Wilhelm Reich, who posthumously enjoys a reputation as an alternative health innovator and a respected figure among scientific researchers, was railroaded into jail as a direct result of a disinformation campaign kindled by "freelancer" Mildred Edie Br ady in New Republic. (1) Reich made every effort to track and correct the damage caused by Brady's distortion of his work (2) but ultimately it led to his federal prosecution. Incredibly, the legal case against him was based almost exclusively on the slander Brady issued from a respected "alternative" journal. This had more to do with Brady's covert Stalinism than any rational critique, but her smears took on a life of their own. Within a few years, serious professional publications such as the < EM>Journal of the American Medical Association and the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic picked up her misrepresentations without independent investigation. These combined to poison the social atmosphere for Reich's fledgling science - orgono my, the study of orgone energy functions. It set the stage for an unscientific assault on his work by the FDA and led to Reich's imprisonment and death.
Even among his critics, few disagree that Reich's last days were a sad and unfortunate episode, but four decades later the familiar pattern of press smear and irrational persecution of orgonomy researchers continues through the agency and covert disru ption of Joel Carlinsky of Holyoke, Massachusetts. Carlinsky has written defamatory letters against Reich and those who continue his research, often attempting to pit one against another. He has spied on anyone who expresses a genuine interest in orgonomy by representing himself as a Reich enthusiast, taking advantage of the openness of people who may be unaware of his true intentions. He was jailed for burglarizing the Wilhelm Reich Museum in Rangeley, Maine; he has intercepted the mail of medical orgono mists; he conducted his own hate mail campaign against orgonomic researchers with a steady stream of letters to Flatland Magazine, Steamshovel Press and many others; he has even poisoned several by exposing them to radioactive materials.
As with Brady's articles, Carlinsky's anti-Reich smears have been repeated and amplified in the "alternative media". Carlinsky found willing partners in the so-called "skeptics" clubs, on the Internet, and even in the conspiracy mill.Skeptical Inquirer and its parent organization, the Committee for the Scientific Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) use Carlinsky as their anti-Reich agent in their quixotic battle against the "paranormal", recently printing disinformation attempting to connect Reich to the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. (3) Individuals purporting to have an "interest" in orgonomy have assisted Carlinsky. Mr. Jamerling Ogg of Windham, Maine, operates an Internet web site called "Public Orgonomy Research Exch ange" (PORE) although he has done no serious research. Instead, he collects every utterance regarding Reich he might find on the Internet and reposts it on his web pages. His slogan is: "Question Authority... There Are No Experts." Think about it.
Jamerling Ogg enjoys the dubious distinction of having introduced Carlinsky's most recent article, titled "Orgonomy Peddlers", to the Internet. For the past year, Mr. Ogg has distributed Carlinsky's disinformation as a permanent feature on his web sit e. Jerry Decker and Chuck Henderson re-posted the article on their KeelyNet web site. This location is revealing, since KeelyNet was previously chosen by John Lear for an "exclusive" on his confusionist UFO story. (4) Paranoia, under the editoria l direction of the pseudonymous Al Hidell and Joan D'Arc, reprinted Carlinsky's slanders and continue to give him a platform in their magazine's letters page. (5) Jamerling Ogg, KeelyNet, CSICOP and Paranoia all had been fully briefed on Carlins ky's criminal history, and they cannot hide behind a pronouncement of ignorance.
Until this recent expansion of his smear campaign, Carlinsky's targets have wisely treated the intrusion upon their life and work as a nuisance that would only be exacerbated by giving it further attention. One chief target of his attacks, Dr. James D eMeo, the most publicly active orgonomic scientist in the US and founder of the Orgone Biophysical Research laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, has been interrupted in this work by the necessity of counter-pointing Carlinsky's attack in "Orgonomy Peddlers". It essentially charged that DeMeo was not only causing environmental havoc but killing people. DeMeo's initial responses to Carlinsky's attacks had circulated for years, but Ogg's posting and Paranoia's recent reprint required DeMeo to update and repeat them in a 20 page point-by-point article. (6) DeMeo has always made this material -- to KeelyNet, Paranoia, the "skeptics", or anyone with an interest in the truth--available for a self addressed, stamped envelope from t he Orgone Biophysics Laboratory, POB 1148, Ashland, OR 97520 (now posted at the web site for the Orgone Biophysics lab, "http://id.mind.net/community/orgonelab/index.htm). The response deals vigorously with Carlinsky's exaggerated and false cr iticisms, making the reprints of Carlinsky a redundant aggravation that DeMeo has also had to repeatedly address. To date, none of DeMeo's critics - Ogg, Carlinsky, Battaglia, Joan D'Arc- have countered the substance of DeMeo's self-defense, though they h ave been mightily embarrased by it and have shamefacedly attempted to divert the issue to picayune hair-splitting.
Carlinsky has duped many people by claiming to be convinced that Reich's discoveries are valid and that he is a "friend" of this research. He is particularly obsessed with the use of the cloudbuster, a device developed by Reich and used in "atmospheri c medicine" to combat the now-critical morbidity of the earth's delicate environment by restoring natural pulses of rainfall. During the West Coast drought in 1988, DeMeo began soliciting water resource offices in California for small grants to do cloudbu sting work in the high Sierras. The state had already granted $20 million for cloudseeding operations, a weather control technology of limited effectiveness. (Cloudseeding doesn't work if there are no clouds to seed.) After opening a dialogue with the Gov ernor's Drought Emergency Task Force, one individual, John-Michael Battaglia, defended cloudbusting to members of that task force at a meeting of cloudseeding companies assembled under the name of the Weather Modification Association (WMA). Carlinsky targ eted Battaglia for a barrage of anti-DeMeo phone calls the day he returned from the meeting. DeMeo also learned from Battaglia that Carlinsky had been goading the editor of WMA Newsletter, Thomas Henderson, into publishing an anti-cloudbusting p aper based on Carlinsky instead of a review of the scientific data. Although Carlinsky's provocations eventually stopped the promising dialogue with the task force, DeMeo convinced Henderson not to publish, on ethical grounds, yet another attack on Reich' s ideas.
No such logic prevailed in a 1993 encounter with Carlinsky. DeMeo proposed a public recognition forum on Reich to the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS/PD). That such a mainstream scientific group would approve the proposal, while exceptional, serves as some measure of the level of acceptance Reich's work has received in the decades since his death. After Carlinsky made AAAS/PD a recipient of his hate mail campaign, however, it did an about-face on DeMeo . AAAS/PD Counselor Robert Bowman wrote back to Carlinsky, in a letter xeroxed and forwarded to DeMeo, that "your materials have convinced the Executive Committee members of AAAS/PD that we must reject DeMeo's proposal...One reviewer has described the pro posal on Wilhelm Reich as `quite mad...Reich's groupees [sic] have remarkable survival power--that is, those who have survived the argonal box! [sic] Again, thank you for your assistance in our review of the DeMeo proposal." (7) Despite DeMeo's protests t hat AAAS/PD used hate mail and smears as part of its evaluation process, it reversed itself and rejected the proposal. As with the "Orgonomy Peddlers" article, Dr. DeMeo makes full documentation of this sabotage, and AAAS/PD's extremely unethical behavior , available for a stamped envelope. Carlinsky-directed invective has provided background for anti-Reich articles in such books as Jack Raso's Dictionary of Metaphysical Healthcare, (8) Robert Baker's Mind Games(9) and such magazines as New York Skeptic, (10) and t he aforementioned Skeptical Inquirer and Paranoia. In much the same way Mildred Edie Brady's articles were multiplied by repetition in other magazines that did no research on Reich before convicting him of medical fraud in their pages, t he criticism on the surface looks like it comes from many sources. It actually comes from the same source--an irrational one, from a convicted criminal who trumpets his own mental pathology. (11)
Perhaps most remarkable is the link between Joel Carlinsky and Martin Gardner, a CSICOP "fellow" of some repute who was responsible for repeating the Brady smears in his 1952 book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. (12) Gardner has wr itten his own criticism of DeMeo (13), which uses more tempered language but still virtually ignores Reich's scientific protocols and relies on information coming again from Carlinsky. In his last memoir, Gardner notes that he learned the ape language of the Tarzan novels from Carlinsky. (14) That information was used in both a Washington Post review of the memoir and in Skeptical Inquirer, making the CSICOP-Gardner-Carlinsky connection absurdly explicit. (15) Similarly, correspondence b etween DeMeo and Henry Bauer, the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, on Bauer's criticism of Reich in Skeptical Inquirer were dutifully copied by Bauer and sent to Carlinsky. Bauer's article unfairly failed to mention v olumes of scientific documentation sent to him by DeMeo, but the essential point remains: CSICOP skeptics offer Carlinsky as a credible source while his open ambition is to smear, distort, criminally harass and do physical harm to students of Reich. (16)
That this is an extraordinary breach of the scientific integrity the "skeptics" pretend to defend, not to mention a breach of plain common sense, requires only a quick review of Joel Carlinsky's behavior over the past twenty years:
Mid-1970s: Carlinsky showed up unannounced at Jerome and Desiree Eden's home in Idaho carrying a small amount of a radioactive substance to "test" the Edens' sensitivity to the poison. Jerome Eden wrote Planet in Trouble among many other titles that boldly pursued Reich's ideas in rolled-sleeve-work-shirt, everyday language. The Edens had moved to Idaho to get away from pollution. Eden died of cancer in 1989; his widow Desi subsequently died of breast cancer.
Early 1980s: At Carlinsky's urging, the FDA began investigating doctors they thought were still treating patients with orgone accumulators. Carlinsky also began writing and phoning various orgonomic workers attempting to extort informa tion from them with threats of breaking into their homes.
September 1980: Carlinsky broke into the Wilhelm Reich Museum in Rangeley, Maine, stealing various files, Reich's original microscopic slides, and, significantly, the guest book listing. Police arrested him when he tried to sell some p u rloined letters, and indicted him for possession of stolen property, stolen credit cards and possession of a forged driver's license.
Mid-1980s: Carlinsky began hanging around Earth First! meetings, acting in concert with Mary Lou Sapone of Perceptions International, a private Wackenhut-styled security firm. Functioning as an agent provocateur--some Earth Fi rsters thought he worked for the FBI--he tried to enlist them in a plot to "take out every nuclear reactor on the East Coast." Dave Foremen and other EF! activists were arrested in a similar framed-up scheme.(17)
Late 1980s: The FBI warned the American College of Orgonomy in Princeton, New Jersey about a bomb threat. During this period, Carlinsky shifted tactics with his phone calls and correspondence, presenting himself as a fellow ent husiast to those with a genuine interest in order to cajole information from them. In 1989 he claimed responsibility for the damage caused by Hurricane Hugo using Reich's cloudbusting technology. By 1990, Carlinsky had focussed his attention on James DeMeo. He sent a threatening letter to DeMeo's wife, circulated a fake fund-raising letter using DeMeo's stationery and continued circulating poison-letters to universities, professional journals and private groups.
1991: In a phone conversation with Ed Gehrman, a contributing editor of Flatland Magazine, Carlinsky stated that he would do everything in his power to discredit Wilhelm Reich and that if Dr. DeMeo had any chance of convincin g establishment science of the validity of cloudbusting, Carlinsky would "have to shoot him." Gehrman took this matter-of-fact threat very seriously.
DeMeo made every effort to ignore the attacks and has successfully continued his work with the biophysics lab, opening a new facility, conducting many symposia and publishing a great deal of scientific data. Perhaps articles such as this one cast Carli nsky's escapades in too high relief. He may be nothing more than over-identified with Reich, socially unable to express himself in another way. But Earth First! would be the first to point out that the FBI's COINTELPRO program didn't end with the congress ional committees on intelligence in the mid-1970s. Shortly after the planning sessions for the 1990 "Redwood Summer" demonstrations to protect old-growth forests, environmental organizers Judi Bari and Daryl Cherney were bombed in their car in Oakland, Ca lifornia. The FBI charged them with possession of an explosive device, a false charge for which the FBI is now being successfully sued. Interestingly, Carlinsky attended those meetings of Earth First! before the bombing, presumably as part of a cadre of < EM>provocateurs. Dave Foreman and other EF! activists were arrested in a scheme very similar to the one Carlinsky concocted for them.
In 1996, Steamshovel Press editor Kenn Thomas traveled to an infrared imaging lab north of London with a BBC-TV director to test the temperature differential of an orgone accumulator. The imaging clearly detected increased heat within the accu mulator, an important observation that contradicts the mechanical process of entropy. Soon after Thomas returned to the US, Carlinsky barged into the London office of the BBC director and demanded money. It was not the first time Carlinsky had flown a gre at distance to meddle in orgonomy-related activity.
Is Carlinsky an agent-provocateur? He is a two-time loser on federal counts and operates full-time on tax dollars as an SSI disability pensioner. Where does he get the time, the plane fare, the unlimited long-distance phone calls for the past thirty years, to disrupt workshops and conventions, mail out hate flyers, chatting for hours to anyone who will listen? If he has another source of funds, as a paid provocateur might, it remains unknown. If he manages all this by living free off his parents (despite his 55 years of age), theft, extortion and somehow defrauding the airlines, his government SSI checks subsidize this. This makes him a de facto, government-funded provocateur.
Carlinsky is in fact, and by strict SSI definition, incapacitated - yet he finds people to type his rants, post them on the Internet, publish them in periodicals and advertise his mail drop. To anyone who requests more "information" and to many that do n't, he sends personalized letters on yellow legal paper, laboriously penned in all capitals, with spelling skills that rival those of the late Lee Harvey Oswald. With select targets, Carlinsky calls at all hours and refuses to terminate conversations at obvious points -- telephonic stalking and a subtle form of brainwashing. He's always got a juicy rumor based on a half-truth. In this way, he pushes his contacts into typing and editing his lies, spreading the rumors. They in turn offer little resistance in favor of getting a big kick out of tempestuous social relations such as Internet "flame wars" and public mud-slinging -- from a safe distance, of course.
When Paranoia reprinted Carlinsky's "Orgonomy Peddlers", the editors knew that the article itself was libellous since they edited it to make it less so. Though completely ignorant of the facts under discussion, they did not contact the persons slandered in Carlinsky's article prior to publication. When Kenn Thomas confronted Paranoia's editors with the facts, and tactfully suggested the possibility that Joan D'Arc's decision to legitimize Carlinsky with her enthusiastic endorsement mi ght have resulted from his phone harassment, she took umbrage that the notion was "insulting." Later, she and co-editor AlHidell professed total ignorance of Carlinsky's past. Al - but not Joan D'Arc - said he regretted publishing the article. However, th ey made no effort, then or now, to get the facts.
Shortly after confessing they had been duped, they rejected Jim Martin's suggestion that if Carlinsky had victimized them, they themselves might research and uncover Carlinsky's activities, his financial support, and his background. They "don't do rese arch," the Paranoia editors opined, but simply "edit" a self-styled "people's forum" devoted to the "heightened awareness" of "paranoia," and became angry at Martin as the messenger of bad tidings and truth. Having been caught red-handed conspiri ng with a well-known provocateur, and having demeaned the work of a scientist whose work they did not understand, they whined more about "openness to controversy" than about having been set up by Carlinsky. This made explicit a perception--prompt ed in part by the editors' use of pseudonyms--that Paranoia, a magazine which primarily publishes Internet downloads and widely circulated material from other zines and newsletters, had never taken conspiracy research seriously. (18) In the end, Paranoia's editors exposed their contempt for all such research and indeed, the contents of their own magazine, when they claimed: "We did not knowingly become involved in this real-life conspiracy" [emphasis added]. The provocateur had exposed the poseurs.
Jamerling Ogg's amateur web page "PORE" suffered a similar fate. Formed in 1995 to discuss Reich, an Orgonomy Mailing List (OML) performed its function well and Reich enthusiasts from around the world began sharing their knowledge, research and questio ns. It was a real breakthrough in the often fractious environment of Reichian groups. Mr. Ogg was an early proponent but infrequent contributor and tended to view the OML as an adjunct to his web page PORE, although it was a completely separate entity. It was on the OML that "Orgonomy Peddlers" first appeared the Internet. (As usual, Paranoia's publication of it was a reprint.) Several participants, including Dr. DeMeo, Martin, Ogg and the moderator of the OML had privately discussed the inevitab le appearance of Carlinsky on the mailing list. DeMeo sent documentation to Mr. Ogg regarding Carlinsky's history, since he, like many other participants on the OML, was unaware of it. Mr. Ogg replied by informing DeMeo that he planned to publish "Orgonom y Peddlers" on his web site, and included his own long, rambling editorial in support of Carlinsky's contention that DeMeo was somehow damaging the environment. Ogg said he wanted to "expose the plague." DeMeo responded that Ogg already was informed as to Carlinsky's criminal behavior and stalking of DeMeo. Ogg demanded that DeMeo reply to Carlinsky's article in detail. DeMeo was faced with the absurdity of writing yet another retort to Carlinsky's false and misleading claims. He informed Ogg that accordi ng to legal advice he had received, a lawsuit would be in order. Ogg apparently failed to understand that, as publisher of the article, he had responsibility for libellous material on his web site. Ogg immediately posted a web page claiming "censorship" r ather than own up to his blunder. Jim Martin, upon reading Ogg's editorial, instantly insisted that Ogg remove his contributions from PORE's web site. (Martin and Thomas had been the first voluntary contributors to the "PORE Journal". To this day, Ogg con tinues to plagiarize Martin's work (19) on his web pages.) Subsequently an "anonymous someone" broadcast the article to the 100 or so subscribers of the Orgonomy Mailing List and elsewhere on the Internet. Ogg most likely knows the identity of this "no se e um" , and later on he posted the article on his own web page - without DeMeo's response.(20) Steamshovel Press editor Kenn Thomas became among the first to post angry responses and quit the OML in protest as it became clear that it would devolv e around Carlinsky's distortions.
Out of nowhere, John-Michael Battaglia appeared on the OML, the person who had been so helpful in containing Carlinsky's disinformation among the cloudseeders of the Weather Modification Association. After that episode, Battaglia had shared a copy of a play he wrote on Reich with DeMeo, who encouraged him to write it as a documentary. The two had a final meeting after Battaglia's business collapsed financially in Los Angeles and he was returning home to live with his family. They parted on friendly te rms. Now (perhaps after continued pressure from Carlinsky) Battaglia did not wait for DeMeo's response and immediately began baiting him with his own angry and unfair remarks on Carlinsky's behalf. (21) Both Jamerling Ogg and John-Michael Battaglia have t ried to distance themselves publicly from Carlinsky, but the fact remains that they had used him for their own small purposes, finding pleasure or self-importance in tearing down the work of others. They eventually turned OML into a sewer of invective aga inst DeMeo. Shortly before Christmas 1996, Ogg forwarded to the OML some private email from DeMeo wherein DeMeo voiced his frustration with Ogg's continuing promotion of Carlinsky. Ogg did this in an effort to incite his associates to denounce DeMeo. Afte r they had posted about 100 kilobytes of turgid attacks on DeMeo to the exclusion of any positive contributions, the OML's disgusted moderator decided to shut the down the mailing list. Hypocritically, Ogg and Battaglia profusely thanked the moderator for his service on the OML, while blaming its demise on DeMeo.
Carlinsky received help from two other sources. EIDOS, a porno tabloid, published yet another one of his rants. Steamshovel Press editor Kenn Thomas counter-pointed for the sake of redirecting EIDOS readers from Carlinsky's r ants to Reich's actual writings. When EIDOS editor Brenda Loew Tatelbaum published a follow-up from Carlinsky, Thomas decided not to continue a pseudo-dialogue which granted head-start prominence to lies while the truth comes limping along behind . Thomas also wrote a similar admonition to Jim Keith, author of Black Helicopters Over America and OKBomb, and coauthor with Thomas of The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Keith spellchecked and type d up Carlinsky's article and sent it out for publication to a half-dozen magazines (EIDOS was the only one to publish it) in exchange for Carlinsky's "inside dope" on conspiracy currents. He thereby participated in the kind of conspiracy he osten sibly writes to expose by forwarding Carlinsky's cruel and personal attacks on Jim Martin of the Flatland book service. Keith secretly betrayed someone who had sold and promoted his work for many years. When confronted, Keith laughed it off: "if I really wanted to destroy your little empire I'd think of something much more effective," echoing Carlinsky's own overdeveloped sense of grandiosity.
Indeed, the Carlinsky affair remains a tempest in a teapot for now. He does not have the audience Mildred Edie Brady had in the late 1940s because (a) the Internet has made readers rely much less on public opinion magazines like New Republic a nd more on their own thinking and research; and (b) Carlinsky cannot write a coherent essay. He can and has done damage, however. Those who have embarrassed themselves in their dalliance with Carlinsky -- CSICOP, Paranoia, EIDOS, KeelyNe t, Jamerling Ogg, Jim Keith and John-Michael Battaglia -- could coalesce and become an identifiable axis of disinformation, or they might reconsider and make a clear statement against his behavior. Will they learn and grow from the experience? Carlinsky i s still out there stalking, lurking and tagging new suckers. His cover as a "friend of Wilhelm Reich" is now totally blown. DeMeo continues his work at the Orgone Biophysics lab with great success. Those who Carlinsky has attacked continue daily routines with the knowledge that this nut is out there gunning for them. He still has his monthly SSI check and whatever other resources that give him mobility and access.
Finally, an appropriate quotation regarding the genesis of all conspiracies:
"From this basic hiding emerge all structural cheating, sneaking, conniving, all evasion, circumvention fear of directness, all rules of conduct forbidding frankness. From this, logically, emerge organizations which serve the hiding or are to protect s ociety against the ravages of crime emerging from cheating. Since the advent of dictatorships, this hiding has become a major weapon of political abuse and murder. Spying in all its forms, against and for government, good as well as bad, is an immediate e xpression and consequence of this basic hiding, due to dirtiness and suspicion in the character structure."
-Wilhelm Reich, from "Desert Development and Emotional Deadness," December 1953. (See Orgonomic Functionalism, Volume 6 (p. 46), published by the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund, POB 687, Rangeley, Maine 04970.)
(1) Brady, Mildred Edie, "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich," New Republic, May 26, 1947; see also: "The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy," Harper's, April 1947.
(2) Reich, Wilhelm, Conspiracy: An Emotional Chain Reaction, Orgone Institute Press, Rangeley, Maine, 1954.
(3) In 1987, Lear became the first to suggest a "secret deal" between alien "greys" and the US government, in which the "greys" exchanged their vastly superior technology for poaching rights on humans as the alien's dietary supplements. No explanation was forwarded to explain why a vastly superior technological race might need to make such a "deal" with any earthly power. Glenn Campbell, editor of the Groom Lake Desert Rat related something about Lear's reputation with serious ufologists on a call-in radio show: "When a caller said, "John Lear says..." you could hear their eyes roll upward and the tinge of wry sarcasm enter their voices: "So what did John Lear say?"
(4) "Reichean [sic] critic Joel Carlinsky notes that James Nichols, accused in 1995 (charges were later dropped) of storing and detonating bombs on his Decker, Michigan farm, kept a 'cloud buster' there. James Nichols reportedly discussed with an FBI i nformant in 1988 ways to 'level' the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a crime for which his brother Terry Nichols now stands indicted. Wilhelm Reich, psychiatrist and biophysicist, and inventor of the cloudbuster, believed, as do his disciples now, that droughts are caused by dangerous levels of 'deadly orgone radiation' building up in the clouds, so the disciples build these implausible contraptions, which they point at the sky, trying to zap the drought away. Typically one or more of the Reicheans wil l claim credit whenever a drought ends, although none has yet owned up to being responsible for a destructive flood, the disciples of Reich keep each other in a perpetual state of froth, endlessly deploring the Food and Drug Administration's heavy-handed actions during the 1950s against Reich for his quack cancer cures, painting him as a latter-day Galileo, hounded and destroyed by fanatical inquisitors." Skeptical Inquirer, March 1996
(5) Carlinsky, Joel, "Orgonomy Peddlers," Paranoia #13, 1996.
(6) Response To "Orgonomy Peddlers" article by James DeMeo, Ph. D., 1996
(7) Correspondence from Robert I. Bowman, Counselor AAAS/PD to Joel Carlinsky, November 13, 1993
(8) Raso, Jack, The Dictionary of Metaphysical Healthcare, Prometheus Books, 1996
(9) Baker, Robert A., Mind Games, Prometheus Books, 1996
(10) Carlinsky, Joel, "Orgonomy in New Jersey," New York Skeptic, Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 1990
(11) Just one example from a letter by Carlinsky to Dr. DeMeo in November 1996: "...If you had been willing to work with me from the beginning, we might have done a lot of good together. Instead,...I was forced by your actions to turn against orgonomy and seek to destroy it..." The prose sounds comical, but it soon takes on the tone of a stalker. "...cancer patients will possibly die because you forced me to ridicule and discredit the accumulator...Mildred Brady wrote only two articles about Reich; I w on't slack off that easily. How much damage do you think I will ultimately be able to do to you and orgonomy if I keep at it? Will 'Greensprings' [DeMeo's Orgone Biophysics Lab] enter the American vocabulary along with 'Waco' and 'Ruby Ridge'?"
(12) Gardner, Martin, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, Dover, New York, 1952
(13) Gardner, Martin, "Reich the Rainmaker: the Orgone Obsession," Skeptical Inquirer, 13 (1): 26-30, Fall 1988; and DeMeo, James, "Response to Martin Gardner's Attack on Reich and Orgone Research in the Skeptical Inquirer," Pulse of the Planet, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1989.
(14) Gardner, Martin, The Night Is Large: Collected Essays, 1938-1995 (St. Martin's: New York), 1996. "Mangani is the language spoken by the great apes who raised Tarzan. Several hundred of its words are scattered through Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels. I first learned this from Joel Carlinsky who wrote that as a boy he and his brother actually learned to speak Mangani, and that a full vocabulary is in one of the biographies of Burroughs. A related language spoken by the tailed men in Tar zan the Terrible is given in that book's ten-page glossary, along with grammatical rules."
(15) Washington Post, July 14, 1996; Dirda, Michael, "A Mansion of a Book from a Sparkling Intellect," Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 1996.
(16) Correspondence from Henry Bauer to James DeMeo and Richard Blasband, copy sent to Joel Carlinsky, 1996.
(17) Animals Agenda, September 1989, p. 20.
(18) "If they could see us chuckling over some of this stuff, a light in the attic might go on!" Joan D'Arc quipped to one critic. Prospective contributors to Paranoia might contemplate this contempt.
(19) Without attribution, Ogg appropriated Flatland Books catalog descriptions in a PORE annotated bibliography on Reich.
(20) Subsequently, Ogg would actually claim that he had not published Carlinsky's "Orgonomy Peddlers" and assert that the whole dispute was the result of a "typo". (See his letter to the editor, Paranoia #15). While he told Paranoia re aders that he decided not to publish the article, in truth he published it his PORE page under "Newsgroup Searches: 1996: February."
(21) It is unclear why Battaglia evinced concern over cloudbusting, since he shares the consensus-reality that orgone energy does not exist and said as much in a December 8, 1996, post to the OML: "Reich had, and has, something worthwhile to offer the
world other than crackpot theories about some mysterious energy."
Steamshovel!