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Note: For more information on Mr. Carllinsky's relentless smears and attacks directed against the work of Wilhelm Reich, and against James DeMeo, see the articles here, here and here.
Joel Carlinsky, CSICOP & Orgonomy
by Jim Martin (editor, Flatland Magazine) Email: flatland@mcn.org and
Kenn Thomas (editor, Steamshovel Press) Email: editor@steamshovelpress.com
Copyright 1997, All Rights Reserved by the Authors.
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 Brady 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 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 - orgonomy, 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 disruption 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
arrested, convicted and jailed for burglarizing the Wilhelm Reich Museum in
Rangeley, Maine; he has intercepted the mail of medical orgonomists; 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 Investigation of 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 "devotion" to orgonomy have assisted
Carlinsky. Mr. Jamerling Ogg of Windham, Maine, operates an Internet web
site called "Public Orgonomy Research Exchange" ("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
via email. For the past two years, Mr. Ogg has distributed Carlinsky's
disinformation as a permanent feature on his web site. 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 Magazine, under the
editorial 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 Carlinsky'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 DeMeo, 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 rebuttal article.(6) DeMeo has always made this material available -- to KeelyNet, Paranoia, the "skeptics", or anyone with an interest in the truth -- for a self addressed, stamped envelope. The
response deals vigorously with Carlinsky's exaggerated and false criticisms,
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 have 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 "atmospheric 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 cloudbusting
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 Governor'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 targeted
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 paper 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 proposal 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 that 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 the 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, the
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 written 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 between 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 volumes 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 information 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 purloined letters, and indicted him for possession of stolen
property, stolen credit cards and possession of a forged driver's license.
He was convicted.
* 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 Firsters 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 enthusiast 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
convincing 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 Carlinsky'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 congressional
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, California. 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 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 accumulator, 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 great
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 don'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 might 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, they
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 research," 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 conspiring 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--prompted 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 provocateurhad exposed the
poseurs.
Formed in 1995, the internet Orgonomy Mailing List (OML) performed its function well
and people from around the world began sharing their research and questions.
Some participants privately discussed the inevitable appearance of Carlinsky
on the mailing list. DeMeo sent documentation regarding Carlinsky's history
to Jamerling Ogg (whose web page "PORE" is one of many intenet sites on
Reich) since Ogg was ignorant of it as were others on the OML. Ogg informed
DeMeo that he planned to publish "Orgonomy Peddlers" on his web site and
included his own endorsement of Carlinsky's toxic disinformation. Ogg said
he wanted to "expose the plague." He introduced it like a virus into the
internet by mailing it to his friends and to DeMeo. Fully informed as to
Carlinsky's criminal behavior and stalking of DeMeo, Ogg demanded that DeMeo
reply in detail. DeMeo was faced with the absurdity of writing yet another
reply to Carlinsky's false and misleading claims and Ogg's illiterate
expansion of them. Jim Martin, upon reading Ogg's editorial, insisted that
Ogg remove his contributions from PORE's web site. Martin and Thomas had
been the first contributors to the "PORE Journal" and Ogg subsequently
plagiarized Martin's work (19) on his web pages. An "anonymous someone" then
broadcast the article to the subscribers of the OML and elsewhere on the
Internet. Ogg 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 devolve 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 terms. 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. Both Jamerling Ogg and John-Michael
Battaglia have tried to distance themselves publicly from Carlinsky, but the
fact remains that they 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 against 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. After 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 rants 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 typed 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 ostensibly
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 and 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, KeelyNet, 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 is
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:
Notes:
(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 informant 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
will 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 won'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 Tarzan 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, and related Resource listings from DeMeo's Orgone Accumulator Handbook.
(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 readers that he decided not to publish the article, in truth he published it on his PORE page under "Newsgroup Searches: 1996: February."
Postscript: September, 1997
Since we posted this article in March of 1997, several of Carlinsky's
contacts, individuals who were mentioned here, have issued statements of
denial, claims of "distortion," and as we mentioned, picayune
hair-splitting. We won't waste our time being dragged into a false dialogue
with people who are disingenuous because they have a bad conscience, or no
conscience at all.
Public Nuisance Alert: Armed and Dangerous
Joel Carlinsky.
DOB: 3/29/42.
Aliases: Victor Joel, Kirby Thwing, others.
5'11", 150 lbs, Brown hair, hazel eyes
Robotic voice and neurotic laugh.
--Wilhelm Reich, from "Desert Development and Emotional Deadness," December
1953. (Orgonomic Functionalism, Volume 6, p.46, published by the
Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund, POB 687, Rangeley, Maine 04970.)
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