Fiftieth anniversary of the death of Wilhelm Reich

[shemp]

I would not have noticed, except that boston.com published a totally uncritical article about him and his nonsense: 50 years later, supporters promote discredited scientist's work (http://www.boston.com/news/local/maine/articles/2007/11/02/50_years_later_supporters_promote_discredited_scie ntists_work/)

I won't even bother quoting from it. It sounds like a press release.

[Lensman]

His more controversial work came after he veered away from psychotherapy into laboratory experiments in Norway that led to the discovery of what he called "bions" -- basic life forms that gave off orgone energy.

Sounds like "mediclorians" (sp?) & "The Force" to me. ;)

[krelnik]

One aspect of Reich and "orgonomy" that I find highly entertaining is how a completely separate branch of woo has latched onto it: the chemtrails nuts.

Apparently one of Reich's useless gadgets was something called a "cloudbuster" that supposedly manipulated his imaginary energy in the atmosphere to cause rain. Wiki article here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich#Orgone_accumulators_and_cloudbusters ).

If you poke around on chemtrails websites, you'll see those nutjobs have latched onto this nonsense and now promote them to "break up chemtrails". They also seem to be into "orgone crystals" which are somehow related. (I got a headache reading the woo descriptions of those, so I'm not sure how they fit in).

Maybe its just me, but I find it highly entertaining when one group of woos either joins forces or declares war on another group of seemingly unrelated woos. It seems like the epitome of pointlessness. Hilarious. If only we could provoke this behavior at will, we could get all the woos fighting with each other and out of our hair.

Oh, and back to the topic, I agree that AP article reads like a regurgitated press release. It even breathlessly repeats the trope about Reich's books being burned by the government. Orgonomists always repeat that one over and over, and yet somehow (according to this article) there are some 300 boxes of his books and papers that will become available this week for the first time. So what did the government burn in 1956? (One account I read said it was the operators manuals and sales materials for the devices he was claiming cured cancer when they didn't).

--Tim Farley