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II. 1997 POSTSCRIPT TO THE ATTACK THAT MARETT AND PORE GRATUITOUSLY MOUNTED AGAINST THE CORREAS

 

In November 1996, Mr. Douglas Marett posted on the AORL web site a totally unwarranted attack on our work, claiming that our PAGD work "solved the orgone motor mystery". In December, we launched our Labofex website and extensively responded to the noxious publicity which Marett had given our work, with the article "The Correa- Reich Affair". As the reader will see from the following archive, Marett was quick to beat a retreat: in less than 12 hours after Labofex went on the net, the two offending articles were removed from his own Homepage. Next he wrote to the now defunct OML list enumerating his reasons for this withdrawal as: 1. That he would rather put his money somewhere else, instead of challenging our patents - which he had previously advocated as part and parcel of his gratuitous allegations; 2. That it would take him a month or more to respond to our rebuttal of his fabrications and confusions. Four days later, the same Douglas Marett, on the Vortex-l list, retracted his allegations of any patent impropriety, and excused himself for having induced any of the participants of Votex-l (people like Heffner, Merriman and Quinney) into error.

Despite this folding all along the line, we knew our man better than anyone, and had indeed predicted in our extensive rebuttal that a revisionist turn would be next on his agenda. Already in our posting of Monday, December 16, we wrote:

We told you, did we not? Read in our "The Correa/Reich Affair", where we suggest readers interested in the matter check the Douglas Marett site on their own, and wrote: "But do it quickly, for we are sure he will be furiously modifying his text in light of what we are about to say!!"

And so, as expected, it came to pass that in place of the two articles on the Correas' supposed re-discovery of the Orgone Motor, Marett reproduced excerpts of the same two offending features but completely expunged the offending material and any and every reference to the Correas or their discovery of the autogenous PAGD regime! This is an old technique; it reminds us of Stalin ordering the image of Trotsky to be removed from the picture of Lenin's arrival in Moscow, thus leaving Stalin alone with Lenin on the podium. Unlike Marett, however, we have never had the ambition of climbing to the (an)orgonomy podium, but that does not prevent us from remarking the standard rewriting of events to which those who cannot back their words with their actions invariably resort. Suppression is both their tool and shield.

Equally inexcusable, in our view, was James Oggreling's behaviour in all this - the epitomy of the opportunist's forked tongue. First he agrees and posts on the PORE site a link to our "The Correa/Reich Affair" as we had requested, given that Marett had links to his two offending papers under PORE's section of "Physical (sic)" papers "at other web sites"... But not only was the link to our rebuttal inoperable (no, we don't think he was conspiring against us, it seemed to be more an ineptitude with respect to running a website), and remained inoperable even after Oggreling's attempts at fixing the link (! witness the archive below); in addition, as Marett retracted his papers, Oggreling decided to place the Correas' paper, along with other matters, under a new section which he devised, entitled "Critique and Controversies". This placement struck us as preferable since, once we had a bit of time to lose reading excerpts of the undigestable work published by others in the same "Physical" section, our "The Correa/Reich Affair" seemed to us too good an essay on the physics of plasma discharges and the physics of Vacor pulsation, to be lumped together with those already present in the "Physical" section. But we also knew at a distance what would be coming next - suppression, what else!? Indeed, as of December 29th, 1996, this new section on Oggreling's PORE page was eradicated from the books, and with it went, of course, the link to our "The Correa/Reich Affair"!! May it rest in peace for, in the end, the last thing we desire is to be associated with the purely mystical and confusionistic claptrap that now goes by the name of orgonomy at PORE. We have, nevertheless, remarked with some amusement all of these turns of Oggreling's to the left and to the right, in his attempt to rid the comfortable and complacent waters of the PORE website of the disturbing winds our questions and criticisms raised. His actions spoke louder of his character than his words.

Mindful of their skins, this new brand of aggressively ultra-ignorant and self-proclaimed orgonomists behaved, when faced with a fair and open challenge, in accordance with their anorgonotic, armored nature, and quite 'naturally' opted for suppression; exactly the same type of suppression they (in order to properly appear as Reich's crusaders and defenders ) so loudly accuse others of having exerted upon Reich's work. In practice, they opt for the same suppression of the Correas' work within their own safe circles. By itself, this serves as a reminder that these people, Jogg, Battaglia, Trettin, et al, these pro-situs who claim to be in need of engineers to decode for them any 'technical' papers which might threaten to explode their comfortable fantasies, are blandly ready to adopt any half cooked theory when it might seem to support them. To keep their boat from capsizing, or even rocking, these loudmouths choose to operate as little Internet Block Stalins of their territory. And so it is.

Lastly, we could engage in futile discussions with all types of revisionists. But we prefer to let the facts stand on their own, in this Archive, as well as in our rebuttal of Marett's allegations. We do not move one inch. We are compelled however to add a few brief commentaries on the return of the sad science of Marett, as it still remains in the expunged versions of his "Physical" "orgonomy" papers, for the sake of the reader interested in the work of W. Reich:

1.   Marett chooses to stand by his results with overvolted GM tubes. Stubbornly, he persists in arguing that Reich's discovery of OR pulsation in Vacor tubes was performed by simple overvolting of his GM tubes. As evidence, once again Marett gives feeble anedoctal references: "The normal operating threshold for Reich's tube is estimated to be 650-750VDC. However, Reich routinely operated his tube far above this threshold, at 800-1050VDC, as can be seen from his article".

Once again, ad nauseum, Marett demonstrates that he does not know the difference between a GM threshold voltage (the start of the plateau) and the GM plateau, spanning usually 200 to 300 V above the threshold. If his gratuitous estimate of the threshold is correct, the plateau of the tubes in question would end up at 950 to 1050V, which is precisely the highest voltage Reich operated his GM tubes at, in the paper in question! So, by Marett's own estimate, Reich could never have overvolted his GM tubes, whereas this is what Marett has done and persists in doing in his supposed experimental "replications". Moreover, Marett does not have to "guesstimate" Reich. In the photocopies of the Herbach & Rademan GM tubes Marett himself obtained in 1984 from material of the Wilhelm Reich Museum, one can see how Reich's H&R GM tubes employed in the referred experiments (GLC10, GLC11 and GLC19) correspond to the H&R designations GM100, GM110 and GM200, all having Argon-Ether filling and GM threshold voltages of, respectively, 830, 780 and 830, with plateau lengths of 200V, 150V and 250V, which places the end of the GM plateau at 980V, 930V and 1070V, presenting clear and concise evidence that Reich indeed did not overvolt his tubes. It is Marett who overvolts his TGM tube, and thus with much ceremony and pompous fanfare, rediscovers the CD region. Moreover, it is rather obvious that had Reich made the same crass mistake, there would be little reason for Reich to invoke an aether or orgonotic effect in the GM tube behaviour: after all, one does not need any ORAC or "high orgone-accumulation" to see any, and we mean any, GM tube produce runaway counting in the CD region!

To us, the worst thing about all this is that, while claiming on OML and vortex that he only wants a scientific and rational discussion on this matter, Marett remains unwilling to acknowledge his most basic mistakes and instead, to defend himself, continues to attribute his own mistakes to Reich, who thereby is, once again, made to appear to be an imbecile. And in this Marett has no excuse, as even he himself claims to be well aware that he is overvolting his GM tube (!) in the hope that "perhaps there may be something more interesting to be found" (sic) in the CD region! Angels perhaps? No wonder Marett has little Reich icons strung across his page for one to click and surf on. One wonders if one of these days he may even post some Elvis Presley icons. Or a little Virgin Mary! Those would equally befit his mystical extrapolations...

2.   Marett's argument regarding our criticism of his most dubious correlation of vacuum breakdown with solar flux, is that we misread the colours in his diagram!! Well, there were no colours on his diagram: these were added only on the 26th of December, ten days after we posted our rebuttal and demonstrated that Marett's graph in question had no legends and was virtually undecipherable! But our criticism was not addressed in any way, shape, or form to the poverty of the presentation, to colours, present or not: it was addressed to the very content of the graph and the accompanying text. The proof of the pudding for the weekly trend between sunspot activity and the entry of GM tubes into the CD region, which incredibly Marett still defends, would have been to see what happened in the week following that for which he presents his 'data'. His failure to address the real issues at stake, in light of the data presented in our rebuttal in "The Correa-Reich Affair", and his silence on the matter, speak mountains about this 'want' of his for scientific and rational discussion.

3.   Lastly, Marett persists in distorting Reich's concept of a massfree energy filling space empty of matter. The distortion goes to the heart of Reich's definition of a Vacor pulsation, as found by Reich under specific conditions, in high-vacuum tubes. Despite all the quotes from Reich himself presented in our "The Correa/Reich Affair", Marett still manages to portray Reich as an imbecile by concluding that Vacor pulsation is merely an ordinary glow discharge. He pontificates:

"However, it was soon found that many of the phenomenon (sic!) that Reich described in orgone-charged VACOR tubes can be produced in un-charged tubes at higher gas pressures, ie. in the 1E-1 to 1E-3 Torr region. This makes sense [!], since if the threshold becomes lower when the orgone field increases outside, then orgone charging should make a tube behave as if it is operating at a higher gas pressure. Thus simply operating the tube at a higher pressure should produce similar results, as was found to be the case.

And so, Douglas Marett persists in his gratuitous rediscoveries! Reich, who specifically sought to get rid of the gas effect in order to observe the gas-unimpeded lumination of Vacor pulsation, by utilizing higher vacuum tubes, is proven squarely wrong by Marett: all Reich needed was to lower the pressure and observe the normal glow discharge! If this was the case, Reich would not have discovered "orgone lumination in high vacuum tubes", but solely rediscovered what Geissler had described a century before him - the normal glow discharge, the same glow discharge Marett has now re-rediscovered!!! Well then, there is no massfree orgone - all Reich needed was to pump in more gas, not pump it out. Reich was looking for the effects of the aether in a vacuum, and all he needed, in accordance with Marett, was to "operate at a higher gas pressure"!

It is rather clear that Marett measures Reich's discoveries with Marett's reinvention yardstick. It is a magic wand, which at one and the same time pays an utter disservice to Reich's work while driving any sensible reader immediately away from Reich, who is made by such base reductions to look like an utter fool. This, then, is what passes for "Physical" orgonomy on the pages of the PORE. There could not be a better illustration in acts of our own contention in the first e-mail we sent to Oggreling:

As all we see as far as the eye stretches, are false replications and facile understanding of Reich's work, we shall have to conclude that Reich's orgonomy is dead, but that the "anorgonomy" of the followers is alive and well - it has become a cottage industry. It has come of age.

So, when we asked Oggreling publicly:

If nothing else, in our view, you had a moral obligation of standing by your disclaimer and checking the veracity of Douglas Marett's allegations, both personal and scientific, with us, prior to posting your links. (Or do you not care about what it is you post on your page in the name of Reich and orgonomy?).
we can take his silence, followed by the suppression of our link, as the answer to our question: No, Oggreling does not care about what he publishes or links to in the name of orgonomy. After all, we may well wonder if Oggreling has a choice: suppose he were to decide to only post serious features: he would soon be reduced to a virtually blank page, would he not?