Will Blog for Food

Suppose the US Treasury Gave a Debt Auction and No One Came!

Ever so often the US Congress goes through the exercise of raising the debt limit "allowing" the government to borrow more money. Right now US debt is approaching $10 trillion thanks to President Bush having spent the US into more debt than all the preceding presidents combined, a distinction held heretofore only by Ronald Reagan. It's not hard to see why: endless wars and tax cuts for the rich. But the US may be reaching the point where Congressional raising of the debt limit is akin to pushing on a rope. What if nobody wants to buy any more US debt? Currency traders are dumping US dollars so fast that the dollar has already been overtaken by the euro and the Canadian "loonie," and it is soon to bow to other major currencies such as the Aussie dollar.

Ever so astute and perceptive, Alan Greenspan has made the following comments regarding the US debt ceiling which instead of being set by Congress may be approaching the point where it is set for the US by international market forces:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the dollar's depreciation may reflect growing unwillingness among foreigners to buy U.S. debt. "Obviously there is a limit to the extent that obligations to foreigners can reach,'' Greenspan said in a speech in Washington today. The dollar's decline to its lowest since 1997 may be "an indication America is approaching this limit.'' Greenspan's warning came after the U.S. Treasury reported last week that international investors sold a record amount of U.S. financial assets in August. Total holdings of equities, notes and bonds fell a net $69.3 billion after an increase of $19.2 billion in July. The dollar has declined about 8 percent against the euro this year and 4 percent against the yen.

China, the US' largest creditor,  has recently threatened to dump US dollars, a move that would precipitate a meltdown of the international monetary system. However, the eventual devastation caused by a gradual sell-off of US dollars would be just as bad for the US, at least, if not for the rest of the world. Just at  a time when there is pressure on the Treasury to lower interest rates to stave off a subprime mortgage induced recession, there is pressure to raise interest rates to attract more capital to assuage the US' voracious appetite for borrowed money. Just as the American people are charging up a storm on their credit cards, the US government is charging everything on its credit card with the willing compliance of China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and other enablers. But as the dollar falls in value, dollar denominated commodities, such as oil, will inevitably rise in price. This is because the purchasing power of oil producing countries based on their income in dollars is declining once those dollars are converted into their native currencies. This pushes up the price of oil for the American people, but not necesssarily for the rest of the world whose currencies are appreciatting vis a vis the dollar and who, therefore, can purchasse dollars, in order to buy oil, at relatively discounted prices.

And the enablers are getting less sanguine about buying US debt:

However, the big foreign buyers of US debt aren't buying this debt like they use to. According to information from the Treasury Department, the five largest holders of US debt (Japan, China, UK, Oil Exporters and Brazil) owned a combined total of $1.224 trillion in August 2006 and $1.459 trillion in August 2007. That's an increase of $235 billion. And over that same time, the really big purchases came from the UK ($189.4 billion) and Brazil ($63.6 billion.) China only increased their holdings by $13 billion and Japan decreased their holdings by $37.9 billion. In other words, Asian Central Banks -- who use to be reliable purchasers of US debt just aren't that interested in buying any more right now.

When push comes to shove and the Treasury is faced with the choice of lowering interest rates and, therefore, disccouraging foreign acquisition of US debt or raising interest rates and, therefore, plunging the US into recession, which will it be? The US government must meet its obligations, including large interest payments on its debt, so it must either borrow money or raise taxes or cut spending or a combination of all three. Therefore, it will raise interest rates to attract capital and to hell with the American people who will have to pay higher taxes and suffer through an interminable recesssion. Additionally, the American people will have to get used to the fact that social  programs to help the poor and middle class will be cut back because war has a higher priority and a more powerful lobby. The  Republicans would like nothing better than to have an excuse for doing away with social security and medicare altogether, two programs devised by Franklin D Roosevelt, their Democrat nemesis. As Rush Limbaugh said "We're working on that too" or words to that effect.

How about inflation? Couldn't the US just print dollars and inflate its way out of its debt.  Inflation would only hasten the decline of the US dollar making it even less  attractive to foreign investors. US government  obligations could be met this way but the dollar would spiral downward, the price of oil would spiral upward, and there is no guarantee that wages would keep pace. As the cost of living for American citizens continues to rise, the lack of unionization and other factors are keeping American wages down while CEOs pocket excess profits. Thus the prospect for the American people in general isn't that bright. American corporations will continue to do well because they sell into a global market, not just into the American market. If American demand for their goods and services declines, foreign demand will only increase due to the devaluing dollar and the relative prosperity of the rest of the developed and developing  world which is spending on infrastructure and commercial industry and not on war.

So -- why is the US dollar dropping? This is where Greenspan's comments come into play. Currency traders are obviously selling the dollar. While they have had ample reason to sell lately, the US economy wasn't slowing until the first quarter of this year -- hardly a reason to sell. One underlying reason may be a lack of confidence in the US' fiscal outlook and current situation. This would make sense, especially in light of the lack of interest from foreign central banks for US debt. Now -- no one is going to come out and say they have lost confidence in the US' financial situation. Instead they will simple go on quietly selling dollars.

And this may have even more sinister implications for the US than a precipitous crisis. A crisis can be handled by "fixing," an old American custom. But a slow almost imperceptible decline is like the frog in water whose temperature is slowly increasing. Unbeknownst to the frog, while he is relaxing in the warm bath, the temperature gets to the point, by imperceptible degrees, where it's impossible for him to get out and his goose is cooked, to mix a metaphor. This could well happen to the American economy!

The  American penchant for war and weaponry will continue to increase demand and expenditures on products and services for the military-industrial complex, most of which are entirely wasteful and destructive.  Continual expenditures on weapons procurements and the militarization of every aspect of American life will virtually guarantee the impoverishment of the American people not only in the public sphere but also in the private sphere as well, at least for the middle class and below. The rich and super rich will have no problem because, for all intents and purposes, they are global citizens and can live and port their capital anywhere in the world where circumstances are the most propitious.

How to Have Freedom from Compulsory Education and Freedom to Pursue One's Own Interests

The following excerpt is from Remem- bering Bix: A Memoir of the Jazz Age, by Ralph Berton. Bix Beider- becke was one of the greatest jazz music- ians of the 1920s who died tragically of alcohol- ism at the age of 28 just as the Jazz Age came to an end.

Walking back this time, a thought struck Bix. It was bound to come up sooner or later; it always did. "Say, Frenchy, don't you go to school?" "Huh uh," I said, shaking my head. He blinked. "How come?" Where shall I begin, a grownup might have begun. I gave the simplest answer. "The truant officers don't know about me," I said, which was true, but raised more questions than it answered. For the first time I saw Bix pursue a topic (other than a musical one) with aroused interest. I had evidently touched a nerve. It was a topic I myself had never really analyzed though the bare facts were, I knew, sufficiently bizarre. Then and in subsequent conversations, Bix succeeded in eliciting most of them. I think the very first one floored him as much as any: that, in all my thirteen years, perhaps two - scattered among various schools here and in Milwaukee - had been spent in schoolrooms; despite which, I had nevertheless graduated at the age of eleven (W. G. Goudy Elementary, Winthrop Avenue at Foster, Chicago, June, 1922). My diploma was not earned by any burst of academic brilliance. "They were happy to see me go," I said, smirking. Unlike poor Bix, I had never considered it my place to placate the authorities; I was determined to make them pay dearly for the crime of having imprisoned me, and my teachers bore the brunt of my vengeance. I don't know what they'd done to deserve me, those poor hardworking maiden ladies. I regaled Bix with tales of my exploits, now appalling in retrospect: correcting their English in front of the class (All right, children-everyone take their seat. Uh, Miss Hattrem, shouldn't it be 'Everyone take his seat'?); asking trick questions on subjects I knew they knew less about than I did (Miss Pierce, is air a compound or a mixture?), "innocent" questions on embarrassing subjects - remember this was 1920 (Miss Clark, what's the difference between an ox and a bull?) (Miss Deely, what's a strumpet?) ... for good old Shakespeare was a gold mine of painful passages, though I never quite had the nerve to tackle my harried instructresses on Merry Wives of Windsor, Act V, Scene 5: "Send me a cool rut-time, Jove," cries Falstaff, "or who can blame me to piss my tallow?" Needless to say, I was a hero to my fellow captives, but it may be imagined how glad the authorities were to hand me that precious bit of ribboned paper and say, with Groucho Marx, "Go, and never darken my towels again." How well I succeeded in conveying all this to Bix is questionable. That there could be any way around the long torment of going to school, never in a thousand years could such a thought even arise. What wouldn't Bix have given, as a boy, for such a deliverance? All of us, in fact, Vic and Gene too, had grown up outside the walls of school and church, had got whatever education we got at home or at work, and by hanging around with complaisant grown-ups. We were also spared other sacred institutions we saw imposed on all other kids, such as "dressing up" and taking medicine. Even vaccination had been inflicted on us over my parents' strenuous protests, at gunpoint, as it were; for Pa and Ma had a rooted mistrust of that other priesthood too, the one in white, with its pills and its needles. ("Did you ever see a deer take a pill?" Mummy would ask triumphantly, adding the crushing sequel, "Or use a can opener?") "Nature" was their religion, meaning lots of raw foods, fresh air, etc. (Papa died at eighty-six of a pneumonia he got swimming through the Lake Michigan ice in January - a good fourteen years short of his expectations; the week before, he'd swum his usual nine miles.) My nonschooling explained both the woeful holes in my education (if that's the word) and my precocious "vocabulary" (my admirers' favorite word), as well as my remarkable repertory of remembered music, my familiarity with college-level astronomy, chemistry, etc., and my surefooted ability to get around any city by myself after a few days' investigation. No doubt my eidetic memory helped, but it was afforded unusual opportunities for use: the time other kids had to waste in school, learning Palmer Method Penmanship and catalogues of dates and battles that would be gratefully forgotten two days after the "tests" for which they had been memorized, I could spend learning, or doing, exactly what I wanted. If I wanted to read the entire collected Works of Thomas Hardy (I did, during one of my childhood illnesses), that was O.K., and if a month later I felt like rereading the whole set (which I also did), I could do that too. I could spend all day and evening listening to Le Sacre if I chose, or the latest New Orleans Rhythm Kings record (I did, for three days, when Leon Rappolo, their clarinetist, became my Hero of the Month). Was it surprising that I soon knew them by heart? So would you, if you weren't packed off to school for 30 hours a week. I said as much to Bix, who asked, "What about your pa?" I was also blessed with a delightful schlemiel of a papa who would rather go exploring with his little boy any day than bother about such trivia as making a living. He took me for star walks until all hours, igniting my infant interest in astronomy (of which, however, he could tell me little); days we often spent poring over maps of whatever town we were in, marking promising sounding places and then, by God, going there (usually on foot), a practice that equipped me with a lifelong love of walking and of finding my way about - all this before I was six.

This passage says it all. Obviously a brilliant man who wrote this excellent biography of Bix Beiderbecke, a man who wouldn't have been so tortured if he had been blessed with parents like Berton's, Ralph Berton was able to pursue from an early age those subjects which really interested him rather than having to digest the bullcrap one has to to succeed in the educational system in order to get the proper credentials and degrees. My contention is that most people would be better off pursuing in life that which really interests them than in having to meet educational "requirements," which not only cause a lot of unnecessary frustration but even downright torture, and also that the educational system holds people back to their "grade level" whereas someone like Berton pursued his interests at an early age up to and beyond the college level without unnecessary prodding.

The only learning that sticks with a person is learning he or she has pursued on his or her own, in other words, autodidacticism, and this is true in or out of school because one cannot learn a subject just by listening to a teacher or professor expound on it. One must do the reading oneself; one must work the problems oneself. You might as well read the class notes or a text or, better yet, original sources as have the professor try to inject his knowledge into your head by bloviation. It's not going to happen. As for credentialing, I'll learn the subject on my own, thank you, without student loans and educational requirements and pass any credentialing test you can throw at me. One should have that option, but then the educational institutions would be out all that money.

John & Judy's Vacation 2007 - Part 4 - Seattle

We left Coeur d'Alene and cruised 30 mile on I-90 to Spokane, a major, inviting looking city I wish we had had time to explore. After stopping at the YMCA for a swim and a mocha, we continued on I-90 through the Yakima Valley and over the Cascade Mountains via Snoqualmie Pass. What a scenic drive. We stopped at the Snoqualmie Pass rest area to find free coffee and cookies waiting for us. Also all the rest areas we stopped at in the state of Washington had free Wi-Fi. What a progressive state! There was snow on the mountains. Here are a few pictures of our drive to Seattle. Remember you can click on any picture to see a larger version.

Finally, we're in Seattle. We settled into our hotel room at the Sixth Street Hotel disappointed to find no free internet access for the first time on our trip. The advantage was that there was a pretty good restaurant in our hotel which saved us from having to go out in the rainy weather. In Seattle there's a Starbucks on every street corner and sometimes there's one mid-block too.

The next day Judy wanted to go to the Rosalie Whyel Doll Museum in Bellevue. While Judy perused the dolls, I took some pictures outdoors.

Later that day we went to Pike Place Market, Seattle's main tourist attraction, where they throw and catch the fish. We weren't too impressed. We didn't actually see them throw any fish, and there were too many tourists there. So we walked down the street and had dinner at  McCormick and Schmick's Seafood Restaurant. We'd been to one in San Francisco last year and the food was as good this year.

The next day Judy wanted to rest in the hotel room while I checked out some of the downtown Seattle attractions. My first stop was at the brand new Seattle Public Library, an impressive, unorthodox structure designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas built in 2004.  Of course they have free internet accesss on their computers or your laptop and a coffee bar right in the library. I  actually did a blog entry from there, the one on Einstein. This is actually the  coolest and most  impressive  library I've  ever been in except perhaps for the one in Paris, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Check out the pictures. The geometrical patterns are fantastic!

After I checked out the library I went to the Seattle Art Museum. The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) just opened its new expanded version this year. It has been in the same location since 1991 in a high rise and as time goes by it has taken over more floors of the high rise. It still has room for expansion as it owns the four floors located directly above it. The rest of the building is owned by WaMu.

The above photo is the cafe at the art museum. After I toured SAM (no photos were allowed), I headed for the monorail station for the ride to Seattle Center where the space needle is located and site of the World's Fair in 1962.

Finally, it was time to head back downtown on the monorail.

The next day we took the ferry to Bainbridge Island.

We could barely see Mt. Rainier through the haze. Mt.  Rainier is an active volcano about 50 miles from Seattle, and on this day, for the first time in Seattle, the weather was not rainier.

On the trip back to Seattle the sun came out. I couldn't resist snapping a few more pictures of the Seattle skyline.

Here's a few other shots taken around town. For the complete Seattle picture album, click here.

 

The next day, October 9, 2007, Judy and I headed for the SeaTac Airport. We had one more adventure in store - the Seattle Transit Tunnel. Seattle busses are free downtown so we boarded a bus outside our hotel which dropped us off at the entrance to the Seattle Transit Tunnel, an underground transit system for busses. Here we picked up the bus for SeaTac for the outrageous fare of $1.35 apiece, I think it was. In 2009 they will have both busses and light rail utilizing the tunnel, the only underground transit system in the US which will be shared by both bus and rail. The rail connection will then link downtown with SeaTac Airport.

Judy was tired and couldn't wait to get home. After we got through security at the airport, she perked up and we had an uneventful (the best kind) flight to San Diego, just a short hop on Alaskan Airlines. They served Seattle's Best coffee on the plane, a definite plus.

John and Judy's Vacation 2007 - Part 3 - Coeur d'Alene, Idaho

It was either raining or threaten- ing to rain the whole time we were in Idaho and Washing- ton. We met Judy's sister, Jeanette, at the Perkins family restaur- ant. I had never been to a Perkins before. The food was good, they had homemade pie and the prices  were low compared to southern California. Everything including real estate was more reasonable here. I had reserved our motel, La Quinta, where we stayed four nights, online through hotels.com for $70. a night although the price from their own website was twice that much. It had everything - two queen beds, a remote for the TV that actually worked, a full kitchen including dishwasher and breakfast was included. You can't beat that.

The next day Judy hung out with Jeanette while I explored Coeur d'Alene. General William Tecumseh Sherman, after he had laid waste to the south in the Civil War, had come out here and established a fort called Fort Sherman, naturally. The name Coeur d'Alene had been given to the local Indians by French fur traders who thought the Indians were pretty sharp traders with hearts like a shoemaker's awl. Coeur d'Alene is a pretty little town that has grown to include on the outskirts all the mall stores that you can find everywhere in the US.  We felt right at home. It still retains a small town flavor though in the old part of town - no fast food restaurants there, not even a Starbucks. The downtown hamburger joint, Hudson's, was celebrating its 100 year anniversary so naturally I had to go there. The menu was very simple: hamburgers, cheeseburgers and pie. No French fries!

Coeur d'Alene is located on a beautiful, enormously huge lake. Here are some pictures. Please remember that you can click on any picture to see a larger version.

There is a nice visitors' center with a sculpture of the "coeur."

There is a resort right on the lake.

There is a nice new public library.

The old chapel from Fort Sherman is still there:

Here are some shots around town. Sherman Avenue is the main downtown drag. For more pictures of Coeur d'Alene check out the album by clicking here.

That night we had dinner at Jeanette's house:

One day we took a drive to St. Marie's, a little logging town about 60 miles from Coeur d'Alene. More beautiful lakes and rivers. No water shortage here!

That night we spent some time with Jeanette and her family, and Jeanette did some energy work on me.

Judy and Jeanette had a lot to catch up on, not having seen each other for 14 years. Our last night together we went to the Tomato Street restaur- ant.

The next morning we went east on I-90 headed for Seattle. We stopped at the Seattle Valley YMCA, a beautiful new facility where Judy waited for me while I swam. Then we had our coffee and pastry at the coffee bar there and bought a couple of sandwiches for our lunch. There was frost on the ground that morning!

Wilhelm Reich, Orgone Energy, Dark Matter and Spontaneous Generation

Wilhelm Reich had a theory that a life energy, what he called orgone energy, permeated the universe. He invented a device called an orgone accumulator to  concentrate this energy and then a person could sit inside it and reap the healthful benefits. He claimed that it could cure disease and make a person more healthy, vital and full of energy. Later outgrowths of his work were bioenergetics, Rolfing and primal therapy. Reich never claimed that orgone energy was a precursor of life or that it gave rise to life. Other related claims for life energy or spiritual energy are the Chinese concept of qi or chi, the Indian Chakra, the Japanese concept of Reiki. There are also many other related concepts.

Charles Darwin invented neither the concept of evolution nor the concept of the "spontaneous generation" of life. Others before him including Lamarck also believed in it.

Darwin was not the first to develop a theory of evolution. More than 50 years before him the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed that the various species had not been created in their current forms all at once, as was commonly believed, but had evolved through time by natural processes. He also embraced the principle of spontaneous generation propounded by Aristotle: Living things came into being directly from nonliving matter. Lamarck supposed this occurred on a minute scale unobservable to human eyes.

The general idea is that life had to come into being from non-life or be spontaneously generated. Another term for this is abiogenesis. This theory as well as others are concerned with the origin of life on earth from a primal soup. None of these theories postulate a universal life energy that permeates the entire universe and is a precursor for the development of life wherever circumstances are propitious such as on the planet Earth. The purpose of this blog entry is to propose such a universal precursor, and, I think, proof of it would have to be sought at the quantum level. Is there such a field as quantum biology? That's what I'm proposing. In fact it might be related to the dark mass/energy which makes up a considerable part of the universe and has physicists stymied. There may be some particle of mass/energy similar to a quark which is ubiquitous in the universe (as is microwave background radiation) and is capable of combining with "physical" particles such as quarks and electrons to form elementary life forms. Nothing like this has ever been observed because biologists are only looking at the molecular level. They need to be looking at a level many orders of magnitude smaller, the level of quantum physics rather than the level of molecular biology.

Physicists have yet to observe a Higgs boson or a graviton although they think they know so much about the fundamental particles. They have no idea what dark matter or energy is. If you have a scientific mentality, you would have to believe that life is capable of not only existing anywhere in the universe where conditions are favorable, but could come into being by natural means anywhere in the universe. For that to be the case, there must be one or more precursors that are ubiquitous and I speculate that they would be similar to the fundamental particles and might be incorporated into the Standard Model, which is a listing of all the particles and forces known to physicists.

Strictly speaking, the term particle is a misnomer because the dynamics of particle physics are governed by quantum mechanics. As such, they exhibit wave-particle duality, displaying particle-like behavior under certain experimental conditions and wave-like behavior in others (more technically they are described by state vectors in a Hilbert space; see quantum field theory). Following the convention of particle physicists, we will use "elementary particles" to refer to objects such as electrons and photons, with the understanding that these "particles" display wave-like properties as well. All the particles and their interactions observed to date can be described by a quantum field theory called the Standard Model. The Standard Model has 40 species of elementary particles (24 fermions, 12 vector bosons, and 4 scalars), which can combine to form composite particles, accounting for the hundreds of other species of particles discovered since the 1960s. The Standard Model has been found to agree with almost all the experimental tests conducted to date. However, most particle physicists believe that it is an incomplete description of Nature, and that a more fundamental theory awaits discovery. In recent years, measurements of neutrino mass have provided the first experimental deviations from the Standard Model.

I suggest that physicists incorporate the investigation of life at the level of quantum mechanics so that the Standard Model would include not only all the physical forces such as gravitation and electromagnetism and particles such as quarks and bosons but a "precursor of life" mass/energy as well. Maybe this is what makes up dark matter and energy. And Wilhelm Reich, although he never made the connection between orgone energy and spontaneous generation, deserves a posthumous apology from the federal government which incarcerated him, banned his literatrure and destroyed his orgone accumulators. He died in federal prison in 1957. One of the things I'm proudest of is that in the late 1960s a group of us, who published the San Diego Free Press, also obtained a copy of Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism (from Canada) when it was still banned in the US and published and distributed a number of copies. The Mass Psychology of Fascism is especially relevant today in light of the character structure of the Bush Asdministration.

In February 1954, the FDA filed a Complaint for Injunction against Reich in the Federal Court in Portland, Maine. The Complaint declared that orgone energy does not exist, and asked the Court to prohibit the shipment of accumulators in interstate commerce and to ban Reich’s published literature which they claimed was labeling for the accumulators. After considerable thought and discussion of this matter, Reich responded with a lengthy letter to Judge John Clifford, explaining that he could not appear in Court, since doing so would allow a Court of law to judge basic scientific research. He wrote: “Scientific matters can only be clarified by prolonged, faithful bona fide observations in friendly exchange of opinion, never by litigation... Man’s right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word FREEDOM should ever be more than an empty political slogan. Furthermore, Reich asserted, if his painstakingly elaborated and published findings “...over a period of 30 years could not convince this administration, or will not be able to convince any other administration of the true nature of the discovery of the Life Energy, no litigation in any court anywhere will ever help to do so. I, therefore, submit, in the name of truth and justice that I shall not appear in court as the ‘defendant’ against a plaintiff who by his mere complaint already has shown his ignorance in matters of natural science.” Judge Clifford did not accept Reich’s letter as a valid legal response, and on March 19, 1954, a Decree of Injunction was issued on default as if Reich had never responded at all. But the Injunction itself was even more excessive than the initial Complaint: it ordered orgone energy accumulators and their parts to be destroyed it ordered all materials containing instructions for the use of the accumulator to be destroyed it banned a list of Reich’s books containing statements about orgone energy, until such time that all references to orgone energy were deleted After the initial shock, Reich continued his research, traveling to Arizona to experiment with the cloudbuster in the dry desert environment. While he was there, and without his knowledge, one of Reich’ students—Dr. Michael Silvert—moved a truckload of accumulators and books from Rangeley, Maine to New York City, a direct violation of the Injunction. As a result, the FDA charged Reich and Silvert with criminal contempt of court. Following a jury trial, both men were found guilty on May 7, 1956. Reich was sentenced to two years in federal prison, Silvert was sentenced to a year and a day. The Wilhelm Reich Foundation—founded in Maine in 1949 by students and friends to preserve Reich’s Archives and to secure the future of his discovery of the Cosmic Life Energy—was fined $10,000. While Reich appealed his sentence, the government carried out the destruction of orgone accumulators and literature. In Maine, several boxes of literature were burned, and accumulators and accumulator materials either destroyed or dismantled. In New York City, on August 23, 1956, the FDA supervised the burning of several tons of Reich’s publications in one of the city’s garbage incinerators, including titles that were only to have been banned. Among the materials burned were: Orgone Energy Bulletin (12,189 copies) International Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research (6,261 copies) Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics (2,900 copies) Annals of the Orgone Institute (2976 copies) The Oranur Experiment (872 copies) Character Analysis Cosmic Superimposition Ether, God, and Devil Listen, Little Man People in Trouble The Cancer Biopathy The Function of the Orgasm The Mass Psychology of Fascism The Murder of Christ The Sexual Revolution This destruction of literature constitutes one of the most heinous examples of censorship in United States history. On March 8, 1957, Reich signed his Last Will and Testament. Among its stipulations was the establishment of The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund as the legal entity charged with operating Orgonon as The Wilhelm Reich Museum; protecting, preserving, and transmitting his scientific legacy to future generations; and safeguarding Reich’s Archives. All appeals denied, on March 12, 1957—two weeks shy of his 60th birthday—Wilhelm Reich was temporarily incarcerated at the Danbury Federal Penitentiary in Connecticut. On March 22, he was taken to the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He died there of heart failure on November 3, 1957, and was buried at Orgonon.

John & Judy's Vacation 2007 - Part 2 - Napa Valley and Portland, OR

From Modesto it's only about a 90 minute drive to Napa. We got to Napa early in the afternoon and had the rental car till the next morning so we checked out the town of Napa which is the biggest town in the Napa Valley and located at the southern end. It's a cute little town.

Then we drove the 15 miles or so up Rte. 29 to Yountville where the California Veterans Home is located. After checking in with Mr. Wolfe, and unloading our things at the Hospitality House we took Dale out for dinner. Remember you can click on any picture to see a larger version.