Monday, January 14, 2019

Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead!

Mary Boyd Higgins, the long-time trustee of the estate of Wilhelm Reich, died  January 8th, 2019. 

Ms. Higgins policies in her administration of the Reich estate were and remain extremely controversial, with many people who are interested in the contents of the Wilhelm Reich Archives dismayed by the refusal of the estate to allow more access to concerned scientists and scholars.

 The late Dr. Eva Reich, the first trustee, was unable to do the job because at the time of her fathers death she had a newborn infant to support and the estate needed a full time manager but was bankrupt from legal expenses and could not pay that manager a salary to live on. None of the 30 or so M.D.s in the New York area who were making their living by what Reich had taught them were willing to help, and Ms. Higgins​, who had enough money from an inheritance to live on so she did not need a salary for devoting time to the management of the estate,​ was the only volunteer so she got the job by Hobson​​s Choice. Years later, Eva Reich​, dismayed at the way the estate was being administered,​ tried twice via the courts to reclaim the trusteeship due to Ms. Higgins insisting on keeping much of the unpublished work of Reich secret and not permi​tt​ing access. Both attempts failed, despite test​i​m​o​n​y from more than 15 witnesses who had known Reich that they believed he would have wanted his writings to be widely available. 

Today, more than 60 years after Reich died, most of that material is still largely unavailable to the general public, tied up in a arrangement between the estate and Harvard Medical School that restricts access to only a very small number of scholars, despite the fact that there is no provision in the will that allows the trustee to turn over the authority over the Archives to another institution. Additionally, some of the previously published material by Reich has been reissued by the estate in bo​w​dlerized editions that contain significant differences from the previously published editions that were approved by Reich during his lifetime. 

Ms. Higgins was very prone to litigation and filed numerous lawsuits against anyone who tried to continue Reichs work by publishing anything in the field. Many vital manuscripts remain unpublished for fear of costly legal attacks and the advancement of the work begun by Reich has been seriously retarded thereby. 

Thursday, October 2, 2014

   Cloudbusting : Environmental Menace 
                                                   by Joel Carlinsky
 
 Wilhelm Reich, in his book, "The Murder of Christ" spoke of the harm done to the cause of freedom by irresponsible "Freedom Peddlers" and warned about the possibility that his own work would be similarly usurped by "Orgonomy Peddlers" who would use it in harmful ways. As with so much Reich said, this warning has been ignored by many people favorably disposed toward Reich and his work, many of whom are supporting and encouraging individuals whose reckless and irresponsible misuse of Reich's discoveries and incompetent and misguided efforts to "prove Reich right" are causing serious ecological damage.
 
Among the worst of these is a Dr. James DeMeo, of Ashland, Oregon, who has conducted numerous cloudbusting operations over many years and has caused the deaths of thousands of innocent people and done enormous damage to the environment.
 
  Dr. DeMeo and his associates are doing a great deal of harm to the environment and innocent members of the public by incompetent cloudbusting operations conducted without proper ecological knowledge or concern for the environment. Their bungled operations have frequently resulted in devastation to ecosystems and other damages, including the deaths of many innocent bystanders, due to storms, floods, and freezing weather.
 
In 1989, DeMeo, then living in the San Francisco Bay area, conducted a series of cloudbusting operations in the Arizona desert. As recounted in his article in the Journal of Orgonomy, he first visited Arizona in March, two months before the rainy season starts, and within 3 days had produced rain. He subsequently visited Arizona one weekend each month during the 5-month rainy season and brought rain each time for a seasonal total of 5 times the normal rainfall for the area in which he was working.
 
Now, in any area with a well-defined wet season and dry season, all native plant and animal species are adapted to the normal dry season and need it. Small burrowing mammals such as pocket mice, kangaroo rats, gophers, etc.give birth underground in the dry season; if it rains unexpectedly at the wrong time of year, the burrows flood and the infants drown.
 
 Reptiles such as snakes, lizards, the desert tortoise, which is on the endangered species list, and the Gila Monster, found only in Arizona, lay their eggs in the dry season under a thin coat of sand, just enough to hide them but allow the sun to incubate them. If it rains out of season, the sand is washed away and they lose a clutch of eggs.
 
These small mammals and reptiles are the base of the food chain and if their population crashes so will that of the owls, coyotes, badgers, and other predators that depend on them.
 
Seeds dispersed in desert sand will germinate when they become moist. If there is out-of-season rain too long before the rainy season starts, they get a "false start" and then die before the real rainy season comes with sufficiently prolonged rains` to keep them growing until they produce a new generation of seeds.
 
The following year, DeMeo undertook a series of weekend expeditions to Arizona durring the usual rainy season. Since this series of operations was planned far in advance, when it would have been impossible to know what the weather at the time would be like, it was obviously not an attempt to break a drought or restore normal conditions. It was intended to be conducted regardless of what he actual weather at the time` of the planned operation might turn out to be.
 
The published report of that project shows a 500% increase in rainfall over the course of the wet season. Ask any farmer what 5 times normal rainfall would do to his crops! Unlike plants in non-desert areas, most desert plants lack the mechanism that limits uptake of excessive wather. Most desert plants absorb all the water they can get, and will swell up and burst when they get twice normal rainfall. This applies especially to the Sagaro Cactus, the State Flower of Arizona, which is on the Endangered Species List.
 
In "Contact With Space", Reich described exactly what he did in Arizona. He spent 5 months in the desert. He drove 100 miles every day just to familiarize himself with the landscape so he could note any changes in it. By contrast, James DeMeo lived in Northern California and commuted to the desert one weekend a month.
 
After 5 months of patient work, Reich succeeded in obtaining a lush growth of grass WITHOUT A DROP OF RAIN HAVING FALLEN ---- That's right! Reich, according to his own report, did not create rain in the desert and did not want to!
 
In fact, he explicitly says that rain would have made it impossible to obtain the increase in plant growth he did obtain, since it would have drowned the developing vegetation. Reich's goal, in which he was successful only after 5 months of patient daily labor, was not to make rain, but to revive the stagnant energy field of the desert to the point where it could regulate itself and produce rain at its own times, not according to some man-made schedule.
 
DeMeo misses this point entirely. He produces rain on an artificial schedule only to create impressive charts and graphs, ignoring the catastrophic effects of 5 times normal rainfall on all plant and animal species, and then, totally disregarding what Reich plainly said, claims to have "replicated" Reich's work in the desert. He repeatly refers to "Reich's rainmaking expedition" and to Reich "making rain in the desert" when in fact Reich specifically said he did not do so.
 
In subsequent years DeMeo undertook two trips to Namibia to break droughts there with a cloudbuster. He also trained local operators and left equipment with them so that Namibia now has a permanent drought- abatement program in place. Under normal conditions -- normal for the last 5-6000 years, that is -- Southern Africa has a regular cycle of 3 or 4 good years followed by a drought year.
 
 In the dry years, the prevailing winds pick up millions of tons of dust and carry it out over the ocean. About half of it falls into the ocean where it provides silica, phosphates, and other essential nutrients to the phytoplankton which are the base of the marine ecosystem food chain. So in years when Southern Africa has droughts, life in the South Atlantic flourishes and in years Southern Africa has good rains, the South Atlantic marine life dies back.
 
The remainder of the dust is carried over to Brazil, where it is the sole source of trace elements not found in Brazilian soils which are essential nutrients for many tropical rainforest plant species. Like the sea-life, the Brazilian rainforest therefore flourishes in years when Namibia has a drought and declines in years when Namibia has plenty of rain. By establishing a permanent drought abatement facility in Namibia, DeMeo has contributed to irreparable harm to the global environment. (1)
 
 In another case of ecological ignorance and irresponsibility, he reports in one of his publications that to make up a long-standing water deficit during a recent series of dry years in California, he extended the rainy season by a month one year and 6 weeks another year. I have spoken to a biologist at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory who tells me that in both years in question they lost a significant percentage of baby birds due to inclement weather during the normally dry nesting season. Baby birds get pneumonia in wet weather. Incidentally, some of the birds affected were on the Endangered Species List. (2)
 
In several consecutive years in which there was a drought in California, DeMeo and the group he belongs to, known as the C.OR.E. Network, conducted a long series of operations in an effort to end the drought pattern. While some rains did fall, the drought prsisted. It was obvious from reading his reports that the problem was the cloudbuster itself. As a safety measure, DeMeo and his associates use cloudbusters operated by remote control. This is to protect the operator from too much exposure to DOR in the immediate vicinity of the cloudbuster.
 
The remote control equipment uses 12-volt D.C. batteries to power electrical servo-motors to elevate and turn the cloudbuster pipes. Electricity has an excitng effect on orgone, and the 12-volt D.C. current was enough to cause an over-excitation of the field of the cloudbuster, which was then imparted to the orgone energy field of the atmosphere, causing an expansion that counteracted the contraction they were trying to cause to bring rain.
 
 As a result of this attempt to end the drought, it was instead prolonged. The drought would have been over much sooner if there had been no cloudbusting attempted.
 
DeMeo has also done cloudbusting operations in the Middle East. I have seen documentation obtained from the National Climate Data Center, in Ashville, North Carolina,  showing numerous deaths of people in the region as a result of catastrophic weather during the periods in which he was operating there.
 
In addition to a cold snap that was the worst in recorded history and brought the first snow in 40 years to Israel, along with the deaths of 22 people in a snowslide in the mountains in Turkey, his own report contained documentation of people drowned in a flash-flood while camping in a normally dry riverbed, and several deaths in accidents caused by driving too fast under unfamiliar`conditions on rain-slicked roads. When questioned about this by some of his German collegues, DeMeo reportedly defensively replied that his operations in the Middle East had done so much good that a few` deaths were an acceptable price to pay. (3) (4) (5)
 
Dr.DeMeo also conducted a 4-year project in Eritria to increase rainfall in that normally very dry country. The project was, according to his own report, a great success. However the effective range of the cloudbuster is very large, and the weather it creates does not stop at national borders. At the same time the rains were falling on Eritria, they also were falling on surrounding countries, and in neighboring Kenya there were disasterous floods, killing many people, followed by epidemics of water-bourne diseases like cholera and malaria caused by the increase in mosquitos which found favorable breeding conditions in the now water-logged landscape. About 20,000 people died of diseases in Northern Kenya as a result of the successfull cloudbusting operations in nearby Eritria.
 
Dr. DeMeo has also acted as an advisor for some groups in Europe who look to him for guidance and expertise in cloudbusting. One such group was responsible for a severe storm that killed about 200 people in Central Europe. (4) (8)
 
DeMeo is the leader of a group called the C.O.R.E. (for Cosmic Orgone Engineering) network. Two other members of the group, Mr. John Schleining and Dr. Stephen Nagy, have on occasion taken it upon themselves to play Smokey the Bear and stop forest fires in Oregon. According to their own reports published in the Journal of Orgonomy, they have caused up to 2.5 inches of rain in a dry summer month which normally has about 0.25 inch. Ten times normal rainfall for that time of year! This is not drought relief; it is blatant disruption.The time to break a years- long drought is in the normal rainy season, not in what is normally the dry season.
 
Despite what Smokey told these people in grade school, natural wildfires have an important role in forest life-cycles and should not be prevented. They open up stands of trees so some can grow, recycle nutrients back into the soil, help some kinds of seeds germinate, and clear away underbrush that would otherwise accumulate enough in several years to cause an eventual really disastrous fire.By meddling in normal forest fire cycles, Schleining and Nagy are following an outmoded fire-suppression policy which the Forest Service now realizes was a mistake and has abandoned. (6)
 
According to the same report in the "Journal of Orgonomy", the cloudbuster was also used to prevent fire in another way besides increasing rainfall: it was used to decrease the number of lightning strikes in the area. Now, aside from its role in creating useful and necessary fires, lightning fixes atmospheric nitrogen into compounds plants can utilize. For plant species that lack a symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their roots, including many temperate-zone forest trees, lightning plays an essential role as a source of fertilizer, so this application of the cloudbuster, far from benefiting the environment, amounts to mere vandalism of Oregon's forests. (7)
 
 
**********************************************************************************************************
 
 Documentation of Cloudbuster-related Damage By Dr. DeMeo and His Associates
 
  (1) My claim that atmospheric dust transport from Africa is essential to South Atlantic and South American ecosystems and that therefore cloudbuster interference with droughts in Africa is irresponsible and damaging is documented by the following:
 
The New York Times' International Edition on October 29, 1992 contains an article about how hot "October winds scoop up the thin topsoil off the African savanna, swirl it high into the skies, and thrust it west on a journey that can stretch thousands of miles." The article
by Marlise Simons goes on to explain how "the severe and lethal droughts of Africa are a boon for life in the Atlantic Ocean and for soil and vegetation in the Americas."
 
( Go to a public library and check out: Marlise Simons, "Winds Toss Africa's Soil,
Feeding Lands Far Away," New York Times, October 29, 1992.)

In addition to that New York Times account, There is also an article published in Tellus (1992, 44B, pp 133-149), a scientific journal, on "Saharan Dust in the Amazon Basin." The authors of the article, R. Swap, M. Garstang, and S. Greco of the University of Virginia Department of Environmental Sciences, are the same scientists who are featured in the New York Times account, and they make a compelling case that "Any strategy designed to preserve the Amazonian rain forest or any part thereof should equally concern itself with the inter-relationship between the rainforest, global climate, and the arid zones well removed from Amazonia."
 
 (2) My source on bird mortality in wet nesting seasons is: Geoff Geupel, Pt. Reyes Bird Observatory, Bolinas, CA  (415) 868-1221 ext 30.
(3) The dates of operations in the Middle East by Dr. DeMeo are in his own report posted on his website. Compare those dates with the following for evidence that those operations killed a number of innocent people:
 
The January 4, 1992 issue of the "Weekly Climate Bulletin," a newsletter published by the Climate Analysis Center of the United States Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  reports on a "New Year's Day storm [which] brought torrential rain and high wind to parts of the Middle East, forcing schools and businesses to close," flooding streets, blanketing Jerusalem with snow, "blacking-out" power for a fourth of the homes, creating "snow...for the first time in the mountains north of the Red Sea resort of Eilat," covering the mountains of northern Saudi Arabia with snow, downing
power lines and telephone lines in Lebanon, causing heavy avalanches in southeastern Turkey, and "killing 22 people."
 
 The "Global Climate Highlights Feature" page states that "Abnormally cold air has
settled over large sections of northern Africa, the Middle East, south-central Asia, and the Far East during the last two weeks."

 (4)  "I stopped all the financing of cloudbusting as the president of the Wilhelm Reich Society because of the side effects in 1992  because I pointed out that nobody knew about the dangerous side effects of the operations ! As a result, James DeMeo became a furious enemy towards me."
        ------Heiko Lasek
              Berlin, Germany
            (Personal communication to the author.)
 
 (5) On page 96 of the Pulse of the Planet, #4 issue, there is
a report by DeMeo entitled "OROP ISRAEL 1991-1992," in which [DeMeo] does mention flooding, homes destroyed, and people dying from traffic accidents on flooded roads as a result of the heavy rains occuring after DeMeo's November 1991 cloudbusting operations in the Middle East. 
 Quoting now from DeMeo's own report :
 
"Our research team had not anticipated the strength of the storms
which subsequently developed in the eastern Mediterranian.... When heavy
rains came, traffic often came to a standstill for hours.  Previously
bone-dry river beds and conduits filled quickly, and overflowed onto major
roads.... A few deaths also occured on the highways due to the fatal
combination of rain-slickstreets and highway speeding, or when people
attempted to drive their cars through rain-swollen streams.... Additional
difficulties also occured in a few areas when power lines were knocked down
by heavy winds or accumulated snow, leaving many persons without power,
sometimes for days."

Here, in his own words, DeMeo admits to having participated in a scientific
experiment which appears to have wreaked havoc on the public while
concurrently serving as the direct or indirect cause of several deaths
 
(6) My source for forest fire information is: Cascadia Fire Ecology Education Project, P. O. Box 3563, Eugene, OR 97403.  (503) 726-4738.
 
(7) An article published in "Science News," October 1995 documents an atmospheric chemist by the name of Pud Franzblau has discovered that lightning is a crucial ingredient
involved in the maintainence of life, because it "fixes," or breaks down, the nitrogen atoms
which exist in the air in a form unusable by plants, into a usable form. Up until Franzblau's fieldwork indicated that lightning is responsible for about 1 billion tons of nitrogen fixing (instead of only 10 million tons), researchers had thought that plants were the biggest nitrogen fixers on earth.

 It should be apparent that messing around with the atmosphere with a cloud-buster without an inkling of its ramifications on the generation of lightning could have unforeseen, untoward consequences in the ecological system on nitrogen fixation, plant growth, and human existence.
 
(8) Der Grund, warum für mich Cloudbusting lange Zeit kein Thema war, war eine Erfahrung, die ich in den 90er Jahren gemacht habe. Bei einer großangelegten Aktion, kam es zu einer internationalen Wetterkatastrophe, in deren Verlauf es etwa 200 Tote und Schäden im Bereich von 100 bis 200 Milliarden Dollar gab. Diese Aktion, an der eine Reihe von Leuten beteiligt waren, die sich heute in der orgonomischen Cloudbusting-Szene lautstark über die positiven Ergebnisse äußern, wurde daraufhin totgeschwiegen. Um keine rechtlichen Probleme zu schaffen, werde ich die genauen Umstände dieser Aktion auch nicht preisgeben. Obwohl diese Aktion (intern) als erfolgreich gewertet wurde, (weil eine monatelange DOR-Situation beendet werden konnte), werden das sowohl die Opfer und deren Angehörigen, wie auch die vielen Menschen, die ihre Existenz verloren haben, anders sehen. Außer den straf- und zivilrechtilichen Folgen, die das für alle Beteiligten haben könnte, wurden auch internationale Abkommen verletzt.

Jurgen Fisher
Newsletter von www.orgon.de

Comments On Cloudbusting In Madagascar

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: joel carlinsky <joelcarlinsky@yahoo.com>
To: roberto maglione <robert_jumper@yahoo.it> 
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2013 1:58 PM
Subject: [OrgonomicEcology] Cloudbusting In Madagascar



Dear Roberto Maglione,
Thank you for sending me the information on the upcoming conference. I shall not be able to attend, but I found the linked article
Roberto Maglione - Restoring Natural Atmospheric Pulsation in Northwestern Madagascar with the Reich Cloudbuster - Bio and Abstract – Full Paper
on your cloudbusting expedition to Madagascar very interesting. I have a few comments and I hope you will take them in the spirit of constructive criticism in which they are offered.
( 1 ) Your stated purpose in publishing this article is to " verify" or "validate" the claims made by Reich regarding the effectiveness of the cloudbuster. But no article can be considered a scientific report or will be accepted as having any value as evidence by scientists unless it includes sufficient details of the experiment to allow independent replication. You give no such details. You say nothing of what direction the cloudbuster was pointed, at what angle of elevation, for how long, at what time of day, or by what criteria any of these factors were selected. Without such information this cannot be considered a scientific report and will not be so regarded by scientists.
In fact, other than those by Reich, no article on cloudbusting has yet been published that fulfills this essential requirement for being taken seriously by the scientific community. I am, of course, aware of the argument that the information needed to replicate cloudbusting successes should be witheld to discourage independent operation, but while I agree with the intent, the fact remains that unless such details are included, no article on cloudbusting will ever be considered a scientific publication by the mainstream scientific world.
( 2 ) Of the authors you cite as prior publication, none is a trained professional expert in any relevant field, and one, DeMeo, whose doctoral-level work was in cultural anthropology, not meteorology or atmospheric physics, has been known to fraudulently claim credentials he does not in fact possess, which seriously undermines his credibility. You would have done better to cite the excellent confirmation of Reich by Charles Kelley, who was a trained meteorologist with years professional experience in weather forecasting.
( 3 ) Your observation that DOR-removal reduced the number of cyclones is, as you say, a significant new finding. However it is predictable from the orgonomic theory, which holds that strong, circulatory storms are a self-clensing mechanism by which the atmosphere tries to rid itself of DOR. So your observation is a confirmation of a claim first made by Reich in Contact With Space, published in 1957.
 However, draining off DOR with a single cloudbuster is not likely to be as fully effective as the vast, powerful sweeping motion of a cyclone would be, and any residue left behind could remain to add to the total DOR burden next year, so further cloudbuster work might still be required. If that should prove true, DOR-removal with a cloudbuster might be counter-productive in the long run by preventing the strong storms that might do a better job of solving the problem in a more complete way.
But even if the short-term advantages of breaking a drought outweigh the long-term risks of preventing storm formation, these strong circulating systems are vital in many other ways to oceanic and coastal ecosystems. I urge caution in spreading the information around that cloudbusters can prevent cyclones; some people who are ignorant of the vital role of tropical storms might think cyclones SHOULD be prevented, when in fact, the exact opposite is true.
( 4 ) You are quite right to attribute the drought to build-up of DOR, but DOR itself has a cause. While it is true that droughts have occured for ages and a certain amount of DOR is a normal stage in atmospheric energy metabolism, and it is also true that there is a generalized increase in DOR globally, with weather effects all over the world, the most important local factor in the Indian Ocean Basin is the large stockpile of armed nuclear weapons at the secretive American Navy base on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia. Since the evil American militarist regime moved these weapons there at the start of the invasion of Iraq to assert American imperialist hegemony , the effects on weather all around the rim of the Indian Ocean have been noticeable on weather maps.
While some of the worst effects can be mitigated by DOR-removal with a cloudbuster, to really solve the problem, C.OR. E. operations could and should be conducted to disable these weapons, as Reich demonstrated is possible. That would not only solve the problem of recurrent droughts in a more lasting manner, but would also thwart the efforts by the American fascistic dictatorship to threaten the lives and safety of the entire population of those countries in the region.
 Sincerely,
Joel Carlinsky

Rebutal Of DeMeo's Anti-Islamic Crusade By An Anthropologist

Dr. DeMeo is notorious for his far-right anti-Islamic biggotry and his frequent lapses into outright hate speach against Muslims, usually thinly disguised by presentation in the form of social science criticism of human rights violations alleged to be endemic in the Muslim culture or an alleged conspiracy by Muslims against the West. Numerous examples of this can be found on his own blog. 

 Many who are familiar with his work think he often oversteps the bounds of scientific discourse and promotes ideologies that incite inter-group hatred and could provoke either legal repression or violent action against innocent Muslims in Western countries or could be used to justify wars of agression against Islamic countries under the guise of "liberating" them. 

His publications are therefore of some concern to many who are familiar with his works and aware of the political activist ideology that lies behind them, as well as the history of some European scientific journals publishing ideologially-motivated articles of a similar nature in the 1930s, articles which helped set the stage for events that followed.  



Here is an article by a well-known anthropologist refuting what James DeMeo says about the Muslim religion.

Matriarchy and Islam Post 9/11: A Report from Indonesia

by Peggy Reeves Sanday
University of Pennsylvania
Published in Anthropology News, Vol. 43, No. 9, Dec. 2002, page 7.

One of my passions as an anthropologist is to write ethnography that speaks simultaneously to anthropology by building empirically grounded conceptual frameworks and to the public by exploding outmoded Western stereotypes. My recently published ethnography of the Minangkabau presents a conceptual framework for rethinking matriarchy and challenges the stereotype of Islam as universally subordinating women. Among the largest and most modern of Indonesia' s ethnic groups (four million in their home province West Sumatra and four million elsewhere) the Minangkabau are well known in Indonesia for their "matriarchal" social system and dedication to Islam.
The book, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (2002), focuses on a complex of customs called adat matriarchaat. These customs include matrilineal descent and women' s ceremonial roles. Adat matriarchaat is part of the pre-Islamic cultural tradition called adat Minangkabau. Because of the degree to which the Minangkabau tie adat to Islam in the modern period, I was challenged to explain how the supposedly patriarchal Islam came to be bound to a social system identified as matriarchal.
The book went to press in 2001 just as the post-Suharto era was loosening the stranglehold of the state on West Sumatra by granting local autonomy and the 9/11 disaster hit. I had the opportunity to examine the impact of these seismic events on the adat-Islam relationship when I took the book to present to colleagues, friends, and family in July of 2002.

Adat and Islam in West Sumatra
The accompanying photograph taken this summer in the village, which was my home for many years, illustrates the interlocking of adat and Islam. The picture shows matrilineal longhouses built in the 1920s and '30s on clan land. The houses face toward Mt Merapi, famous as the pre-Islamic site for the origin of the Minangkabau people. The axes of the houses point to a local hill on which famous spirits are believed to alight as they move from hill to hill in the adat village universe. In the foreground there is an Islamic prayer house built after the return to the traditional adat village structure, part of the renewal of the adat-Islam relationship in the post-Suharto era. Traditionally, the prayer house was a place where older men taught Islam and adat to boys of the clan. It also functioned as an alternative residence for boys and men, an usage which accords with the adat ideal that boys and men live outside their mother' s house so as not to compete for clan property with their sisters.
The Minangkabau love to tell the story about how adat and Islam achieved an accommodation. The story often begins with a proverb: Adat came down; Islam came up. According to the story, adat originated in the interior mountainous heartland of Minangkabau culture long ago, some say before the time of Christ, and went down to the coast. Islam came much later, brought by traders to the coastal regions, sometime between the 14th and 16th centuries, and went up to the mountains. The two formed an alliance and achieved an accommodation in order to fight Islamism imported from Mecca by a few well-known Islamic officials seeking to purge Minangkabau culture of adat customs such as matrilineal descent. The struggle brought on the Padri war in the late l8th and early l9th centuries. The moderate wing won the struggle with the help of the Dutch. The accommodation involved the purging of some adat practices (like gambling) and the strengthening of others. Matrilineal descent, the linchpin of adat Minangkabau, was placed in the most sacred of adat categories on a par with Islam.

Matriarchal Adat as Sacred
The sacred status of adat matriarchaat is reflected in the role of Bundo Kanduang in village life. Bundo Kanduang means "my own mother." It is both a royal title reserved for the mythical Queen Mother of the Minangkabau and a title applied to senior women in their ceremonial roles. In the book I show how women occupy center stage in social and public life through the revered adat ceremonies they organize and stage. In 2002 women were much more vocal about their central role in these ceremonies in contrast to previous years when they were virtually silent on this subject out of respect for their male counterparts whose role had been diminished by the Java-centric state under Suharto. In 2002, having regained their adat roles, male adat leaders proudly proclaimed the high status of women in community life. As one put it, "Without Bundo Kanduang there would be no adat."
In the book, I suggest that the joining of matriarchal adat and religion at the hip is a hedge against the decline of either. Backed by religion, adat is better able to withstand the global capitalist formations sweeping Indonesia. With solid roots in adat practice, religion is better able to withstand Islamist trends (at least in village life.) This conclusion was even more obvious in the post 9/11 period.

Bin Laden and 9/11
The subject of Bin Laden came up a number of times during the summer. Everyone was adamant that the Islam they were taught prohibits violence and the use of force. We achieve our ends through negotiation and discussion, not through force, I was told. One man said that his Islamic education stressed the importance of thinking about others. The same idea was expressed to me in l981 by the foremost adat-religious leader in West Sumatra, Dt. Idrus Haikimy, now deceased.
The talk about Bin Laden raised the subject of globalization. In the post 9/11 period there are two kinds of globalization Minangkabau intellectuals worry about: Western capitalism and anti-Western Islamism. As mentioned, the passion the Minangkabau pour into religion and adat acts as a defense against the destructive consequences of Western capitalism and guards against falling lockstep into a simplistic anti-Western Islamism. Urban professionals and intellectuals reject both forms of globalization as "a clash between two politicized universalisms." They long for a more humane model of globalization for their country and the world based on cultural and spiritual rather than on political or economic values in the context of "democracy building and creating good governance." This is a dream expressed by many of the peoples of the world regardless of religion.
Peggy Reeves Sanday's recently published book, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy, is based on long term ethnography spanning a period of 18 years (l981-1999) in the highlands of West Sumatra. More on the Minangkabau can be found on her webpage: www.sas.upenn.edu/~psanday.

Regarding A Talk In Germany By James DeMeo

When James DeMeo was due to give a talk in Germany I sent this to several German websites.

http://de.indymedia.org/2012/01/323375.shtml

Hate Speach

This was sent to several anti-fascist groups in Italy. There was no response. 

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: joel carlinsky <joelcarlinsky@yahoo.com>
To: 
Sent: Friday, September 13, 2013 7:31 PM
Subject: American Fascist To Speak In Italy.

A conference will be held in Rome on Oct. 4 on the subject of orgonomy, which is a rather broad-spectrum field that touches on many widely divergent subjects. Most of the presentations will be of little interest except to specialists, but there is one that has a degree of public importance.
Sito per iscriversi alla Conferenza : http://www.associazioneitalianadiorgonomia.blogspot.it/

One of the invited speakers will be a Dr. James DeMeo, of Ashland, Oregon, USA. Dr. DeMeo is an extremely outspoken enemy of Islam and at every venue at which he speaks loses no opportunity to denounce and denigrate Islam and it's followers, all of whom he considers terrorists, without exception. 

Public condemnation of a religion and attempting to incite hostility against people on grounds of their religion is illegal in Italy, as in most European countries, but in past lectures in Germany and other countries, Dr. DeMeo has ignored these laws and spoken against Muslims in terms that bear little or no respect for historical facts and more closely resemble Nazi propaganda than the dispassionate scholarship he pretends to. Despite laws against defamation of a religion and incitement to inter-religious hatred, so far no attempt has been made to stop him. 

Most of the conference will be about other topics and most of the speakers will not agree with Dr. DeMeo on this subject, but it is a disgrace that he is to be allowed to present his anti-Islamic bigotry under the guise of social science. I suggest you might want to have somebody attend this event to monitor his presentation and take appropriate action. 

Blasband, Constable, And The ACO

Dr. Richard Blasband, whom Reich asked Ellsworth Baker to push out of orgonomy, is still with us, having recently given a talk at a conference in Italy on alternative sciences.

 Dr, Blasband, whose underhanded manipulations to discredit Ralph Markson, now on the Atmospheric Physics faculty at MIT,  and take over the research program of the ACO set back the scientific acceptance of orgonomy by at least a generation, was a good friend of the late Charles Pitchel, formerly the personal representative in America of Adolph Hitler, and more recently, along with another ex-president of the ACO, Barbara Koopman, an outspoken fan and defender of the late Nicolai Levashov, whose anti-Semitic rantings, which can be found on his website, are so extreme even the Nazis would be embarrassed by them. 

In 1972, when I blew the whistle on his friend, Trevor Constable, exposing the killing of numerous people in California by cloudbuster-generated storms, Constable was promptly fired by Ellsworth Baker, but the mass murder by Constable with funding and support from the ACO was no news to Blasband. He had been visiting there in Los Angeles when Constable demonstrated a new cloudbusting technique, documented by the next day's newspater headlines: "Unpredicted storm hikes state death toll to 67 on rain-slicked freeways". Another report by Constable which was already in Blasband's files was documented by the headline: "9-year old boy swept out to sea by sudden, unpredicted storm" .

 Baker told me at the time, "I'm worried about Dr. Blasband", and assured me the whole story would be exposed in the next issue of the Journal of Orgonomy. I am still waiting for that article. 

Correspondence between Blasband and Constable at the time shows that Blasband suggested he quit the ACO to go into a commercial cloudbusting venture with Constable, but Constable talked him out of it, saying he would need someone on the inside in the ACO in the future to keep him informed of any developments.