Gene Mallove, Dec 10, 2003

"...and silence is a dangerous game And words are dangerous too And you've spoken the best you can... They don't understand you None of them understand you" NMA, "The Love of Hopeless causes", 1993

It is a good question, all the more so as no one is likely to thank us for this material. Or thank Gene, for that matter. In fact, it will likely make us more enemies than we already have.

We shall strive to answer this question in as simple a manner as possible. There is not one, but many and forceful reasons why, one year after Gene's death, we have decided to 'speak out'.

This is a complex record. It encompasses our science and technology; the nexus of established paradigms that our work overthrows and the confrontations that have marked its journey; our still ongoing processes of research and publication; our collective efforts to commercialize the various technologies through what now seems like endless searches for sponsors; and Gene's particular efforts to publicize this work - in plasma physics and in Aetherometry - to educate the larger public, and interest or challenge scientists.

In this record, Gene plays in all of his many capacities: early on, as a test-engineer, as a scientific peer, as the Editor of IE, as an objective defender, and as a potential intermediary in a business arrangement; later on, as an advisor, a team member, collaborator and co-author, co-inventor and ally, co-founder of ISFA, our representative and promoter, and even our first sponsor! Throughout, our friendship grew to become the closest of associations. We strategized together, discussed all matters openly, even the most personal ones, and were in virtually permanent contact - by phone, by email, by letter. The plans, dreams and adventures we shared only made our bond stronger. Gene, in fact, changed a lot during the 4 years before his murder - and so did we.

Only too many shameless falsities have been written about this work in the past ten years. More than any other contribution in the fields of physics and biology, no matter how incipient and mediocre, our work has been the object of degradation, suppression and distortion. A veritable plague of lies gathered around it - from those of Marett, Ogg, DeMeo, to those of Rothwell, Storms, the NEM, Kooistra, Hoagland, etc. And all of them are on record as having the gall to admit that they know nothing, or very little indeed, of our work. This fact immediately identifies their collective effort (often coordinated in the manner of little conspiracies) as one motivated by something other than science - and certainly other than any understanding of our science.

Why does our work threaten these marginal crowds, when they have not read it or understood it?

That, too, is a good question. The 'threat' is more like a visceral reaction. They don't need to understand the work, its articulations or implications. It suffices that they sense its importance and more or less grasp its consequences . Mix in a little competitor envy, and off they go to the races! To put it bluntly: it is just as well that they have soccer stadiums, otherwise they'd likely turn to looking for some kind of final solution; and, in this case, we are their Jew - the one that threatens the established order of things.

It is, first of all, a challenge to those in power - to the authority of politicians, 'economists' and sociologists who lie about the inevitable dependency on oil, coal-burning and nuclear plants, and who make false promises about a hydrogen economy that never was, and never will be, viable. With their doctrines of the positive value of growth they have turned this earth into an uninhabitable jungle of concrete, highways, malls and casinos. They call it progress, civilization and a State of Law, but they thrive in the corruption of so-called democracy, where no real people have a say - only lawyers and lobbies.

It is also, and perhaps foremost, a challenge to a scientific establishment that even in universities only knows how to kowtow to marketing, to image-making, to ready-made formulas - an establishment so secure in its unassailability that it freely improvises its 'ideas' du jour - over here, some haffnium bombs and other exotic weapons, over there, some dark-energy Higgs, etc - promising genetic cures for all cancers and all medical and psychiatric disorders, committed to ever more zombifying, normalizing and collective techniques of behavior control. This is the global establishment of a science that no longer questions itself, its dogmas and its own authority, because it no longer has the strength to question authority, any authority. This is the science that belligerently and irrationally refuses to consider, let alone investigate, the existence of massfree energy in any of its forms, and disallows any consideration of the scientific, technological, social and political consequences of the discovery of this energy. This establishment, this science, could never permit acknowledgement of any of our work, or permit acknowledgement of the very challenge that is posited throughout these pages. Anymore than it could permit unbiased assessment of our technologies (viz the COFE '99 trap, the 4-year black hole with Ontario Hydro, etc). From the university to corporate and military laboratories, passing by countless nonprofit, philantropic, 'green' foundations (all that institutional capital which, in spurts, flows on the basis of handshakes at golf courses...), there is a gigantic flux of capital ready to pounce on technological development, but all of it is committed to a competition between 'friendlies" - certified participants that blindly follow each other, tripping one another up and down the same imaginary and beaten tracks, until one out of a hundred sometimes finds what they were looking for - or a decent facsimile, a substitute, a desideratum. Dark energy must exist, so there's a Higgs. Oops, there must be four. Oops, there might be none. Schizophrenia must have a causative gene, so let's find one. Oops, it's not one, it's almost one. The universe must be expanding, so let's imagine an origin. Oops, it's not one; it's many Big Bangs. By a masterful crafting of the image, the scientific establishment appears to be a dynamic system in perpetual change ('constant evolution'), yet it has simply become a succession of packaged bumblings. Like a series of psychotic crises that find a point of agglutination, a commonality of opinion in their aleatory paths.

But the challenge we speak of is not solely a challenge to the political and scientific establishment. It is also a challenge to the margins of this establishment - the margins occupied by minor, subaltern, greasy and ossified cadres who, on smaller (if more intense) scales, do exactly what the establishment cadres do: along with calculated carefree distortion, a game of ostracism and suppression that prevents any questioning of the marginal sub-dogmas; a game that organizes available capital into a limited supply; that only promotes, invites or mentions those that play ball in each group or group of allies; that markets an image of 'alternative science' designed specifically to attract the uncautious mainstream and the 'believers'. Here, in this underworld, the alliances temper the differences, and soon everything is pretty much equal to everything else - the dragged Aether of Miller is the orgone of Reich is the residual of Michelson is the Ch'i of the Taoists is the God of the Christians is the money that everybody enjoys... Universalism is an orgy of equal signs no longer chained to the lion's den. It is true that the poor of mind do not deserve to be be burdened by any other challenge than that which their nature has already brought them. But if one is to give back to Reich, or to Miller, or to Michelson - and hundreds of others for that matter - what is their due, honoring their differences, not reducing their arguments, not falling into caricature - how can one do it without denouncing the incessant and often voluntary (yes, talk about desire!) labor carried on by these organized margins - the labor of sapping the intelligent mind and stifling any intelligent questioning? Thus, willy-nilly, one is obliged to challenge them just the same.

For they have proven barren indeed, those alternative scientific and green margins that have now monopolized the opposition to the so-called 'skeptics' - 'skeptics' mandated by the centers of power. The marginal believers are as unable as the centrist skeptics to pierce through the problems of the physical world in any fashion that meets their expectations. The skeptics, too, are believers who are ever deceived - in their hopes for the sustained thermonuclear fusion reactors which, after half-a-century and a few trillions later, have never sustained fusion (oh, yes, we remember that blip a decade back...); in their belief in thermonuclear fusion as the driving power of the sun, their belief in supermassive dark energy, in black holes, in antimatter, in the spaghettini of superstrings, and so on. Their beliefs are no less outlandish than those of marginal believers. One is supposed to take them all seriously; but to top the cake, marginals and centrists share the penchant for adding together apples and oranges - charges and masses, for example, since it's all about points anyway; they all, with equal gusto, rush to abandon dimensional analysis and embrace hyperdimensionalism; and they all have one faith and one faith only - in electromagnetic energy.

And the challenge continues, beyond the scientific margins, to where it was not even purposely posed as such by any of our collective efforts - to the contacts with potential sponsors, few of which evolved into business negotiations, and many of which, too, sooner or later, took on the mode of a challenge. So we saw ourselves also challenging those sites of international capital - some institutional (from utilities to car manufacturers, etc, etc) and others 'independent' (Soros, Strong, etc, etc), some at the center, others at the periphery - challenging them to have the courage to invest in technologies that issued out of experimental research in basic science, research into the fundamental nature of things. A challenge that we extended to that most sycophantic and phony of all industries - the green markets, the 'greenpeaces' that cater to the impotence experienced everywhere by good people - all, to a man and woman, totally uninterested in the science, the technology, the social consequences. Aether? Don't wanna hear! Massfree energy? How d'ya spell that? and the typical: Energy from nothin'? Go tell it to yer grandma!

Everywhere the deaf-ear syndrome was definitely the winner - followed closely by the free-advice syndrome (the Old Man, the Kid and the Donkey), followed in turn by the red-carpet promises. One day, perhaps, the whole record will be made known - if we shall ever have the time and patience to relive it! In these pages, however, we will strive to present poignant cases - instances of a combat against ignorance, greed, false concern, disinterest and opportunism, a combat that clinically identifies the growing incapacity of Capital, of its businessmen and its scientists, to think, whether at the center or at the margins.

This record is therefore, and also, a challenge to the manufacturers of images and information - from the New York Times to ABC, from KeelyNet to the NEM. A record of how closed the world of the media is, hemmed in by a pure system of graft where science and facts are of equally little concern. No information that is not advertising. No concept that is not a publicist's feel-good lie. No presentation that does not infantilize, debase or stupidify - even, and above all, if it is a presentation about science and nature. Ours is a particularly impeccable record of struggling against the current - a struggle conducted with increasing intensity by an Editor of the only publication that ever had the guts to publish our work, and by a team of people to which he came to belong, a team of dedicated individuals bent on publicizing this work no matter what it takes - but without once bending to any social, political or economic force.

Moreover, this process could not be a challenge to the political, financial, scientific and media establishments and their margins or peripheries, without also being a challenge to the wider public, young and old. To all those young people undergoing the conditioning of fake education, who still have the rebellious energy, the personal determination and the ability to make the effort that it takes to think through questions of basic science, of fundamental ethics, of the political choices confronting every human being. And to all those people who, from the experience of life, concluded, at some age, that what is known about nature and life is actually very little, and that the pronouncements whereby establishments tell us what is best, are simply lies tailored to be acceptable to silent majorities and assimilated minorities, not truths to live by. It is a challenge to people who thus came to rely on having to think for themselves. A challenge to the young and the old alike - calling upon them to learn, on their own, and think, on their own - while putting at their disposal entirely new tools (conceptual, analytical, technological) that permit such learning and thinking, permit an opening of new escape lines without falling into automatic identifications, mystical reductions, unnecessary probabilisms, mathematical arbitrariness and religious delusion.

Yes, that is the challenge! And yes, the reader should note and realize how few, if any, of the existing alternative science efforts or publications carry out a single of these challenges, let alone a persistent, relentless combat on all these fronts.

There couldn't have been a better reason for having engaged in it than the fact that we all thought it was a breath of fresh air. New vistas opened up that no one had imagined - and yet they were, and often are, right under our noses. That breath, now that the air has become ever more unbreatheable with Gene's absence, needs to come through like a hurricane, cold, pitiless and merciless, exact like a surgeon's knife. It has waited long enough to pour out its wind and water.

We do not believe or expect that any other collective experiment of this kind will come to continue where ours will leave off. Institutional violence, along with the repression and suppression of efforts like ours, will make sure that this does not happen. The total conditioning that civilization today imposes on life is the worst and most miserable of all violences - a violence that makes one fearful of thought, unable to think; a violence that paralyzes; a violence that aims at suppressing all violence, whether legitimate or illegitimate; a violence that creates docile masses that will endure all manner of encroachments in civil liberties, that will even endure assaults while patiently waiting to be rescued by a 911 operator; and a violence that creates the death-latency driving all those testosteronic males and females that become either law-and-order enforcers or gang leaders, bully boys. Never has there been a world that was so illegitimately and legally violent, so arbitrary and lean, and, at the same time, so filled with a violent suppression of violence - a suppression all the more violent and intrusive as it is made subtle, insinuated by infantilizing lies and guilt. That's what all those priests in black robes and in white robes, with their attendant throngs of moralizing journalists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, negotiators, paralegals, counsellors, etcetera, are there for: to instill 'nice human sentiments', the basis for a pacified sociability devoid of intense affects or strong emotions.

This world is stale, it needs to be swept through by a breath of fresh air - by many such breaths. And this aetherometric project is one of them, the one that had Gene's heart and mind to the end and above all else. A breath of cold nordic air flamed with the enthusiasm of southern winds. He himself unceasingly asserted what it meant to him. So why shouldn't this record stand proud and alone, and be called, like a hurricane, by a first name - Gene?

And the suppression has become nearly universal - from the disingenuity of NEF/IE's declarations of intent to consult with us and follow our advice, to the sham article in Popular Mechanics which falsified Gene's words and disregarded his wishes, to the auspicious and complete unmention at the NEM's Oregon conference in supposed memory of Eugene Mallove, to the unflinching ignorance and disregard of our work, including our solution to the problem of sustained table-top nuclear fusion, by Hagelstein's group of five and other 'cold-fusioneers', to the refusal of support on the part of NEF/IE to honor Gene's desire to have our work represented at ICCF-11 - where Gene himself, too, was voted to oblivion. It was and is a systematic pattern: they say, let's remember Gene - but not for who he was and what he did; let's empty him, his spirit and his combat, of all substance first. Above all, let's erase the past four years of his life and replace it with all the claims that can be made by anglers who took Gene's death as an opportunity to promote themselves - the Rauens who ply the trade of the NEM, the Swartzes who ply the trade of the Chubbs', the Hagelsteins & Co, the Hoaglands and Willcocks who ply the trade of the hyperdimensional, the Sterling Allens who are busy mormonizing Tesla's Aether, the Krivits' who 'were' Mallove's 'special students' and now take on the populist airs of Art Bells of cold-fusion, etc, etc. An unending procession of those who had staked, as early as possible, a claim to Gene's spiritual inheritance, and who make free to speak in his name.

Ah, we even came to welcome - not the graft, but the suppression of our work and of Aetherometry in particular. We contributed to it, by asking IE to stop running the Aethera ad. Our work, Aetherometry included, owes no debt of gratitude to 'friendly grafters', or covert enemies, nor shall it be used to promote or perpetuate their compromised politics or their erroneous slants.

This record will stand on its own, without making concessions to false friends, or our and Gene's enemies.

No such books are possible now that he is dead. And no commercialization has come about either - and if one were to happen, he will no longer be there to share it with us and have his sharp, penetrating eyes shine with joy.

But stripping the lies and deception from this love affair with nature and knowledge does not thereby become any less important.

We cannot claim that our anger and indignation at what has happened with - and since - Gene's murder will do justice, through these pages, to his joy for life and living. Nor do we claim to speak for Gene, now that he is no longer here. But we will stake here - and not just on the basis of the legal rights given to us by Gene through the contracts we made - our determination to let his words go free and to present undistorted the context of those words. Free like the eagle that does not look back, free like a bird, those words will say what they said.

If others should now feel as if this was their own Judgement of God descended on their heads, they should perhaps have shuddered before they proferred - while Gene was alive and immediately after his death - their self-promoting lies, vile falsities and willful distortions. They have only themselves to blame.

It would explain nothing to say that we're lashing out in pain. Our process has continued to move, through the good and the bad and the indifferent, because it has been a joyful one - the creation and the work were joyful, the combat was joyful, the results were joyful. Yet, institutional centers and marginal groups, even Mocenigos like Marett or Rothwell, have never ceased injecting sadness into this process wherever they could . From hailing us as saviors to despising us as madmen. And there is now no greater sadness than Gene's life having been taken. But it would not be, nor should it be!, a sadness so pointlessly cruel that it would silence and cloister these words, or even permit others to think that such silence could be secured by fear for our skins.

They have made possible the continuation of research at ABRI and the continued publications at Akronos. But they know, and we know, that this activity is a very tenuous one - and we all sense the end of these efforts coming ever nearer. It may well become an incomplete work. Not because we have failed in our program of investigation, thought, or writing; but because our work will prove - much to our discontent - to not have been publishable. Before this happens - or even as it happens - we would like to leave behind our own salute to a very dear friend who knew what it is to fight the good fight and to never betray his integrity, his dedication to science, his commitments, or his friends. A friend who didn't lie. A friend whose steadfastness we are most proud of.

It is a truism that only in hard times does one know one's friends. In hard times, Gene and we found each other as friends that could be counted upon. In still more cruel times, we found that none of these players mentioned above could be counted upon. Precisely what unifies them, and what places them in the ranks of the desolate majority, is that they don't know what making friends is, and thus have none, no matter how many.

Peer pressure, fear to speak out, fear of rejection, disinterest in vital matters, all these collective sentiments managed by cadres ensure that whistleblowers are always perceived as troublemakers, as attackers. Funny, ain't it, that those who, often at great personal risk, summon the courage to blow the whistle are rarely rewarded with general respect. When they die, most want to forget them, and those who want to remember take it upon themselves to strip from the lives of these extraordinary individuals all that was struggle, combat, duress, suffering, and its cause - a value no longer valued: the courage to stand up against what is wrong and unacceptable, and be counted. An operation of normalization - to make these unique lives acceptable in everyone's eyes (whatever that is), and thus neutralize effectively the impact these lives had actually sought, and their real difference. How many extraordinary beings have not suffered this fate? Reich and Nietzsche have certainly been given its full measure. An act of usurpation permits the grave-diggers of the spirit to falsify the entire process of combat of those who once lived with the greatest of joys and brilliance. Reich becomes a loonie persecuted by homophobia, as Nietzsche becomes a Nazi.

The brutality and apparent senselessness of this murder demands that this record of the life and work we shared with this rare human being be told. As his closest friends, this is the least we can do.

We will not deny the terrible bitterness that Gene's murder has caused, nor the bitterness we felt upon seeing the takeover of Gene's legacy by the grave-diggers of the Spirit. But even now, it is still joy and excitment that we feel for this work - for its honesty and its teaching. We may lose the means to continue the research, we may lose the means to publish, we may lose even more - but we shall never lose the love of a good fight, a love that Gene also shared.

The body can be killed, the mind can be stolen, but the Spirit shall never be imprisoned.