develop them to the point where they can be mass manufactured and brought to market.

LB - The lunch now ceases to look as free as was assumed - it takes thought, study, understanding, knowledge, strategy, and means to act. I have heard of, or sat through, some of these sessions of P&A with potential investors, and have noted this polarity between, on the one hand, the anomalies that are shown to them and the ease with which a well prepared demo flows, versus, on the other, the dose of sheer reality which is necessary to do something good and useful with these discoveries, both scientifically and technologically, let alone socially and politically.

MA - Yes, by the time that our angel is made to think, as you say, the earth has completed a significant portion of its dance around the sun, lunch has long been eaten, coffee has been drunk repeatedly and is ready to be drunk again. Now everybody sits down to discuss the business of the business. At this point, the angel pops the question: which of the inventions he has been shown can start bringing in a profit within six months? None of them, he is told; these are prototypes, and significant research is required to develop them to the point where they can be mass manufactured and brought to market. And to do this research, one needs funding and time. How much time? Upwards of three years.

The would-be benefactor of Africa and India has trouble dealing with this. That is, it is not he himself who has trouble with it - he understands that the revolution he hopes to bring to the world requires time and work, and he is in full agreement with everything P&A have told him about this. If only it all depended on him, he would arrange it exactly along the lines that P&A have proposed. But he has the world to contend with. He has to explain the matter to the actual investors, or to his partners. He himself is a humanist and a dreamer, but the world is different. His trousers have no pockets. Besides, the world wants to know that its investment will yield a profit within - he will be generous - about a year.

PC - No one will invest for the long run, he will flat out tell you.

MA - Since he must operate a veritable miracle, our angel proposes that P&A choose among their inventions the one that promises the fastest return, and commit themselves to concentrating all their efforts on the task of bringing it to market. The world will not be inclined to put its money into a scheme that allows P&A to continue their other research while the commercialization of the potential money-maker is put into the hands of someone else. The harsh reality, which the angel never ceases to deplore but into the intricacies of which he is happy to offer his guidance, is that investors need guaranteed results. What guarantee is there that within three years other free-energy technologies will not appear and sweep away the market? How would P&A propose to protect against that?

In response, P&A argue that if what is desired is guarantees, it would in fact be more prudent to have P&A continue research in several fields at once, while others work on commercializing each specific invention after it has been brought to a point where commercialization becomes a matter of engineering expertise. This way, instead of staking everything on the success of one invention, there would be multiple offerings in the works, and the chances of novelty and success would be increased. The angel has no good response to this. Nevertheless, he continues to insist that P&A must make a choice, and that they will have to put aside their research until at least one gadget is successfully brought to market. Later, they can continue doing whatever they want; after all, we are only talking about a year - and what is one year of one's life? Nothing. A year is an infinity when it comes to waiting for profits, but the context of life is different: in the context of life, a year is just a puff of insignificance that human beings - or at least P&A, who are, after all, not in the race for profits - can easily dispense with. It is obvious that although the whole negotiation is in the realm of a giant free lunch, the role of the 'world' - which the angel has taken upon himself to represent - is to ensure that P&A don't come away with anything resembling a free lunch or perceived as such, like effective control of the development of their inventions for a limited period.

Well, say P&A, the thing is that if one were to choose one invention, then the obvious choice would be PAGD, since the research on it is, from a practical viewpoint, virtually completed, and it is essentially a matter of engineering and some applied research to bring it to market. And, incidentally, since it is a matter of engineering, there would be no reason to require P&A to put their research on hold in order to work on it. In fact, as the angel is well aware, P&A have created a separate business proposal for a company that would be dedicated to developing the PAGD technology, with relatively minimal need for participation on the part of P&A themselves. Why not concentrate on this proposal? But the angel is not happy with that. The angel has been granted a vision of the Mother of all Free Lunches, the Aether Motor, the motor that operates on thin air, as it were, and he is hooked. What he wants is that same Aether Motor, six months later - OK, let's say a year later - coming out of his assembly line. He has seen a miracle that is bound to become the glorious future of humanity, provided that it can be profitable within a year. Clearly there is no time to waste; he wants to go back to his investors or his partners and infect them with this vision before it is too late and someone else usurps humanity's future, together with the windfall which inevitably will come in its wake. To this end, what needs to be discussed next is a plan for independent validation of the Aether Motor. Because although, as has been stated above, the angel has 'proven communication skills' as well as a vision upon which to prove them yet again, we are now - let us all be reminded once more - talking about the real world, the tough, down-to-earth, no-nonsense world whose necessary existence we will never cease to deplore. And that world will require validation from one of the generally recognized scientific or engineering establishments. Now: although the angel fully sympathizes with P&A's unwillingness to send their new and unprotected invention out to be examined and tested elsewhere, the next step is to make plans to do exactly that, since it is absurd to think that any establishment that fits the bill would agree to send out its experts to test these inventions on P&A's premises. After all, we are talking about places like MIT or Stanford, and one cannot imagine MIT - can one? - coming to P&A's laboratory to test the Aether Motor. And so here, finally, after all the hours of work and cups of coffee, after all the emails and faxes and words, after all the meetings of minds and birthdays of the heart, we are back to the Same Old Nothing. We have seen the revolution, and it is more of what we already have. The angel packs his stuff and goes off to seek the future somewhere else - somewhere where it does not insist upon knowledge and a respect for the dignity of those willing to reach and fight for it, but comes as the next get-rich-quick scheme, an instant unencumbered free lunch. Over this free lunch, the martinis and the champagne cocktails and the chocolate mousse, we will have plenty of time to enjoy philosophical conversations about the need for knowledge; but in the meantime the first order of business is to get to that free martini, and until then we need to get down to the brass tacks, with no time for bullshit.

LB - This underscores the lack of seriousness of most of these 'prospective sponsors' or worse, the crookery of angels.

PC - With such angels, who needs Mephisto?

AC - And these are, rather often, the same people who, for years, prospected in the Cold Fusion field for just such short-term runners - in six months the world will have cheap, infinite, unending power. Who needs science? Who needs knowledge? Who needs to burn the midnight oil? So the difficulty of research is judged by the light of the media hoopla. And after the feeding frenzy is over, the same old world remains, with the same perception of an immediate solution to be found just around the corner in the next gold mine.

LB - However, as you point out unceasingly, knowledge by itself is not redemption.

PC - Precisely - knowledge for its own sake is knowledge cut off from action. It can implement neither its power nor any potential becoming or transformation; it is barred - in a very real sense - from verification, from actualization. It is impotent knowledge.

MA - That's where the media plays its role of organized reaction. Translating everything into incoherent sound-bytes. Making knowledge utterly impotent and reducing it to these immediate gratification schemes, or better, rackets.

AC - Indeed, along with the thesis that the solution to the grand energy problem must be found on a platter with virtually no expenditure of substantial capital by social institutions, there is this permanent goading of the public carried on by the media - and which is an integral part of the intelligence-organized campaigns of disinformation. The objective here is two-fold. On the one hand, it creates an artificial division - between those who are reasonable researchers in esoteric domains, and those who practice 'voodoo science'. This is an arbitrary division precisely because, as Feyerabend correctly saw, it is based upon myth. Physicists who indulge in computing hundreds or thousands of imaginary dimensions, who believe that Time dilates and Length contracts in the direction of motion, or that electromagnetic waves propagate across Space, or that neutrinos and antineutrinos exist, are no less 'voodoo practitioners' than are Searle with his flying discs, or the reichians with their various identifications of ions, neutrons, neutrinos, etc, with Orgone energy, and their mythical cloudbustings, or the Poltergeist tools of Hutchinson.

PC - The latter may well be cuckoo, but that does not make the former any less so.

AC - The absence of method constitutes as much a myth as does the wrong method. Both distort science and feed on that distortion. Which leads us to the other hand, the second objective of organized campaigns of disinformation - where the distortion is not simply a defect of the scientific spirit, or of the 'human mind', but an encouraged and concocted distortion planted, conditioned, and planned, even if without much thought. For example, you know that up until today there is no open scientific investigation of the UFO question - it is not simply the repeated ridicule it suffered at the hands of the US military, with all its discombobulated somersaults, but, more fundamentally, that a veil of sordidness fell upon the field once it was taken over by a morbid interest in supposed abductions by extraterrestrials. Nothing has blocked any genuine effort at investigation of the phenomenon more strongly that this fantastic confabulation of horrors and hermetic mysteries surrounding the purported experimentation and genetic cloning by extraterrestrials. Surely, the incapacity to accept or perceive without embellishment that which is anomalous also depends upon the failures of the scientific method, such as it exists, to provide an adequate understanding of these phenomena - so much so that, most of the time, they are simply repressed, suppressed and distorted. You might say that our work on plasma physics, as much as our recent work in Aetherometry, have been the object of unceasing repression and suppression - both by official science and by alternative venues. Some legitimize this suppression on the basis that we do not reference or cite others they consider pertinent to the subjects of our papers. Others rationalize it by publicly stating that what we have to say is so far off the wall it's not worth talking about - even though we know for a fact they have never read a single one of our essays, and have no idea what our work actually is. You know the trouble we went to, six years ago, to bring to the attention of the public and the media institutions - in Canada, the US and worldwide - our work and discoveries in plasma physics. But no one ran a single mention, or sent a single reporter to investigate, not even the green organizations. That surely tells you something which those that support and manipulate those groups are effectively discarding and precluding from consideration.

LB - However, just recently, on January 24, MSNBC ran a nameless Reuters feature about an unidentified 58-year old irish engineer who, after 23 years of work, had supposedly come up with an undisclosed process for the generation of power; this was accompanied by a photo of something that looked like a dishwasher box, called the Jasker device. The article was backed up by a certain Tom Hendryk, chief executive officer of an undisclosed company, and the only verifiable reference was R. Park, who eagerly pronounced the report voodoo science and stated that these sorts of claims come around every ten years.

PC - That makes you wonder why Park provided this Hendryk with such extensive coverage, no? This is just what we are speaking of - a coordinated disinformation campaign, at times only too transparent, to undermine research and findings in alternative energy. To discourage any perception that more fundamental research is needed.

MA - If this all were not bad enough, the machine is described as having operated for 10 minutes from a car battery while driving three 100 watt bulbs - something that is easily accomplished, since the total consumption amounted to only 50 watts. To buttress the claim, Reuters reported that the battery, after switch-off, increased its open circuit voltage, which every battery does when relaxing from a load. Look, the problem we're focusing on is that neither the official media nor the alternative media has any interest in the real questions of science which are questions of detail as these relate to theories and processes or their validity. The media can never serve as a judge for what is or not correct in a scientific sense - nor as a forum for developing consensus about technologies.

PC - Unsavory people have tried to gain access to our laboratories - and some have even tried to suborn friends of ours to gain access to our knowledge. It ceases being paranoia when we have concrete proof of all sorts of incidents. You have no idea about the extent to which greed, betrayal and narcissism can go. Or maybe you have - and then this is all hardly astonishing. To see what I am getting at - let me put this question to you: why did we not receive any 'molar' coverage six years ago when we obtained patents for our PAGD technology? How can Reuters pass around such unsubstantiated news - with totally undisclosed inventors, licensors and processes - and yet not report on technology that is patented in the US, England, and so on, with identifiable inventors and physical processes described in papers published in a variety of journals and venues?

AC - You see, the proof of the pudding lies in the taste of the difference. Under the guise of misinformation, disinformation has the droit de cité, and gets where it is supposed to go, whereas 'information' does not.

LB - You suggest what I myself have thought for many years: that the answer is not simple - for what is reported, and what is not, is solely a function of the disinformation or disinterest one can generate.

PC - Yes, we are intimating that this is the result of an organized campaign of disinformation, the target of which are those few researchers who actually have something different or new. You see, the point is to keep reminding people that these lulu claims have always existed and have never led anywhere - and when they do not show up, that's right, one manufactures them. That is what the Keely Net is there for. That is what deluded researchers are there for. And also, and above all, that is what Park is there for, to legitimize the Reuters-type articles and remind us that it is all 'voodoo science'. Eventually, if something comes along that is different and new and really opens the gates, one ensures that it will be lost. At the very least, lost in the noise.

AC - In our case, including Aetherometry, the matter is even more difficult. For we have taken political positions which are at odds with the present social regime in all of its colors, from the right or the left - positions against fascism, red and black, throughout our lives, and positions against that 'post-modern evolution' of fascism, what we have come to call 'nursery-school fascism'. Just listen to the way primary school teachers address kids today - it is in exactly the same infantilizing tone that TV anchors read us the news or talk-show hosts manipulate their audiences, or university bureaucrats treat students and academics. It has all acquired this tone of infantility, simplicism and compliance - everywhere producing either herds of sheep who can only repeat slogans, or individuals that become totally disaffected from the system - whom the latter, in turn, makes a point of managing in a variety of institutional black holes.

PC - It is in parallel that we all learn to distrust our neighbours, still continue to vote when we know that all politicians are corrupt, and accept all the rules that multiply daily and that unelected bureaucracies impose upon us. It is more than Liberty we have abandoned or betrayed. It is that, at bottom, everybody wants to be a fascist, and everybody loves the good things of fascism. If only fascism had not plunged headlong into a war of total destruction and self-abolition, the word would still carry a positive connotation today. But who needs the word or the idea? What matters is that the essence of fascism, unnamed as it is, now permeates all social institutions, from the Right, the Left and the Center - that it is there, present in a dissolved and molecular fashion, in all the pores of the system, tightening all the social mechanisms of relative control. What matters is that we unquestioningly accept the principles of identification and authority by representation, along with the reduction of all values to the logic of the commodity. It is a devious and destructive fascism - and in extreme cases, like when its target is Aetherometry, it simply resorts to suppression and vacuolization.

AC - There is this fascism of knowledge which is attached to its very vacuolization. When the Sarfattians begin talking about 300 dimensions or the Demeians speak of orgone being the same as negative ions, neutrons, etc, we know that they were never intent on anything but producing toilet-paper science. And if that performs the role of inflation, it also contributes to the degeneration of the scientific spirit and the overall debasement of all values.

PC - And then there are even more extreme cases, where fascist calls are uttered in the name - not of science or religion or ideology, even Reichian - but of democratic morality. One of those fellows who was fired from the USPTO some years ago, recently circulated a newsletter article demanding that the USA nationalize all the free-energy patents, secret or not, that have laid unexploited by the inventors holding them. He estimated that several thousands of such patents exist. Pure disinformation. Aside from ours, there are only a few others. Yet he published one of those quasi-official papers slanted to appear to evaluate these free-energy patents, that made a point of omitting our technologies.

AC - Many are those in the field of alternative energy who are positively angry at Eugene for the support he has given us. But the more they pressure him, the tougher he fights for what he has perceived and seen, touched and tasted. Likewise with all of us.

PC - We are telling you this because, in a very real sense, we have effectively declared war on the thought of our epoch - including its counter-thought, all those acts of little rebellion that are so many abortions of desire and that plunge us into the desperation from which all malignancies crawl.

LB - Like Spinoza - neither a Jew nor a Protestant nor a Catholic New-Christian. You are out of context - or out of Time...

AC - Yes, none of us has any allegiance to church, state, race, class, family or club. We have managed to become, rather instantly, personae nongratae in all the circles of church, party and corporate capital. Both because we denounce the intolerable vacuum that now holds science and technology in abeyance of power mechanisms, and because we indicate there are other ways out of this scientific and political impasse, this morass - where all science has turned into the sensationalism of an absurd detail.

LB - Much has changed in the world around us since we spoke in the Summer of 2001.

PC - True. Tendencies that were hidden or contained have come to full bloom.

LB - If your reference is to the geopolitical anti-situation - I fully agree. This has been a traumatic period for most people.

PC - That too, but I was thinking of the last leg of our process. But, yes, this is a different world than it was - a world where questioning authority has again become suspicious, qualified as 'a suspicious activity'. But also a world that is witnessing the dissolution of its very foundations, the concept itself of a world, just as an International State of Peace looms over us - despite its glaring failures, both financial, as in Indonesia, Korea, Japan, and so on, and military, as in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia. Did you see how Kofi Annan recently had the courage to declare that the entire world was against Israel?

LMF - And at the same time the UN still speaks of the sovereignty of peoples.

AC - The speed at which the ground under you changes is stunning. Take the energy scenarios of this world we were talking about in our last meeting: one moment we are contemplating having Alaska completely open for drilling and pipelines because there is a critical energy shortage in California which, incidentally, was totally fabricated by the legislators and the interests they served - specifically Enron - and the next moment the world is at war with Afghanistan but the price of oil, instead of rising, hits a low with a little help from our friends, the Russians; then Enron collapses - 68 billion gone in one year, pffut! - and suddenly there is no more energy crisis. Only a recessionary market on the verge of a depressionary collapse, and another potential scandal in influence-peddling and company auditing - soon to be wiped out by the woes of Andersen and a host of others. A smooth act.

LB - Like the famous or infamous class-struggle which, after its disappearing act in the 90's, has just been reduced to Terror and counter-Terror.

PC - Yes, all these territories that were once opened, have now flown back - reflux/redux, that is the cut-up, à la Burroughs, which this civilization is presently undergoing. A paroxystic closure is under way, even as Europe closes its gates to the new hordes of Islamist Huns. The last Hurrahs of the western civilization can already be heard amidst the reflux of barbarism. All fundamental rights have been all but obliterated, as residuals of a reformatted totalitarian entity. And this surgical operation is performed at a transnational level, just as the State and all of its layers become ever more unresponsive to local demands. It is a veritable chasm - people, even stupid people, are not just disenchanted with politicians. Some want to see blood, but most just want the blood of one another - as a generalized war of all against all, waged under the most vengeful banner of Love and Peace. A very strange climate has taken over the entire disaggregating society. My sister, the playwright and architect Graça Correa, once introduced me to Harold Pinter - he says that we are living our last days at the edge of an abyss, just around the corner from a disaster "of a subtle kind" - a disseminated terror that can be felt everywhere and whose causes are poorly understood because, at bottom, we all want to lie and be lied to.

AC - But this would take us far, far afield. The face of the new totalitarianism is a veiled one - it is the face of diffuse, disperse fascism. It is the face of ugliness that has returned as the currency of propriety - and everyone is running scared. The Freedom of Information Act was just recently suspended in the US, and no one rang even a note of alarm - certainly not MSNBC or CNN.

LB - Well shall we take the bull by its horns?

PC - That depends on the bull. I do not see myself as a forcado in a Portuguese or Spanish corrida. And I do not believe in Fado or fate. So what bull is it you are cooking?

LB - Simply the events that have now become euphemistically known as "911", as if one were always on call to spot terrorists - a progressive repoliticization of crime throughout society, where even petty thieves and rapists will soon become known as terrorists, no?

PC - Very provocative - are you trying to get me arrested?

LB - Well, you have, on occasion, been known to like to be provoked - and since you have placed your lives and research on the line, and are known for your uncompromising views...

PC - Like we don't have enough trouble.

AC - Yes, it is true, most people are hanging on by a single stitch, peeling themselves off the walls.

LB - I can see I will not make many inroads today...

AC - Not so long ago we wrote, under an assumed name, an analysis which predicted much of what has come to pass in the past five months - and probably much of what will come to pass in the next year. We are, in case anyone remembers, at the edge of a major war in the Middle-East and a major war between Pakistan and India, momentarily silenced by the combined American-Pakistani actions in Pashtunland, with China just lurking in the wings of any final settlement. The USA may tighten up all it wants at home, but the rest of the planet will continue to spin ever more out of its control. We are all caught between the herd mentality and medieval barbarism. Our analysis traveled on many email lists around the globe and certain people lifted it off from one site and propagated it to others - the great plus of the internet.

MA - Akronos has decided to reprint it at the end of this conversation.

PC - It is all coming home to roost - Sharon even contemplated re-occupying the occupied territories. And who can blame him - this is still the same struggle that was going on when the entire world closed its eyes to the fate of the Warsaw ghetto. The world is at last satisfied because it can make the Israelis appear as Nazis, and thus come to agree with the universal Nazi condemnation of all Jews. After all, the Jewish Question has never been settled by our modern civilization! And, likewise, so are fundamentalist Jews happy with this status quo, since they are largely responsible for having created settlements in the occupied territories, during Menachem Begin's tenure. But you see, most Israelis consider - in my view, quite rightly - that even if those settlements were no longer an issue, the terrorism would not stop. The simple Palestinian program continues to be the eradication of Israel. And even though Arafat has been behind many of the suicide bombers, you do not hear Europe or the UN condemn him for that, do you?

AC - A complete failure of the Left in Europe is now apparent - under the cover of anti- Sionism, Europe has exhibited once more its eternal racism against the Jews, whether it comes from the Right or the Left. Should we forget the vicious attacks on civilians by Iranian and Algerian extremists in France - which accomplished the closure of French society in the past two decades? Europe has been effectively intimidated by a permanent threat of an internal eruption of terrorism - itself encouraged by the Left. There is, on the one hand, a caving in by government policy towards Islamist and Palestinian terrorism, particularly in France, Italy and Germany, and, on the other hand, a repressive tightening of the whole European order that uncovers once more the chauvinism of Europeans. Everywhere in Europe today the Left stands against Israel. The terrorist spirit of Nazis has won by becoming a decent form of dissimulated hatred, shared by the Right and the Left. One might even argue that the worst thing about Terror and terrorism is that it works with stupid and tired populations, precisely by further stupidifying and tiring them. It suffices to hear the hatred of those Palestinian mothers who procreate abundantly only to incite their children to become martyrs for God - and you know that fascism, that Terror, has worked. That it has succeeded in producing completely distorted human beings.

PC - Should we forget the role which the State-financed Red Brigades played in destroying the legitimacy of any attempts at transforming Italian society? Should we forget how their work was financed by the State Secret Police - and likely by the Mafia as well as the Vatican, by way of the infamous P2 Lodge? How it ultimately contributed to bringing Berlusconi into power - along with the present revisionism of italian fascism and Il Duce? I never thought I would find myself agreeing with Sharon, but now I do. I do not see how the Jewish people can continue to tolerate any more western bullshit, hypocrisy and doubletalk.

MA - It is unbelievable to see Arafat caught like a choir boy by the Iranian boat affair and by the seizure of these documents where he and the PLO are shown to have financed the Al-aqsa suicide brigades. But choosing to ignore this, and as a note of protest against Sharon's invasion of the West Bank, Berlusconi donated 2 billion lira to the PLO. Yet what Berlusconi said and did was no different from what one can read in the Libération, any day.

AC - The Left finally assumes its true fascistic and suicidary nature - red fascism. It is something that not even Deleuze and Guattari wanted to admit: that nothing is Left, just as much as once nothing was Nazism. Leftism has been the mortal enemy of real change. And at the end of the day, red fascism is obliged to show its true colors. In face of this, Sharon can only be applauded. One can at last understand why Peres opted for a coalition. These are grave times indeed. The Iranians, the PLO and the Lebanese have just given Sharon reason with the captured cargo of weapons a few weeks back. It shows that in the Middle-East you do not have to be very intelligent or perceptive in order to give 'checks'; you only have to know well what is expected within the millenary logic of resentful retribution. There are no check-mates - no one wins. The USA, and even the hawkish Condoleeza Rices, are caught in the door-jam, hoping it will not close definitively on them. After all, if it is not with Arafat - the puppet of Arab-American Oil - then who will the Americans or anyone else negotiate with - the fundamentalists of Jihad, Hezbollah or Hamas?

PC - Everywhere the logic of the bomb unleashed upon civilians has become the new military weapon of politics. From the atom bomb to the modern suicidary fanatics - the fundamentalist version of the kamikaze - there is a continuum, as if the fires of WWII had never ceased burning for the past sixty years.

MA - It was terror by the bomb that led to the end of pre-war anarchism - for example in Spain or France. It was terror by the bomb that corroded the contestation movements of the sixties and seventies, and led to the madness we now know - from Baader-Meinhoff to the Red Brigades and the PLO.

PC - If there ever was a revolutionary project to transform society, the logic of the bomb destroyed it. Misguided as he might be in believing that only individual pleasure serves as guideline to Life, Vaneigem once put it rather bluntly in his Book of Pleasures - this destructionism, this destruction for destruction's sake, is but the homage that suicidary fanatics pay to a society of death, the alms the leftist do-gooders leave for their poor.

LMF - One sees with great disgust these leftist do-gooders in all sorts of discussion groups. Between the insidious and unspoken terror of the politically correct Left and the bombist Left it is, as you say, a continuum of bad faith, hatred and a desire to worsen things.

PC - When the Arab League accepted Iraq back, Cheney's efforts at creating an Arab coalition against Saddam had been snubbed. And Sharon took advantage of it, further dealing a fundamental blow to the US policy on the Middle East. If the US can take over Afghanistan to pursue the Al-Qaeda, why should Sharon stay put when the entire country of Israel is under the most constant and harrowing of terrorist attacks? It all comes back to the price which the US and Israel must pay for the US policy of supporting the most reactionary and dictatorial regimes in Arab and Muslim countries. This is one of the cleavages that has returned to wreak havoc with social structures - the modern fundamentalist unity of the Muslim world promoted by US and European Oil policies and the price that international capitalism will have to pay for sustaining a State of Israel that has been forced to become a military mechanism. Likewise India - its occupied Kashmir Valley cannot be made independent, due to the simple fact that it will become a client State of Pakistan and China. By that very fact, any Kashmiri patriot who wants independence from India becomes an agent of Pakistan and a terrorist. When, four decades ago, India wrestled Goa, Damao, etc from the colonial occupation by Portugal, it called it an act of liberation, and not one of terrorism. But now... So we are locked in this bad tribal regression ad infinitum - in the final stages of international capitalism, there are everywhere pockets of resistance as the structures of Asiatic, savage or nomadic societies have not yet been completely dissolved, and these pockets invariably develop towards terrorism - thereby serving precisely to implement that which they supposedly resisted. It is resistance itself which is a lie - manipulated by all sorts of con artists with ulterior motives.

AC - All the cycles of progressive degradation - that is the evolution the present 'socius' is condemned to. A bit like the succession of full circles in "Farewell My Concubine": the Manchus paid their price, with the pain inflicted on others or themselves, for achieving a theatre of repetition; and the Japanese, the occupiers of all things Chinese, could still appreciate it and delight in it; but the nationalists were at best ambivalent, and initiated the populist descent that reached its pinnacle in the Great Cultural Revolution of '66. A progressive degradation occurs, as the Chinese Opera loses its Spirit. That is the real meaning of socialism, as the whole civilized world already practices it - not just as the Chinese or the Maoists once did: equality by systematic debasement until all friends and lovers denounce each other for the most stupid, degrading and oedipal of sentiments. Instead of the Bible, they have a digest of it, a Red Book, or the latest Microsoft Intelligence. A report issued on December 13 [2001] by Microsoft Corp claims that Asian terrorist groups and Triads now finance their operations with software piracy rather than drug-smuggling. An encompassing definition of terrorism creeps in on both sides - criminals become terrorists, as Microsoft employees become intelligence officers and legislators. To change this double slide, a whole other sensibility is needed - today more than ever, as we undergo one more cycle of planetarian degradation.

PC - Karen Selick recently wrote a rather poignant Guest Editorial in the April issue of Canadian Shooting Sports, entitled "Be very afraid of the new anti-terror bill", a bill which the Canadian Federal Liberal Party is ramming through Parliament (5). At the end, she summarizes in a poignant fashion the whole threat hanging over civil society. Let me read it to you. It says:

"Observe also that during the past century, the power of the state has already grown by leaps and bounds. It now takes half of our incomes. We have to notify it whenever we move, if we merely possess a driver's licence. We now live with wiretapping laws, drug laws, money laundering laws and increasing censorship masquerading as human rights laws. Meanwhile, the evils of crime, vice, terrorism and social discord that all these measures were supposed to protect us from have grown apace. When is the pay-off from giving the state ever more control over our lives going to come?

Indeed, a plausible argument can be made - although I don't have space here - that the rampant growth of the state has been the cause of, not the cure for, many of our problems.

While no one should make light of the destruction and suffering terrorists have caused, the fact remains that this harm is dwarfed by the destruction and suffering that too-powerful states have caused.

The greatest massacres of history - millions upon millions of people in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Maoist China and elsewhere - have been perpetrated not by "freelance" terrorists, but by those who controlled the machinery of the state in all its awesome power.

The fact that the Canadian government is rejecting even the feeble comfort of a sunset clause on this intrusive bill should cause citizens great concern.

The government has discussed enacting this type of guilt-by-association, asset-freezing legislation before - most recently in connection with biker gangs. If it achieves this goal on the coat-tails of the current emergency, it should come as no surprise that it won't be willing to retrench later.

We have before us a perfect example of what can happen when power and command over resources become concentrated in the hands of a few.

When Osama bin Laden was on "our" side during the Soviet-Afghan war, we gave him weapons and money and called him a freedom-fighter. Today, we have others asking for power and money, again in the name of freedom."

LB - Well that's direct enough - it's the indictment of an epoch, and maybe you succeeded, once more, in making that indictment without taking recourse to a Judgement of God. But don't go so fast - even if speed is of the essence. The Left may have at last become nothing, fascism may well have come to discreetly permeate all social institutions, and the choice before our epoch may well be that between barbarism and a globalized herd-mentality, yet a still greater chaos is rising from the depths of our history. Do you envisage any possibility of a positive opening anywhere?

PC - As you well know, openings occur everywhere - but as soon as an opening occurs, the massive operation of closing the gap begins. It may well be that the US will come to consider the 'national loss of liberties' as merely a 'phantom'. You see, the changes are so subtle and logical as to appear necessary to ensure whatever residue of those liberties remains when all is said and done. However, we are forgetting, in all this, the molecular side of the inequation. All the openings left are on this side.

4 - FROM THE MOLECULAR TO THE AETHEROMETRIC

LB - These molar dislocations you speak of that occurred in the past years, almost since the recent deaths of those who marked our youth - like Debord, Deleuze or Guattari and even Foucault - they are dislocations, at one and the same time, of power systems, of power-pouvoir, of the nature and the face of the new potentates. And these dislocations of molar power are, in a way, matched by new resistances and experimentations - even if there is less and less of that. Yet, one cannot but feel the subtle dislocations, also, of that power, or micro-power, that Deleuze was fond of calling power-puissance, thus giving it that subtle physical flavour that only the French language can impart. I am almost tempted to perceive Aetherometry - in this context - as the molecular dislocation required, at the very minimum, to resist or compensate the new inroads that power-pouvoir has made. Marxism, and other theories of revolution, have now made proof of their failure; yet, the paradox is that, precisely as Debord predicted - and despite the lucid cries of Voyer - the diffuse form of the spectacle has now merged with its concentrated effect; and precisely as Deleuze predicted, new forms of molecular fascism have come to pass - unnoticed, nearly imperceptible, slipped in by consensus and even inattention. To combat this insinuation of control technologies requires a finer perception - and science cannot avoid this higher politics of making perception adequate to its object - can it? So, one wonders whether Aetherometry is, in a way, the scientific continuation of the philosophical anti-fascistic project of schizo-analysis?

PC - Not by any stretch! First of all, Aetherometry is a scientific theory and a body of experimental and theoretical knowledge. We are convinced that this body of knowledge lays the foundation for a new science, a microfunctionalist science with a particular mathematical language that is capable of integrating physics, chemistry and biology. It is true that this science gives a very different view of Life and the Cosmos - and thus that its philosophy reveals a different friendship towards puissance and a new antipathy for pouvoir. But it is also amusing that you bring up Voyer and Debord and Deleuze in the same breath. It is a mouthful - one a consistent Hegelian, the other a consistent 'non- Marxist' and the last - well, some might call him a Nietzschean, I suppose. Yet, as you well know, these distinctions are all manicheist, at the very best. Voyer, who is not one bit interested in matters of scientific investigation, wrote perhaps one of the few interesting commentaries on Reich's theory of character formation, where he comes to regard characterological neurosis as the defence against communication, and character dissolution as a precondition to the global critique of society. Debord, despite his deep insight into the nature of modern capitalism, remained prisoner of a Marxist economicism of needs and believed that schizophrenia was the materialized ideology of capitalism. And Deleuze replaced the entire problematics of characterology by a microfunctional analysis of energy investments, whether conscious, preconscious or unconscious, as collective and social investments. It is obvious that the theory of alienation can at best only approximate the destructive characteristics of the Spirit. What it seems barred from is abandoning the fetishistic notion that needs are foundational to survival, and ipso facto, somehow, to Life. Marxists and Hegelians are notoriously ignorant about archeology and ethnology. They have these puerile notions of what other societies were all about. They imagine hardship where there was none or little, and systematically gloss over the hardships that produced war, including class-war. Voyer is infinitely more lucid about this problem than Debord or Vaneigem ever were - as when Voyer concludes that "the economy is merely the dominant theory of the commodity". When he seats the power-pouvoir of Capital's division of labour in the thought of NASA, IBM or Texas Instruments, as the very practical manifestation of the Spirit, he has stretched the Hegelian envelope to the limits of the method - even if, just as he comes to realize that thought is the result of communication, he makes the latter into the essence of Spirit and thereby reduces its practical power to merely the negation of labour. After all, power mechanisms are less concerned with their reproduction or the communication of orders in open or closed vessels, than they are with forces that can no longer be constrained by structures of representation, communication, game-playing, role-taking or performative operation. It is not about theatre but about the energetics of thought and action. Character is merely the repetition that accompanies being possessed by the practical Spirit of Capital - and this possession is a matter of desire, a question concerning the strategies, the tactical deployment and the production of desire. Or, if you will, the intensity and breadth of the thought. The dialectical method can be applied consistently by following either in Hegel's footsteps or Marx's, but it has never been able to uncover any pathway to affirm Life. It always places something above Life that is distinct from it - Spirit and its communication, or Labour and its economy, or Matter and its dialectics. But if it was Spirit that guided History, consciously or unconsciously, one would have to conclude to a poverty of thought on its part, in both the universal and the particular. One might further propose that, rather, it is Thought alone that can guide desire - but then one better understand that desire is a singular event, the very event of thought, as Deleuze said, and not some socialized machinery of pleasures posing as needs to be satisfied. Voyer is quite correct in arguing that what produces 'man' as a social being is not the 'imagined' material production that 'man' is forced to engage in to satisfy his animal desires - any animal can do that, without thereby becoming a social animal. However, neither is communication the 'real thing produced by men'. Nietzsche continues to have the last word on this matter - what created language, long before there was writing, was the savage activity of inscription, the primitive form of writing, a veritable mnemotechnique. Communication is no more an end in itself than is knowledge or material production. Signs may make the world, but it is desire that makes these signs, that composes something with them, that creates a sense. The critique of the commodity is so banal as to lead one to say that there is nothing left to communicate. Just like the method of negation, as Nietzsche liked to emphasize, can never form the basis for affirmation. Nothing new or different arises by double negation - the very notion has always suffered from religiosity - it is the mere zealous excess of a method for deconstruction. Critique is never to be confused with creation or construction.

LB - It is nearly impossible to situate your thought. It escapes classification - and when one least expects, one finds it admiring a consistent Hegelian like Voyer. Yet, you have absolutely nothing to do with any notions of proletarian revolution - which, admittedly, have proven to be, as Dr. Rui Silva was fond of saying, simply an historical error.

PC - Revolution was a circumstantial process - when the capitalist machinery was far from having achieved the role of programmed unconsciousness that Voyer speaks of in his Mode of Usage of Reich. A last flash of lucidity certainly crisscrossed France and the Western World in those days of May '68 and the aftermath. But today we have before us an achieved planetarian society - one that has relinquished absolute control but renders the entirety of our perception and desire a captive of arbitraries that have been built directly into that permanent state of characterological unconsciousness. The very logic of the molar machine produces this latency of desire that is constrained to adopt the explosive mode if it is to discharge at all the tensions it builds up. And revolution is a greatly overrated word - how many of these so-called revolutions were any less manufactured by power-pouvoir than is the terror of these strange days we are living through? Maybe there never was a revolution...

AC - This is also where we must insert the sense of our aetherometric project. From the viewpoint of desire, the past is merely inertial - a matter that can be handled intelligently with an adequate biophysics of the living. All desire composes with inertia, with resistance, with antiproduction. Even if the energy of the Aether is ultimately massfree, living systems are such only because of the permanent interaction of this massfree energy, in both electric and nonelectric forms, with inert Matter, including not just the mass of the organism but its heredity - a form of inertia which is genetic - as well as the body of a collectivity. Likewise Capital - it, too, is, in a certain sense, a microphysical and micropolitical event - it constitutes, at all times and moments of the living, the social and collective inertia of a certain History, the composite of the histories of the State, military mechanisms and the commodity-production system. It is the unconscious but reproducible domination of the present by the Historical past. It is the universal being of the planetarian society. The essence of this civilization might even be described as the institution of the fear of fear. Comfortably numb as the anesthesia of fear and pain - is, for most characters of this universal play, the definition of pleasure by the negative. Indeed, the inertia of that History is a physical and biological reality - one that confronts us every day: as our Human Form, as our systemic characterological neurosis, as the fascism of our exact humanizing of things, as our apathetic and anesthetic stasis. One is bound to always have to compose with some inertia, but it matters to know how to compose. Life is definitely not on the side of this inertia, but it has to compose with it. The essence of Aetherometry is not in the metaphysical why, but in the how. As Deleuze and Guattari used to say - what do you do with your desiring machines? How does one go about subjecting the socius to the libidinal, the molar to the molecular? How does one find a line of perception that from the molecular moves on to the aetherometric, to the fluxes of massfree energy?

PC - Despite their incisive foundations of schizoanalysis (6), Deleuze and Guattari were on the wrong track when they suggested that there might be a "properly libidinal conflict" between science functioning as a "paranoiac-Oedipalizing element" and an analytical "schizorevolutionary element"; it might have pleased those who, precisely, have been overimbued with the tragedy of the living. And in science, no less. There is another track, which the Anti-Oedipus already described as that of "schizophrenic mathematics", and Mille Plateaus managed to pursue with reference to a science that smoothly occupies Space - despite all the cautions and the later revisiting of the dangers of unified scientific theories in What is Philosophy. It is a strange line - an energetic biophysics of microfunctions that keeps oscillating between the projects of Philosophy and Science - between outcomes that are not known and outcomes that can be predicted only by a systematic, microfunctionalist deformation as in continuous variation - and which, together, constitute, yes, a lawful correction, to paraphrase Reich, of epistemology - precisely because it focuses on accepted sense and experimental data that have not been adequately grasped and constitute therefore the preferred terrain for that unconsciousness.

AC - At bottom, what we're trying to say is that this project of Aetherometry is not about human politics, is not about antifascism per se, is not about antiglobalization, is not about making survival easier for humanity, is not about this or that technology, nor about knowledge for its own sake, and so on. What it is about is the developing of a nonhuman perspective on Life, from which liberating technologies might emerge. The worst tyranny of History is how it measures everything, nature and art, science and thought, by human points of view. Gotta score that point and make the right representation! And always in the image of the human, including God as the substitute for the Aether. But we must learn to respect everything in nature, its violence and its serenity. We must learn to seize events, beings, things, from all the nonhuman perspectives that they carry within themselves. That is the project of Intelligence. Aldous Huxley wrote some beautiful words about this in Heaven and Hell (7). Let me read to you:

"Nature bears a strange resemblance to that inner world where no account is taken of our personal wishes or even of the enduring concerns of man in general. Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologists pursue the close-up - the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty-feet, even at arm's length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains. Something analogous happens to the myopic artist or the happy lover".

LB - The question you raise about non-human affects and non-human thinking is tempting. Not only are our perceptive system and cognitive apparatus molded by culture, but the molecular bombardment of cultural signs over a body produces its own biology. A human-too-human biology. Like the old rousseauesque question of Culture versus Nature turned into one of Culture as Nature, as second Nature. However, we do not see many people out there, either scientists or artists, scholars or journalists, intellectuals or the next regular guy, wanting, or feeling the need, to scratch as deep as that. For the vast majority there is nothing to question about the human form of this world - simply because there is nothing else. Trapped in the human form, with the judgment of God sealing the bottle, territorialization completed. In this sense, how can the Aetherometry principles be understood by anyone if they were not previously - felt?

PC - This is that question that points to experimental methods - intuition, experience, inductive thought, constructivist approaches. Yet, the moment one has to think about death and what Life is and what it has become reduced to through History, the same questions are being posed, even if badly. But there's truth to what you say - this disquiet, the question itself, and even a certain preparation have to be there before someone takes the leap to learn about Aetherometry with an open mind. Precisely, Aetherometry is about Science and not about learning per se, or the politics of Science - it is about learning the hidden energy codes and processes of nature that to this day have remained ignored or poorly grasped, and it is about insights into Life that propose benign technological usages.

LB - You seem to envisage the aetherometric project as a tool but also as a precondition for intervening intelligently upon a multiplicity of affects, scientific, artistic, philosophic - even medical. The fact that it constitutes such a precondition is not your doing - but a consequence of the conditioning we have received that leads liars to be the first to believe their own lies, including in this all forms of scientific fiction, and then also a consequence of our natural or energetic being - including the entirety of the being we refer to as the socius or the body of a socio- historic formation, what organizes our affects into an organism. Yet, at the same time, everything happens as if you are making a strange ethical demand on your readers, and that is not a common situation. After all, if what one is asking for is more 'deterritorialization', including a better decoding of natural flows, are you suggesting that this project - science and the microfunctionalist aetherometric method - is not just one more territoriality in the weaving of desiring machines?

PC - Well, there are two parts to your question - let me address the latter first. To the extent that every scientific body of work and every theory has its errors, or even very real limitations, it is always and just another territoriality. But to the extent that basic scientific revolutions are possible and necessary, and to the extent that they are able to effect adequate epistemological rearrangements, there may be more to a theory or a body of work than being a mere territoriality. It may present us with a power to deterritorialize or decode that responsibilizes an entire socius or an epoch. But to address the first part of your question - regarding sense, the preconditions for an interest in Aetherometry and the wider social, political and scientific questions. I have little doubt that the being of society is sick. That is a constatation that all fascists, old and modern, also make. The breakdown of the old State-and-Nation-based principles of unification of mankind for the benefit of a world-'culture' has opened Pandora's box. I am not as optimistic as Deleuze or Guattari were about the excesses of deterritorialization that underlie the global machine, anymore than I would trust the Spirit that has guided the hand of NASA. Nor am I saying that Aetherometry alone has the answers or has all the answers. Aetherometry has no answers of that kind - it is not a cult and it has no opinions. Aetherometry, in fact, only purports to have answers to those problems that it knows how to pose - but it is not a doctrine, even if one can see it as stark physical evidence for Nietzsche's doctrine of Eternal Recurrence of the Other. It is a systematic thought, at once analytical and experimental, that has laid the foundations for a biophysical science of energy, and, at that, of massfree or aether energy. Its tracks are difficult and demanding. It is not everybody's path. Aetherometry has no answers to the political problems we have been discussing. It is far more like a guide to the machinics of energy that are implicated in the very production of desire, independently from the regime of desire one is faced with. If it has a politics, it is not a macropolitics, but a micropolitics - precisely as Deleuze and Guattari envisaged - a micropolitics of nonhuman affects. But that is the true micropolitics of knowledge when placed at the service of Life. However, my own views are that the global society is on an irreversible course of self-destruction, permanent and slow, that is bound to accelerate on a variety of fronts - as it has been. Even the civil liberties that will remain will become pathetically devoid of sense. But aetherometric theory has no such opinions about this.

LB - Surely, however, you think that knowledge of the Aether and this minor science would go a long way to transform the present social conditions of Survival?

AC - Yes, this is knowledge that affirms Life. But such an appraisal is not universal; it can only be made from the viewpoint of an apprenticeship of the Spirit, a recomposition of Desire that constitutes the real transformation of the material and energetic conditions that limit Spirit itself or Desire. Castaneda often reminds one that a warrior has no illusions about the foolishness of our fellow human beings - and so, any gesture, big or small, that is not mere indulgence, must do battle with that unconsciousness on its grounds, or better still, thereby redefine those unconscious, libidinal or energetic grounds by itself, on its own. The old 'Aztec' knowledge of the Double or Nauhalli had already concluded to the same principle - that the Tonalli of consciousness is virtually unable to perceive events, actions and reactions, from the viewpoint of energy. It can only seize forms, at best. The schizze or split in our being is not the result of any materialization of ideology, anymore than it is a mere linguistic procedure or the crossing between physical dimensions. It is the moment of an energetic intervention, the manifestation of Spirit, a beckoning to higher becomings. But can Spirit save us from anything - except ourselves, in the best of cases?

LB - If I get you - Spirit is not merely a practical activity, or even its phylum; it is the activity that produces thought, and thought is a configuration of biophysical energy. The fluidity between any string of configurations hides the act of intent - this then, which both of you have often spoken about, is it part of the aetherometric project?

PC - Only to the extent that the aetherometric project follows the pursuit of those energy functions, often seen as imperceptible, that underlie the energetic processes of intent, perception, action, thought, life, light. Energy is a daily effort for a warrior or a 'man of knowledge'. From that viewpoint, the world is just a concept employed to sadden us - and so are those voices of friends that remind one of the world and its judgements. The actual world, the only one that matters, is what we make of it at every intersection or moment in our lives. And where the exploitation is the harshest, is where this percept still remains more actual and intense than ever -

AC - We are, in our epoch, at an unbelievable conjuncture - the end of the era of ideologies removed all value from the last ambitions of nations, classes, races and masses. It is not an intervention like that of Toni Negri and his followers which will alter anything - it can only limit itself to spouting the same tired, old, vacuous notions of an organization of the movement of a populace. Perversely, one almost wishes that Guattari would turn in his grave - all the more so as the SI stated a million times better just what was at stake, at least on that level of the combat in everyday life. Even youth movements are now perfectly confronted with a simple fork - either secrete the international bureaucrats of today and tomorrow, or undergo inevitable militarization and reduction to some form of cheap, sensationalist terrorism. Militantism is a christian trap - just as Nietzsche saw that it was - and no less Islamic either, for that matter. Rebellion has become a tool of the system - and those schooled in the arts of intelligence see how the cost is to watch rebellions fall over and over again into the same old trap, clichés and slogans included. Terrorism is certainly no way out of the present chaos, anymore than chaos itself can save us. We are rapidly crossing thresholds, as a species, from which there is simply no return. And at the end of the day, the return of the Nietzsche project, just like the return of the Durruti Column, or any new variant of this, will have to find a refrain of its own not limited by the failure and the limits of past experimentation. But can we seriously envisage some form of social and sexual self-regulation in a spectacular world - where all is out of control, even relative control, where all is a matter of entertainment value? So, the problem is much deeper, and much sharper tools are needed, not only to say what one means but also to make it stick. To do something intelligent about it. To induce totally new courses of action.

LB - But can you avoid the banalization of your work as just another cargo-cult?

PC - We will let scientists decide that, when they finally dare to make computations with our methodology or repeat our experiments often enough to begin to understand what is there that matters to be understood. There was this neorelativist Sarfatti who would not make the effort to read our writings - but chose, one blue day, to denounce what he decided was our wrong dimensionality for energy. Why? Because he cannot understand either Reich or Aetherometry - or the simple fact that massfree energy does not carry the dimensionality of mass - since he has never made the effort to read a single one of our publications. Yet, massfree energy can also be measured in the traditional units of ergs, joules or electron-volts. Moreover, the same individuals who cannot be systematic about the dimensionality of energy, or even grasp it, discuss topological descriptions of the Real that supposedly have I don't know, three hundred dimensions...

AC - People behave as if they are possessed, and scientists are no exception - all the values which they held up as human values have now been turned around. They permanently regurgitate the past as easily as they invent numbered dimensions or 'put-on' particles. They all acknowledge they have no joy in it, but are constrained to do it because 'Arbeit is the condition of Survival'. One of the Sarfatti admirers once admitted that modern physics is amazingly like the metaphysics of Hollywood's Sci-Fi movies. Yes, in the very same way that the events of 9/11 bear a striking resemblance to the movie The Siege produced in 1998.

LB - Akronos has managed a feat for a new publishing house - to publish the first two volumes of Experimental Aetherometry in six months of operation, nearly twenty or so reports and essays - what has been the feedback?

PC - Apparently, sales of the monographs have been strong enough that Akronos is thinking about following our advice - that only those readers who have gone through those two volumes should be considered for access to the third volume...

LB - Ha haha! Like an initiation! But you must be joking?!

PC - Yes, it's bad for business - but then what? - we surely think that this knowledge, though it could benefit all, is still just for a few - those who can patiently read and learn, who have come to know how to suspend judgement, are not bothered by the ad hominems, are not put off by the way we philosophize with a jackhammer or investigate under the microscope, and are, effectively, interested in learning about the secrets of nature. Our initial suggestion to Akronos was to make it only accessible to those who become members of the ABRI. And I think there is merit to this view.

AC - One could not put it better than by saying that life, joy, unfettered knowledge, inhuman love are toxic for most human beings. Our conditioning is so extensive and the principle of reaction so very under the skin that we experience revulsion and hatred whenever we are confronted by something entirely new, and that is what Aetherometry is, something entirely new that uses the fragments of the old to create a new ensemble for scientific investigation. We are redefining the framework of science - of Physics and Biology - and if our contemporaries do not notice us, other than to cite us as examples of wishful thinking and insanity, what could we possibly care about them? Our work, if it survives the assault of all its enemies - leftist bureaucrats, corporate spies, fanatics and debile Reichianists, relativists - is for future generations, if and when people learn to think again, to read and write again, if and when they choose to learn the beautiful language of functional biophysical mathematics, if and when they cease confusing Nietzsche with black fascism, or Reich with politically correct Saharasianism, or Bergson with Chardinism.

PC - Aetherometry is a call to cease pactuation with the enemies of thought, of science and of knowledge: the Higher Men of Kulture who are ensconced in their ivory towers - all the fundamentalist mullahs of this world, no matter what their ethnic background or their creed. Some of the feedback from such quarters has been sheer vomit - which in itself could be a performance. But it fails to be even an event - psychopaths of this sort are mostly characterized by their incapacity to read or understand, eyes wide shut as Kubrick so aptly put it.

LB - So, then, back to what I was arguing before - there is a political, a micropolitical vein to your project - one that, somehow, strategizes also as a function of socio-historical conjunctures. Do you see your work in any way along these lines?

PC - This is hardly a matter for a discussion like this. But let us see - first, there is this impassable framework: today a 'planetarian world' is produced nonstop around the clock. This world defines itself by grand issues - the economy, disasters, famine, AIDS, terrorism, law and order, energy and so on. It also regards itself as the solution to these problems, but its solution is a permanent state of crisis where all is unstable. And in this instability runs the demand for the easy solution to everything - an easy solution to terrorism that is policial and military; an easy solution to AIDS or the common cold which should be, or 'is', a vaccine; an easy solution to law and order - three strikes and you're out; an easy solution to equality - political correctness; and so on. With each easy solution all that's created are new corporate and governmental bureaucracies, amidst a growing legislative chaos ruled by pure lines of corruption. No problem is actually addressed. Nor is it so much repressed - as it is dissolved into a myriad of new problems, even more falsified than the earlier set. The famine in Africa is the rationale for a thousand and one private, governmental and UN institutions of aid, yet over the last half-century it has grown worse and more insidious. But in the absence of overt colonialism, it all appears to be the result of the incapacity of African societies to 'live harmoniously'. You see, it is this kind of cynicism which is now king. Each newly constituted bureaucracy is really chartered to deepen and worsen the grand problem, it is but the medium of corruption. And it is all being done in the name of democracy, religion and civilization. When in fact it is merely the dictatorship of the majoritarian bureaucracies and their systems of rapacity.

AC - If the principle of representation has always undermined any chances of a direct, Agora-type democracy, this representation is no longer afraid to hide its delegation from the top; whenever it's put into question, it knows it can always resort to the base and extract another legitimacy for the order emanating from the top. The entire apparatus is in place for the rule of this fictitious democracy - with the global village meetings, the daily CNN TalkBack Live, the academic control of any counter-cultures, unending announcements of marketing polls, and rigged votes galore in every institution. In fact, in a most paradoxical way, all institutions are invaded by this virus of 'politicking' that engages a permanent degradation. This only deepens the cries for easy solutions, and more of the same lousy cake gets served as solution. All institutions of the modern world are now caught in this vicious cycle. The essence of modern civilization is the very dissolution of society - as a concept and a dominant reality. If one can still speak of a dominant world, this world is not the world of a society, but of its degradation.

PC - It's this very dissolution that should alert us to learn about "things nonhuman", before it is too late for that experiment that one calls "intelligent human life".

(1) Correa, P & Correa, A (2002) "Aether power from pulsed plasmas", Akronos Publishing, Labofex Monograph LS-25.

(2) Correa, P & Correa, A (1999) "The indirect 'ORgone effect' of Tesla radiation: solar spectra for ambipolar Aether and Blackbody radiation", Akronos Publishing, ABRI Monograph AS2-17A..

(3) Correa, P & Correa, A (2000) "Determination of the OR and DOR energies, frequencies and wavelengths driving the atmospheric allotropic cycle of oxygen, ozone and water", Akronos Publishing, ABRI MonographAS2-17B.

(4) Correa, P & Correa, A (2002) "The microwave cosmic background radiation (mCBR) as evidence for cosmological creation of electrons with minimum kinetic energy and for a pervasive cosmic spectrum of ambipolar massfree radiation", Akronos Publishing, ABRI Monograph AS2-17C.

(5) Canadian Bill C-42, the new anti-terror bill, was withdrawn ion April 24th, 2002, and replaced by Bill C-55.

(6) Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1972) "Anti-Oedipus", Viking Press, NY, NY, p. 283 and following on "The molecular unconscious".

(7) Huxley, A (1954) "Heaven and hell", in "The doors of perception/Heaven and hell", Harper Colophon Books, NY, NY, p. 129.