What seems odd to us, however, is that we cannot find any major sources of news and information that have called these observances to the public’s attention, so PRAXIS is stepping in to the void.  We hope that you will share this list with everyone – understanding American history is the foundation of understanding our world today, and better understanding ourselves.

So, now is the time to subscribe to the History Channel, National Geographic Channel, the Military Channel, or the Discovery Channel, then sit back and enjoy the flood of special shows, books, commemoratives, and feature films.  While you’re at it, learn a bit about American History, and share it with your children.   Here’s the list:

• 2011 – 2015:  American Civil War Sesquicentennial
• 2011:  911 10th Anniversary Observance
• 2011:  Battle of the Alamo 175th Anniversary
• 2011:  First American in Space 50th Anniversary
• 2012:  Cuban Missile Crisis 50th Anniversary
• 2012 – 2014:  War of 1812 Bicentennial
• 2012:  Sinking of the Titanic Centennial Observance
• 2013:  Assassination of President John F. Kennedy 50th Anniversary Observance
• 2013:  Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech 50th Anniversary
• 2013:  French and Indian War Ends 250th Anniversary
• 2014:  Gulf Of Tonkin Incident – Vietnam War Outbreak 50th Anniversary
• 2014 – 2018:  First World War Centennial
• 2014 – 2020: Second World War 75th Anniversary
• 2014:  Resignation of President Richard Nixon 40th Anniversary Observance
• 2015:  Assassination of President Lincoln Bicentennial Observance
• 2015:  Battle of Waterloo Bicentennial
• 2016:  Pearl Harbor 75th Anniversary Observance
• 2018:  Protestant Reformation 500th Anniversary
• 2018:  Assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King 50th Anniversary Observances
• 2019:  Moon Landing 50th Anniversary
• 2020: Plymouth Rock/Mayflower Pilgrims’ Landing 400th Anniversary                                 

Honorable mentions:

50th Anniversary of Woodstock (2019), Passage of 16th Amendment – Federal Income Tax (2013), Passage of 19th Amendment – Women’s Suffrage (2020), Beatles’ First American Tour 50th Anniversary (2014), John Glenn’s Orbiting the Earth 50th Anniversary (2012), Bay of Pigs Invasion 50th Anniversary (2011), Formation of the League of Nations Centennial (2019), Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address Sesquicentennial (2013).  Notice that there are NO sports-related commemorations listed anywhere here.  Had we included the category of sports, the list would be endless…

Can you think of any more?  Let us know! 

No related posts.

  Theoretical Physicist 

 Thursday, May 20, 2010

Present:  Dr. Jack Sarfatti, Alan Waite (PRAXIS President – interviewer), Ryan Harbert (PRAXIS videographer), Jagdish Mann (guest), Daniel Geller[1] (guest).

ALAN: Jack, would you mind going back in your mind to your undergraduate work or prior to that and talk about how your interest in physics began?

JACK: Probably prior because as I said I was part of a group of super kids, these genius kids that were being studied at the Columbia University Laboratory of William Sheldon, and one of his assistants, a Walter Breen, (we’re talking like 1953).  One member of the group was a guy named Johnny Glogower.  He was a year younger than me.  He was a Westinghouse Science finalist.  He was a Quiz Kid on the radio show “Quiz Kids”.  There was a bunch of them, a guy named Robert Solovay, who became a famous mathematician at Berkeley.  And even Alan Greenspan who became head of the …the…

ALAN: Federal Reserve.

JACK: Yeah. Greenspan is older than I am, but Greenspan became part of this group.  It was all also connected somehow with Ayn Rand.  Somehow Ayn Rand had something to do with it.  It was also connected to the government.  It had something to do with what later became Sandia Labs in New Mexico.  In fact we used to have these guys come up (they looked like FBI guys), and this was the McCarthy era, to get pep talks about being patriotic and anti-communist and all that kind of stuff.  So there were a lot of weird things going on.  But it’s kind of like…there’s a “Twilight Zone” episode that somebody recently told me about, where it turns out the screenplay is a fictionalized version of what was actually happening in real life.  It’s about this government program back in the Fifties with these whiz kids, and apparently there was a similar program at Berkeley  – there’s a friend of mine named Hank Harrison who was a part of it, who’s the father of Courtney Love, actually Courtney Love’s dad.  And he apparently (we’re contemporary actually, about the same age in fact he lives in Sacramento)…you might want to actually talk to him about the program.

ALAN: Hank Harrison?

JACK: Yeah, Hank Harrison.  He has a ranch right outside of Sacramento, horse ranch.  He apparently was in a similar program in Berkeley around this same time, this is like, the early Fifties, and it was tied up with the intelligence community, definitely with the government.  It was kind of like the X-Men.  I mean what they were trying to do…what they were trying to see.  First of all, they were trying to promote an interest in Science.  And this is where his (pointing to Daniel Geller) dad comes in.  And in the paranormal world – Danny, I don’t know if you know Danny – is it all right, can I talk about his dad?

ALAN: Yeah, sure.

JACK: Danny’s father is Uri Geller, the psychic, you know, the famous Israeli scientist and psychic.  That’s his dad, whom I’ve known for many years.  But the thing is that…and this is what’s so interesting about it…because we were tested, they were trying to induce paranormal powers in us…like telepathy, psycho-kinesis, and things like that.

ALAN: How did they do that?

JACK: There were experiments, and they would just sit with the kids, you know, trying to get them to move objects.  We never moved anything, but there was a whole program going on about this.  Also, they talked about aliens and flying saucers, trying to figure out how they fly, and all that kind of stuff, it was a lot of science fiction.  Oh, and I met Isaac Asimov at that time.

ALAN: When you were part of this program?

JACK: Yeah, they used to take us to all these sci-fi conventions.  Walter was very much part of the sci-fi scene then, and also he’s one of the founders of MENSA.  This is in New York in the Fifties.  Walter wanted me to go to the University of Chicago for some reason.  And when I graduated from high school in 1956, the people in this program wrote the recommendations for me for the schools I applied to.  So I applied to MIT, Cornell, and the University of Chicago.  For some reason my mother didn’t want me to go to Chicago; it was too far away.  Also the people in the neo-conservative movement came out of Chicago.  One of the people, I forget the name, but one of the professors there who was an inspiration for neo-cons was in some way connected with this.  So, at this point I wouldn’t go to the University of Chicago.  But I’m actually wondering, where did Greenspan go?  Is he from Chicago?

ALAN: I don’t know.

JACK: That’d be interesting to find out.  Greenspan was part of this experiment.  Or so I’m told.  I never met Greenspan at the time.  He would have been four or five years older.

ALAN: How old were you when all of this was happening?

JACK: I was about thirteen when it started.  So from about thirteen to sixteen.

ALAN: Early to mid Fifties?

JACK: Yeah, this is like Fifty-three to Fifty-six.  And then I graduated high school, I was like sixteen going on seventeen that September.  And it was in, you know, an accelerated program.  So I went to Cornell, and I remember Breen wrote the recommendation that got me into Cornell.  Apparently it was like a ten page recommendation.  One of the things Breen said was something like, “young fine age, emotionally immature”.  I was told this later, as a lot of scientist kids are nerds, you know, and he wrote that I would “probably create a new physics, like Newton.”  My mother didn’t have any money, and my parents were divorced, so I got a full scholarship to Cornell.  My professors were the guys who built the atomic bomb in Los Alamos.  You know, like (Nobel laureate physicist) Hans Bethe?  A lot of them were at Cornell and other Ivy League schools.  I don’t know if you’ve read it, have you seen the movie The Good Shepherd?

ALAN: Oh, yes.

JACK: Well, you remember how the opening scene of The Good Shepherd, Gilbert and Sullivan, the guy who plays Angleton…

ALAN: Jesus Angleton – CIA Counter Intel character…

JACK: Yeah, the character.  The opening scene of The Good Shepherd is where he’s playing in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera at Yale.  And the CIA guys come and recruit him for the…uh…

ALAN: Skull and Bones.

JACK: Yeah, Skull and Bones, and all that kind of thing.  And the ending of the movie also goes back to that scene with Gilbert and Sullivan.  Well, by coincidence, while in Cornell I was the lead tenor of the Gilbert and Sullivan…[everyone laughs]…

JACK: And my voice teacher, who later became Sir Keith Faulkner (became knighted by the Queen of England), became the head of the Royal College of Music…but there’s this very tight relationship between the British and the Americans in the intelligence services.  Of course, this is the Fifties.  I mean, it was very different back then, it was a small world.  The Ivy League was a recruiting ground for the intelligence services.

ALAN: And early on, very early on, then, you were connected with the intelligence community.  And that relationship stuck?

JACK: Well, actually, I should have said even before then, because it turns out my grandfather, even before this Columbia Project, which was definitely some kind of intelligence thing…before that my grandfather worked for the US Army.  He was a veteran, and this is when I was 8 or 9 years old.  I was actually living with the grandparents.  And after school, I would go to meet my grandfather, who was at the Army Quartermaster Corps, in the Garment District of New York.  And that was a very strange situation, maybe I was 10 or 11 years old…but I would hang out there and play.  And they had a laboratory there.  They had the different cold weather uniforms, hot weather, that sort of stuff.  It was like a museum. 

I was given free reign in this place.  My grandfather drove around with these Army officers – my grandfather was driving the car, and I would sit in the back seat, with these colonels…they must have been psychiatrists.   I mean they were always analyzing.  And it’s all kind of consistent.  (because) at time I was, going to build rockets, go to the moon, or all this kind of stuff.  But all of this was encouraging me, I was actually in the company of these Army officers alot.  That’s when I saw this fun colonel named Phil Corso who wrote a book, “The Day After Roswell”, many years later.  I’m pretty sure Col. Corso’s one of those guys, really…though I can’t prove it.  This would’ve been around 1950. 

But it’s a consistent story, and it all makes sense.  Then there were other scientists.  A guy named Hal Puthoff, who’s right now in Texas, about my age, also had similar experiences, and has been involved, I mean he actually was a Naval officer.  He worked for the National Security Agency, and is now one of the active researchers in UFO’s and the paranormal.  In fact it was Hal Puthoff who was involved in a CIA project at Stanford Research Institute back in the 70’s. 

That’s where I first met him.  So this has all been kind of a consistent picture of what looks like a very long term intelligence effort, definitely involving the British, definitely involving the Americans and probably other agencies as well (maybe the Israelis as well) to investigate these kind of fringe areas which are now called UFO’s and the paranormal, and how physics could explain it.  This idea to try to explain consciousness and possible flying saucers, the big thing back then, was part of this project.  So I was involved in that from the very beginning.

ALAN: What did this experience you had starting off…very early on in a field that was obviously of great interest to you, that you were gifted in, and you were surrounded by people who were interested in specific applications – I suppose, weaponizing for intelligence use – what sort of  possibilities did that put into your mind?  Does that make sense?  How did you see the world at that time?

JACK: Well, you’ve got to remember this was, I can still kind of remember World War II.  I mean I was like 5, 6 years old when it ended.  But I remember walking my grandfather down the Hudson River and seeing armadas of airplanes, you know, like hundreds of airplanes I guess going over Europe.  I can remember that.  And I can remember victory gardens, and I remember blackouts.  It wasn’t quite like London, nobody was bombing us.  But I remember the stories of how the V-2’s were going to hit New York and all that kind of stuff. 

My mother’s brother, Arthur, was in the war…in the Pacific.  In fact, he had been in the Army Reserves.  He was supposed to get out in December of ’41, then there was Pearl Harbor.  And so he was on the first, one of the first boats leaving San Francisco to go overseas…he was at Guadalcanal.  This is another interesting thing; he had a reputation for being psychic, you see, because he was in a lot of combat – he was overseas for four and a half years.  And even when he was not in the jungles, they had him teaching, in New Zealand or something, as a jungle warfare instructor.  And I think at one point, they had him working with the Navajo Indians, you know, the Whisperers?

ALAN: The Windtalkers?

JACK: Yeah, the Windtalkers, ‘cause apparently he got this sort of, they used to call him “the Jewish Indian”.  He had this reputation, everybody wanted to be wherever he was because he had a sense in the jungle…the snipers in the tree, he sort had an accurate sense for where they were.  And there was one outfit, I think when he first went over, the 25^th Division or something, it was famous since around 90% of them were killed.  Tremendous casualties.  And he was one of the few that survived without getting shot…I have photographs of him during the war…

So, the military, they were always interested in stuff like that.  I mean the military’s more open to the paranormal.  So one reason that possibly the Army became interested in me was because of my uncle.  That they wanted to see if any of the…if there’s any kind of familial sort of thing in the gene pool  And this is speculation.  I don’t really know for sure.

ALAN: So you’re trained, as you go through school, from a very, I would imagine, traditional set scientific perspective.  This is what Science is; this is how it’s done…

JACK: Oh yeah, at Cornell.  In Cornell, there was never, yeah.

ALAN: None of that was compromised by…

JACK: Well, I mean, that I almost forgotten, it was actually Cornell.  That whole perspective of Science was put in the… my subconscious.  I was not really actively involved with the fringe stuff when I was at Cornell although when I would go to New York I would visit Walter…but, I guess it’s more of something we had to do really.  This actually involves his dad (pointing to Daniel Geller).  When I was thirteen or maybe twelve, I got a very strange set of phone calls in which there was a mechanical voice, and it could have been simulated, but the story is of this mechanical voice that it was a computer onboard a spacecraft in the future!

ALAN: The “Godphone”?[i]

JACK: The Godphone.  And you know, it wanted to teach me things, and I was supposed to meet these “others” in 20 years.  This was 1953 and twenty years would be 1973.  So this kind of whole weird thing happened.  And the odd thing about it was that I only remember one of the phone calls.  But my mother, I only found this out later, my mother remembers weeks of them and hours at a time, which I have no memory of whatsoever.  I was walking around glassy-eyed.  And finally she got worried…finally she grabbed the phone from me and says “who’s this?” and heard this metallic sounding voice.  And it said “this is a computer aboard a spacecraft and it wanted to speak to me.”  She got angry and said “Don’t ever call here again,” and slammed the phone down.  That was her memory of it that she told me about later.

ALAN: So, could the phone calls have been part of a government program?

JACK: Well, I think that maybe it was.  It’s one of two things.  Either it was what it says it was, or a government program, take your choice.  I mean, given everything else, it sounds like it’s a government project.  They’re still playing psychological games on these kids, quite possibly.  So that’s the most likely explanation.

But the uncanny part, and this involves his (indicating Daniel Geller) dad, because I spoke to Uri, right around the same time, I think Uri; he’s what, 63, 64 years old?  There’s seven years difference in age. 

(To Daniel) I’m about seven years older than your father. 

(To Alan) So Uri is walking around Tel Aviv, I think it was Tel Aviv, in a park or something.  And up until that point Uri…was a normal kid.  And apparently this orb of light – this is the story, and there is a witness to this – this orb of light comes down and Uri is seven years old at the time, and shoots a beam, like a laser beam into his head… well you’ve probably heard this story.  Uri runs to his mother, runs from the park to his house.  Years later, there was a young Israeli soldier in the park who witness the actual event, who later became a sort of, correct me if I’m wrong, but became high up in the Israeli military, maybe a general, or a high ranking military officer.  But he came, maybe in the last year or two he went public and said he saw the whole thing…it was actually on Israeli television, wasn’t he?

DANIEL:  I believe so, I believe so.

JACK: So, there’s a corroboration of this story, and the thing is that, this weird incident, we’re talking “Twilight zone” here, a real “X-files”… sort of thing.  Uri’s experience was about the same time as my phone calls were happening.  And whatever was on the other end of that the telephone said I would begin to link up with the others, part of the group, in twenty years.  Twenty years would be around 1973.  I have a book called “Destiny Matrix” where this whole story is told.  A lot of people have written about it.  It’s actually on the web. 

By a very odd co-incidence, I can’t go into it now because it’s too complex, but I wind up at Stanford Research Institute with Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ who was working with the CIA, which was not known publically, but later came out that they were.  And they’re experimenting on remote viewing, ESP, paranormal stuff.  Uri Geller was one of their subjects, as was a guy named Pat Price. 

Very secret official government project dealing with paranormal stuff.  I was a professor of physics at this time at San Diego State, and it happened that I was leaving town.  I was on my way to, in fact, see a Pakistani physicist named Abdus Salam – he had invited me to Europe to the UNESCO Institute of Physics, which is also a part of the International Atomic Energy Agency, you know, the ones who now monitor Iran.  I was invited there as a scientist, and I made it there by a very weird set of circumstances.

I met Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut who was on the moon.  Edgar Mitchell was very into the paranormal as was a guy named Brender Regan, one of the people running the project.  And I was asked at the time because I had been the assistant to a man named David Bohm at the University of London.  And I was asked to help arrange tests of Danny’s father, Uri, at the University of London.  At the time of course, you know, this was a CIA operation, but I didn’t know that.  I was just the academic; I guessed they called me an “asset”.  I must say, before this happened, 1963, right after the Kennedy assassination, I was working, I had like a summer job at this defense contractor in Newport Beach, California at Ford Philco Aeronutronics.  And After Kennedy was killed; it was like 9/11.  I did volunteer for the CIA.  I was actually interviewed by the CIA at their office.

ALAN: In what capacity?

JACK: Well, as an asset, whatever.  I didn’t even know. 

ALAN: You wanted to work for the CIA?

JACK: Well, I even tried to join the Navy, as a physicist.  Yeah, I volunteered for the Navy.  But nothing ever came of it.  I know I was interviewed, they had these tape recording machines, it was several hours up near UCLA, we were pretty patriotic World War II era…the kids…I was fairly patriotic, gung ho…not at all anti-American, left-wing…

ALAN: Wasn’t that in the late Sixties?

JACK: Not late  60’S this was 1963 right after JFK’s murder in Dallas. I could tell you about that as well.  But nothing officially ever happened in terms of the CIA.  All these weird things later were connected.  In the mid ‘80s, I met a guy named Harold Chipman, who’s now dead.  He was the Station Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency in Munich, Germany and he ran MK ULTRA in San Francisco.  Apparently he was one of the guys behind the scenes that set up the SRI experiments.  In the mid Eighties he actually funded some of my work and tried to get a think tank going.  So these connections with the United States government intelligence community have been there almost all my life.

ALAN: How common is that, Jack, for people like you – theoretical physicists – to be connected with intelligence agencies?

JACK: Well, I think it’s common… I think it was fairly common, at least back then because remember it was a much smaller world back then.  There weren’t that many people, not like it is today.  I mean we had compulsory ROTC at Cornell, okay, and I was in the Air Force ROTC.  When we graduated, President Eisenhower reviewed the troops.  The President of the United States came up in front of our class; we’re looking at the President of the United States!  It was a whole different world.  When I first arrived in Ithaca as a freshman in 1956, our counselor was Governor Averell Harriman, U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and I shook hands with him when I was a Cornell sophomore.  I met Harry Truman at the Student Hall. 

ALAN: What was the understanding in the scientific community at that time – about where Science was going?  A brave new world, we’re breaking into new fields, we’re finding out new things, you’re at the cutting edge…?

JACK: Yeah.

ALAN: And you’re intricately connected with intelligence agencies and defense programs, things that people decades later, particularly people on the Left would have significant problems with…

JACK: Yeah.

ALAN: Moral problems… how did that work for you?

JACK: Well, that was not… first of all, back in my generation, it was all taken for granted – you did things for your country.  It was not even questioned until the Sixties.  I was on the periphery; I can tell you what happened.  In the ‘Sixties when I left Cornell, I spent two years at Brandeis  University, the graduate program at Brandeis, I ran out of time at Cambridge.  There, I met Eleanor Roosevelt,  Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis …. and I got involved with a lot of that stuff… I was fairly naive, but I must say my main interest was Science.  I was not political…and there was a natural patriotism in the Fifties.  My uncle was a war hero…. Around Harvard, the Harvard/Cambridge thing, I got involved with John Cage, composer…

ALAN: You could not have been popular with the defense establishment…

JACK: No, I don’t think… I don’t know… I was a National Defense Scholar, but I even did some work, I think, for whoever was the left wing candidate.  My wife was more into it.  I didn’t know what I was doing.  But I was involved with SANE, the people at SANE, S-A-N-E, the Sane Nuclear policy.  I was sort of on the periphery of all that.  Then I wound up at UCSD.  And UCSD back in the mid Sixties.  Now UCSD is part of the Military-Industrial-Complex.  We had Edward Teller would come down there all the time.  Harold Uri, these are all famous, you know… John Wheeler, Keith Brueckner was the head of the JASONS, the JASONS were elite defense department physicists… designing the electronic fences in Vietnam… and San Diego’s a big military town.  So, UCSD on the scientific end was totally enmeshed in the defense industry. 

But the liberal arts department had Herbert Marcuse taken in from Brandeis and Angela Davis.  My wife was more into liberal arts.  So I knew them socially, and got involved with the formation of the Peace and Freedom Party in San Diego… also I must say, before that, at Cornell, a lot of my friends were involved in the freedom movement in Mississippi.

ALAN: These are all things that are even outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

JACK: Yes, yeah.   Absolutely.  So I was on the periphery of all this.  By the time I got to San Diego, I was teaching.  One of my co-professors Fred Alan Wolf was pretty well known in those days.  He’s kind of a movie star now.  What was that film, “What the Bleep” or something like that?  In any case, we had the Black Panthers …Huey Newton’s… he used to come to La Jolla… so, I was a sort of Forest Gump and Zelig witness to a lot of these historical things on the Left.

ALAN: where are you going at this time?  Where in your mind are you going in the field of Science?  You’re dealing with the government, and yet you certainly had your own fascination and own interests.  There are a lot of issues that are there from your past dealing with the paranormal and things that are outside the mainstream…taking you where?

JACK: Well, about the paranormal… at the time in San Diego… from the mid 60s until 1971- 72, I was pretty straight and narrow in terms of mainstream science.  I was not thinking very much about the fringe stuff at all.  Then in 1973, 20 years after the phone calls, a whole bunch of weird things started happening.  It’s too complicated to go into, but it’s in my book “Destiny Matrix”.  I wound up at this SRI thing with Geller, and there’s all kinds of weird things happening, so from 73 …I ran into all these weird people…witches and warlocks in London, – just a whole bunch of crazy stuff happening.

ALAN: So it was like an awakening?

JACK: Oh yes…definitely an awakening.  Lots of people who were in the occult.  Okay, it’s 1974, I’m commuting between Trieste, working with Abdus Salam at UNESCO’s – International Center for Theoretical Physics -, very straight science.  But the institute we were at in Trieste was a meeting ground between the Russians and Eastern Europeans; it was still the Cold War. 

That project was definitely an intelligence thing…it was CIA, and we were right in the middle of it, Fred Alan Wolf and I.  Fred, who looked like a real hippie, long hair and all, he’s a character.   Fred was real adventurous, much more adventurous than I am.  I went back to Trieste, I had to work, and Fred was footloose and fancy- free, so Fred was invited to Bulgaria in 1974 and he had an affair with this woman who turned out to be the daughter of the KGB chief – the secret police in Bulgaria. 

Another interesting thing was in the Spring of 1974.  There was a very wealthy woman in London; I think Daniel’s dad knows her… Judith… was that her name?  Anyway, there’s this wealthy American heiress living in London, who was very into the paranormal, and she had this beautiful house in London, I remember it had an Olympic-sized swimming pool in the basement.  Ira Einhorn stayed with her more than once.

So we were staying there with some of the people from the SRI, and we drove up to it, I remember she took us in here white Porsche up to Cambridge University – there was a meeting of the Para-psychological Association there.  That’s where I first met Brian Josephson, who is very into the paranormal.  I also met Steven Hawking’s research assistant named Bernard Carr now professor of physics at the university and later became head of the English Society of Research.  So I met all these people there. 

There was a group of guys from the CIA there too.  One of those people invited me to dinner, his name was Dennis Bardens.  Dennis Bardens, if you look him up on the Internet, well, he’s dead now, but he was definitely with British Intelligence.  He was the biographer of Winston Churchill.  He was also into the paranormal.  Oh, in fact he was a producer… he invented Panorama on the BBC.  He even did something during the war in Czechoslovakia.  You know, we’re talking about the MI6, James Bond, OSS, one of those guys…he was that era, and he looked it.

ALAN: Was he involved with Aleister Crowley and his crew?

JACK: Maybe, Crowley and all that; all kinds of connections to Crowley… we haven’t got into that yet but all kinds of connections there.  In fact even Ayn Rand was connected with Crowley.  Thanks for reminding me.  So, we’re at this meeting and… Dennis Bardens, he’s an older man, and a general very established, a Winston Churchill staff type, very distinguished, and he says “Dr. Sarfatti, I’d like to take you to dinner”.  So we went to the Blue Boar Inn in Cambridge.  I remember I had duck and cherry sauce.  I swear something right out of a James Bond film.  Then we went into the “club” for brandy, and Bardens looks at me and says “Dr. Sarfatti, first” and he winks at me.  (he was a little bit drunk); “I must tell you that I am a Kabbalist.”  Another wink in his eye.  Now, I had just come from Paris, I had just been involved with these Kabbalists, a French guy[2], a whole other story there. Bardens was telling me he knew the people I had been with in Paris.  The people I was with in Paris knew Lawrence Durrell, the author who was a member of the British Intelligence in World War II, very well known…it was cloak-and-dagger stuff.  “I’m a Kabbalist” he says… then he gets serious and says “Dr. Sarfatti, it is my duty to inform you that there is a psychic war raging across the continents between the Soviet Union and your country, and you are to be in the thick of it.”   And I didn’t quite know what he was referring to, so I just said, “Okay.”

ALAN: Straight out of “Smiley’s People.”

JACK: Absolutely.  Absolutely.  And things got even weirder.

ALAN: Well, let me stop you for just a moment, Jack.  His connections with British Intelligence were such that he knew that American Intelligence had plans for you?  Was that it?

JACK: Well, I’m looking back, and remember, at the moment I was still in my early thirties.  Lots of testosterone, some sexy English woman had picked me up and wanted me to spend the night with her.  I didn’t even want to have dinner with him,  I had other things on my mind,  I mean, I was, you know, totally distracted (laughter).

ALAN: Yes, of course.  Quite understandable (laughter).

JACK: Yeah.  But I was a lot younger then.  So I sorta-kinda understood what he was talking about, but I had other things on my mind.  I was just being polite, letting him take me to dinner, even though I knew it was something official,  I had a sense that there was a lot of this stuff going on.,  and he couldn’t be much more explicit than that…but it was just another in a series of weird things that started happening at that time…

ALAN: So, essentially you’ve been groomed throughout your entire life, since the Godphone calls?

JACK: Exactly.

ALAN: By the government… United States government.

JACK: Oh yeah.  Absolutely. 

ALAN: And eventually you were involved in a series of clandestine programs.

JACK: Yeah.

ALAN: And at that point you’re taking an interest in what people call the paranormal, things outside the box, but you’re still a rising star in the establishment science…

JACK: Well, I became kind of a maverick.  Here’s what happened, and this gets back to some of the recent stuff that’s been happening (with the “Tuscan Conference Controversy.”).  At the time with the Uri Geller paranormal tests, the tests at the University of London, I came out, and was a witness to these tests done by Arthur Koestler.  But it was being done under the CIA, and I wrote a little report of what I witnessed at Birkbeck College (University of London) with David Bohm and Arthur Clarke, and Arthur Koestler, and Uri Geller bending the metal…

I just wrote this thing and gave it to Brendan O Regan, who was part of Edgar Mitchell’s Noetics Institute, the SRI people.  Instantly this thing went all over the world as a major press release in every major newspaper.  Now, that normally doesn’t happen.  That’s CIA.  I was being used, in a way.  I wrote this little thing about what I thought, was very positive, judging from what I saw, Uri’s ability to bend metal with his thoughts.  So as a result of that article, immediately, I found that I had powerful enemies in the academic establishment.

I remember when I went back to America, I was up in Boston, and my undergraduate advisor Phil Morrison, who was then a professor at MIT, the book editor for Scientific American, and Morrison warned me.  He said “This is very bad for your academic career; politically it would be hard for you to get a job.”   Not good to come out in favor of inquiring into the paranormal.

ALAN: And the paranormal is not even to this day been something that the “scientific establishment”…

JACK: Well…

ALAN: …considers being “fair game” in terms of study?

JACK:  Wait a minute; it’s very tricky because it has to do with what’s recently happened with Michael Towler, Antony Valentini and the London Times’ controversy that is happening now.  There’s a war going on, warring factions, okay, involving factions within the intelligence community itself.  I don’t claim to… I’m not privy to all it, but at that time, I was put under a lock.  And even the Amazing Randi (world famous magician)[ii] took me to lunch back here in California…and Randi says “Uri’s a fake.  I can do this, bending metals…” and at one point he kind of scared me and I said “Okay, sure, it’s a trick, physicists can be fooled”.  My arm was being twisted not to… apparently I got all this publicity because of the Central Intelligence Agency being involved, right?  I was just a professor… Assistant Professor of Physics at San Diego State.  Why else am I suddenly getting this worldwide coverage?

ALAN: Because if you can be excluded from the regular community, therefore you’d be more inclined to…

JACK: Well, whatever.  But the thing is… that was a turning point in which I became kind of a black sheep in terms of the respectable scientific community. 

ALAN: Were you the only one?

JACK: No, not yet.  Brian Josephson too.

ALAN: Brian Josephson was (a black sheep) at that time?

JACK: Oh, well, he became very quickly because… Josephson was a stubborn guy – “Don’t… don’t mess with the Zohan.”  I mean he doesn’t look like…he looks like Woody Allen, but he’s a tough cookie and he got involved with the Maharishi, got into meditation.  He did the whole Sixties and Seventies thing, Timothy Leary and all of those people, I was part of that circle.  Josephson has basically been ostracized in his own community, Cambridge, even though Josephson is a Nobel Prize winning physicist, a fellow of the Royal Society, and he’s been a guest of Queen Elizabeth many times at Buckingham Palace.  Nobel Prize winner, and all that.  and he was (treated that way)…  I know Brian very well.  He was my guest in San Francisco back in the Seventies.  He has basically been marginalized at Cambridge.  The Physics Mafia Chiefs have not allowed him to get government assistantships for his students. Theoretical physicists have formed a priesthood of death since they created the atomic bomb.

ALAN: Help me understand this: if “string theory” can not be proven, why is the paranormal…why are any of these other “outside the box” investigations not ok?

JACK: Well, that’s a very good question.  I don’t have a good answer, but it’s a great question, and I think it has to be asked, and this has to be made into a political issue.  It is a political issue.  You know, it’s not even a question at this point of believing whether or not, say, Uri has the power (to bend metal with his mind) or doesn’t have the power, I personally think he does, because I have seen other things since then, very many things,… but whether or not you believe it is not the point. The point is intellectual freedom, academic freedom and why the people who are thinking outside the box are being demonized.

ALAN: Which brings us to the whole “Towler Scandal…”

JACK: The whole “Towler/ Valentini Scandal,” where Towler went on the web, and was blaming me, says “Because of you, my wife and Valentini’s wife and children have been threatened by these extremists.”  I mean… I can’t help that, if they’ve created a situation that became… in other words, we were not supposed to respond to this at all.  We were not supposed to make it public what happened.

The point is what Brian Josephson found out – that there are certain powerful people in the physics community who the twisted arms, metaphorically, of Towler and Valentini.  It’s very… it’s so unusual.  Normally, if you don’t want somebody to come to a meeting, you just never invite them.  But since I was one of the creators of the meeting, I mean, to make it so (obvious)… something extraordinary happened there, okay?  Towler and Valentini…they were threatened with their jobs or something.  The question is who pressured Towler and Valentini to actually do this? Who did this?  Who was behind that?  Brian Josephson is trying to find out.  He wants to know.  He’s not going to let go of this.

ALAN: And why would they succumb to that?

JACK: And why would they succumb to that?  I experienced a kind of pressure through Morrison and the Amazing Randi back in the Seventies.  But look, this is the second time this has happened.  There’s another incident that happened in Brazil.  I published a paper about two or three years ago.  It’s very groundbreaking work about the emergence of the gravitational field from a deeper level. But the point is I was learning some new mathematics, I’m sleepwalking[3] by myself, and some of the mathematics was not quite correct, it was work in progress. 

So I published version one, and there’s this guy named Waldyr Rodrigues Jr. who was a friend of mine in Brazil, in fact I was a visiting professor down in UNICAMP, Brazil, which is the MIT of Brazil.  And so, we were friends.  In fact, Waldyr is a consultant for the Brazilian Air Force, Brazilian military, and he’s very into the paranormal.  He’s very much into the reality of UFO’s… we’ve met generals in the army telling us all about this stuff.  By the way, Uri Geller is like a superstar in South America and Brazil, he’s like John Lennon.  I mean… that whole culture, they accept this as part of their reality, you know.

But in any case, when this paper that I wrote came out, and I acknowledged Waldyr in this paper.  I even said in the paper that this should not mean that Waldyr supports my theory in any way.  But Waldyr sent me a letter (that criticized my paper), and he was like, very guilty; he said he felt guilty about it.  He wrote something that corrected the math.  But the math was a minor thing compared to the idea.  The idea is still valid.  But then Waldyr told another guy who’s actually a physicist named Tony Smith that he was put under pressure that money for his graduate students would be taken away if he didn’t try to make me look like idiot, ok?  So…there’s a whole pattern here.  The question is, who is doing this, why are they doing it?  It involves politics.  It involves defense issues, because any of this stuff we’re working on, if it’s real, has immense military weapons implications.  Immense.

ALAN: There were several articles just recently about anti-gravity…

JACK: Immense!  There’s no question about it.  And there’s no question that there’s an international involvement, and the Israelis are definitely involved, the Russians are involved.  We worked with a bunch of Russians.  There’s an international effort going on.  Now, with my new website,  http://stardrive.org, of course I have the latest surveillance software for clicking.  So, we’re able to see who’s downloading information.  We’ve had some from Moscow, from Iran, Tehran, from Saudi Arabia, from Tel Aviv… everybody’s looking at this stuff.

ALAN: But you have not been a critic of these programs.

JACK: Which programs?

ALAN: Any of these programs that the government is involved in.  You haven’t been a critic of the science.  You’ve actually been a leading figure in cutting edge science, so why would any special interest be (attacking you)…

JACK: Well, a lot of people… I’ve been demonized.  I’ve been demonized as a wacko, as a kook, I had a lot of problems with Wikipedia, finally corrected all this stuff, but now they have just decimated it again. It’s no good. I’ve been really demonized for like 30 years.  Since breaking… since you know, getting involved in consciousness.   Roger Penrose, who’s a very respected professor, even though he says some of the same things I’m saying, certain people can say it and nobody attacks them because they have the mainstream credentials.

But I’ve been demonized, and still am demonized, very demonized by certain powerful factions in mainstream physics, and so has… Josephson has to a lesser degree… actually Josephson has been fairly demonized too.  Josephson…they said, Well, he’s mentally ill, something happened to him.”  And even David Bohm himself was demonized to some extent for thinking outside the box.  So this is a real problem, it’s inquisitorial… it’s like the Spanish Inquisition.  But the question is why are they doing it?  Why are they taking active, literally, active measures like the KGB Section 8, active measures, termination…?

ALAN:  Is it just cultural?

JACK: I don’t know…

(JAGDISH MANN, Off-screen): It’s the yellow socks.[iii]

JACK: (Laughs) It’s the yellow socks.

ALAN: that’s the obvious answer.

JACK: But…

ALAN: Is it something akin to the British Medical Board and all the advances that were made in various areas of medicine, in the teens and twenties and thirties of the 20^th century, and doctors like that were thrown out or…

JACK: Yeah… oh you mean like… you mean an actor in some movie?

ALAN: (A.J.Cronin’s) The Citadel?

JACK: Yes, The Citadel.  That… look, I think that serves as a fact… but there’s something else going on and until Brian Josephson discovers the names of those who were at that meeting in Italy in August of who pressured Towler and Valentini to disinvite Josephson, David Peat and myself, even though they kind of re-invited Josephson and Peat because they were so embarrassed by it, and I became the scapegoat.  I’m the Shylock.  But until they find out who’s responsible for that and what their politics are, what their real motives are, who they’re really working for, until that’s uncovered, we’re not going to really know what’s going to happen, but there’s something big behind all this I’ve been working with a scientist from the Central Intelligence Agency, a science and technology directorate that monitors all of this stuff.  I was recently at a JASON meeting, General Dynamics in La Jolla…. military elite scientists were there. I’ve been involved with Russian scientists, and Jean Pierre Vigier, French scientist, who recently died.  So, there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye.  I believe that it’s going to be some really heavy political thing, maybe I’m dramatizing it, I don’t know … the fat lady hasn’t sung yet.  We don’t really know all the forces and why they’re doing this and what their motives are, but remember we’re talking about a technology coming out from this that would render all conventional weaponry impotent and obsolete.  So, there’s a lot at stake here, and of course, Towler and Valentini make me look like a crazy nut for even saying it anymore.

ALAN: Do they believe that there’s potential in these technologies?  Anti-gravity propulsion…

JACK: Well, I don’t know what Towler and Valentini think.  You got to remember Towler and Valentini, first,  I was very friendly with Towler.   His office is a few offices away from Brian Josephson, and everything was very cordial.  And suddenly this April 19, bang, all of this happens like… something happened to have changed.  I mean, they could have just had the meeting (Tuscan Conference) and nothing would happen.  They could have just let go and there would never have been any issue.  So what made them do this?  We have to find out what that was. 

ALAN:  I thought it was really interesting to read Valentini’s response (to public questions as to why Sarfatti was dis-invited), which was really not a response.  I mean, he said nothing.

JACK: Yea, right.

ALAN: He gave no real explanation, which in and of itself is begging the question.

JACK: Okay, now, what’s interesting… Josephson is very political, because Josephson is in Bejing, he’s in China, and he’s a guest of the Chinese government, Nobel Prize winning physicist.  Now, you have to understand, the Chinese culture sees the paranormal as part of their culture.  They accept it as a reality.  So do the South Americans, it is a cultural thing.  It’s this narrow Western thing (that discourages paranormal inquiry).  So Josephson’s invited as a guest of the Chinese government for the next month or so, and by the way, the Chinese, in terms of real technical and competent physicists are asking the right questions that infringe on paranormal signal non-locality, various things…like cold fusion…and Josephson is into cold fusion.

Not only is Josephson into the paranormal, he’s into cold fusion and he’s also into homeopathy.  So Josephson has all kinds of interests… but even his Nobel Prize doesn’t protect him (from western critics).  So with the power of the geopolitical situation, what’s going on there, it staggers the imagination.  Josephson is fighting mad.  He’s going to find out who pressured Valentini and Towler.  It’s not over.  It’s just beginning.

ALAN: Well, at least from a standpoint of human integrity, it seems a betrayal of the scientific process.

JACK: it’s a total betrayal.

ALAN: Facts whatever they be, you follow them…

JACK: You follow them and you find out … yes.  I mean, this is a betrayal.  It’s a definite betrayal. 

ALAN: Looking for the next synthesis…

JACK: It’s kind of ethnic cleansing on an intellectual level.  You go… in fact the reason they gave… one of the reasons that Valentini and Towler gave… they were afraid that if Sarfatti, Josephson and David Peat were at this meeting that some of the younger students would not be able to get jobs in Academia. 

ALAN: Sounds like how the students of Galileo…

JACK: Well, even if the science turns out to be wrong… as you say, string theory, there’s much more evidence for the paranormal and UFO’s than there is with string theory, and yet string theory dominates the physics departments right now.  This is all so crazy, but on the other hand, everything’s pretty crazy right now.  We have the gulf oil crisis, we have the financial breakdown.  By the way, the derivatives (that played a part in the financial meltdown), who invented financial derivatives – which Warren Buffet called the weapons of mass destruction?  The string theorists on Wall Street.

ALAN: Saw that special on PBS.

JACK: Yea, string theorists.  So, that’s the string theory.  That’s the financial meltdown.  And we may not even… God knows what’s going to happen, we may not survive.  We may be witnessing the breakdown of civilization as we know it.  Very rapidly.  We don’t know yet what’s going to happen with this oil thing.  It could be a lot worse than it looks.  Plus methane being released in the tundra, in the arctic, it may be Apocalypse Now, we don’t know.  But it’s a kind of mass insanity, mass intolerance, a kind of fascist view of things, and it has invaded Science itself. 

ALAN: How does the community of physicists around the world operate?  I mean, is there, and I apologize for not knowing this, is there an organization that they function though?

JACK: Well, no.  There’s the American Physical Society, which does a lot of good work.  Look, there are a lot of good physicists out there,  and I must say that experimental physics and applied physics are flourishing.  There’s a lot of great stuff out there.  But, I’m a theoretical physicist, okay?  There’s a lot of good stuff happening in cosmology, the Big Bang, inflation, dark energy, dark matter, the “missing stuff” of the universe making up 96% of the universe we don’t really know what it is.  I think I know what it is, but that’s another thing.  I think I’ve solved the problem.  I may be wrong, but I made a prediction the Large Hadron Collider Accelerator will not show any dark matter particles because dark matter is not made out of particles whizzing through space.  It’s a phase of the quantum vacuum of space, it’s called virtual particles inside the vacuum.  I made a very definite prediction, I could be proved wrong at any time.  So far all the evidence, so far my theory is good, has not been disproved yet.  It’s better than string theory because there’s no way to disprove string theory.  But the point is in terms of physics… the Tuscany meeting, the Bohm meeting is based really… heavily based on quantum computing and quantum information theory.  It’s about Bohm’s theory, and that is almost like string theory because we have no real quantum computers.  They make a certain assumption there – they assume that information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light, and from that assumption, they derive all kinds of things about the security of quantum cryptography, and cryptography is very important for intelligence work and for financial security and all kinds of stuff.  The ironic thing is that Valentini, who’s the guy who wrote the rude letter, his own theory is based on what Brian Josephson and I have said years before!  He even said that, see?  But for Valentini, it is a real betrayal, a real intellectual betrayal on his part.   He’s under so much pressure that he will not rise in the academic establishment if he even emphasizes his own discovery which is a system that I was describing for many years and what Josephson was saying for many years – basically, that you can communicate not only faster than light, but backwards in time, from future to past, like precognition, precognitive viewing.  That this is all possible, and not only possible, but necessary. 

So, the point is that if that kind of idea is considered so dangerous, disturbing the status quo so much that anybody who talks about that idea has to be demonized like I’ve been, like Josephson has been.  And even Valentini, they got to Valentini who’s one of the guys who pinned it down, and now he doesn’t talk about his own theory, like “I didn’t do this”.  That’s why it’s so ironic.  You know what it’s like?  It’s like the Soviet Stalinist purge trials.  Valentini is like one of those guys on trial in the Thirties who admitted that he did…

ALAN: and now he recants.

JACK: He’s recanting.  Oh, my God.  It’s that kind of … it’s so bizarre, it’s very surreal.  It’s also very interesting.

ALAN: And in your experience… this is not how Science was  conducted in your life?

JACK: Well, it’s not the way… no.  Actually, unfortunately it is the way Science has been because scientists are no better no worse than most people.  They’re just like the people on Wall Street.  They don’t have a superior morality, in fact, they have an inferior morality, in my experience.  Academics in general are nasty people.  They stab you in the back.  They’re ultra competitive, just like the lawyers like the movie with Michael Douglas, Wall Street.  It’s the same thing. 

Also, you gotta remember, in Academia, there’s been a shrinking budget, it’s like you have rats in a cage where there’s not enough space to go around.  They’re all competing for the money.  They don’t get paid much in academia anyway, budgets are shrinking, and people are getting desperate, desperate fear of driving a cab.  There’s an academic who last I heard, he was driving a cab in Prague, or that’s the story because he was fired from Harvard because he had a big mouth.  Political, conservative, he had this blog, whatever.  but most of the young physicists today are fear-driven because there are no jobs, the economy’s shrinking, and it’s also troubling Universities.  So there’s a tremendous fear of not getting a job in Physics and that has a lot to do with what’s going on right now.  But it was not the way I was brought up, it was a very idealistic thing: Science was seeking the Truth, and all that matters is where it leads you.

ALAN: Now we’ve come around full circle because what I’m hearing you say right now is that you were guided by a set of principles, a set of beliefs about what Science is, how it should be  practiced…you’ve head to that ideal.  You’ve tapped that ideal.

JACK: And so has Josephson, and so has Peat, so have as lot of these scientists.

ALAN: Yet there are other people and I’m assuming just by their bios on the web they’re younger, Towler is younger, Valentini is younger?

JACK: Yeah, and they’re all his age, they’re all Danny’s age, late 20s, early 30s.  And they’re very bright. Apre mois, Le deluge.

ALAN: Question: why would there be a difference in terms of ideal, matching action with your ethics, which is what integrity is defined as, why would that be so different in your generation if that’s a general rule as opposed to theirs?

JACK: Well, I don’t know.  I come from a really weird generation.  The Sixties, we were real rebels. 

ALAN: But you were an idealistic generation.  I grew up in the Sixties as well.

JACK: I’m as old as you, and you’re at least 20 years younger than me.

ALAN: I was fourteen.

(DANIEL GELLER, off-screen): Yeah, so he got the edge of it.

JACK: Okay, you’re right there.  All right.

ALAN: So, what’s the difference (in how each generation approaches the scientific method)?

JACK: I don’t know.  Maybe you should ask Danny, he’s so young.  I don’t know.

(DANIEL GELLER, off-screen): I know a lot of fine young people who are very… have integrity. 

JACK: No, there’s some.

(JAGDISH MANN, off-screen):   This maybe makes sense.

JACK: Well, I don’t know.  In this case, look.  You know what it is?  The theoretical physics community at the level that says Valentini and Towler operate, it’s like a Mafia.  It’s a gang.  And they are some powerful people, like Godfathers.  We don’t know who they are yet.  I’m suspicious of whom they might be.  Some of those people will be at this meeting.  Apparently, some of the key people at the meeting, the older people said “we will not attend this meeting if Josephson and Sarfatti attend”.  And if you want to get jobs, it’s not a wise thing (to investigate the paranormal).  So they were put under a lot of pressure to do that extreme thing (disinvite Sarfatti and Josephson).  It’s just not proper English to do anything like that at that stage. 

(JAGDISH MANN, off-screen): Some meeting of mafia capos?

JACK: A meeting of mafia capos in Tuscany. So maybe one day the truth will come out. The issue, some of the people who will be at the Tuscany meeting, are they the same people who pressured Waldyr Rodrigues a few years ago in Brazil to demonize me?  You see?  That’d be interesting.  And then, who do they work for?  So hopefully, maybe one day we’ll get to the bottom of this.  I don’t know right now.  It’s a mystery.

ALAN: Ultimately you get down to the old motivations of power, money, secrets…

JACK: Well it has to do with…it’s gotta do with defense.  Ultimately it gets back to the military, it gets back to weapons.  And I must tell you this: the Chinese are going ahead.  The Chinese are… they are going to beat us at this game.

ALAN: Certainly we (U.S. government) know that?

JACK: They’re going to beat us.

ALAN; Our government knows that, understands what China’s doing, how far it has…?

JACK; Well, the thing is they’re not under the same constraints.  Their scientists are going ahead with the kinds of issues that Brian Josephson and me and the others talked about… our ideas are being demonized here, in China, they’re actively working on it..  And so are the Russians, and so are the Iranians.  The Iranians are doing some very interesting things… the Iranians are very smart people. In fact, Ahmadinejad is smarter than Barack Obama.  I’m sorry… but he’s definitely smarter than Bush.  I don’t approve of Ahmadinejad, but… our politicians all… these guys in the Middle East culture, they’ve had thousands of years of culture, okay?  And they’re just playing us like idiots,  even Obama.  I mean, this thing with the nuclear program…we’re out-classed.  We’re out classed strategically – that’s my opinion, and I hope I’m wrong… my fear…

ALAN: Unfortunately, I don’t think you are wrong.

(Jagdish Mann, off-screen): Yes, you’re not wrong.

JACK: So, I mean we’re… by the way, and I’m gonna say this: by demonizing me and Josephson, they are making it easier for the Chinese to get ahead of us.

ALAN: And there you may be closer to what’s happening (regarding the Tuscan Controversy).

JACK: And there we may be closer to what’s happening.

ALAN: Thank you for your time, Jack.

[1] Son of Uri Geller

[2] Carlo Suares

[3] allusion to book by Arthur Koestler

 [i]  Allegedly from Edie Sedgwick to Andy Warhol according to my former North Beach room-mate David Gladstone who wrote an unpublished shorter version of my story.

[ii] Randi and Jon Ronson who wrote “Men Who Stare At Goats” came to the Singularity Summit Aug 14-15 San Francisco. I was given a free ticket to it because my sister in law, Ellen Heber-Katz of the Wistar Institute is a featured speaker on organ regeneration.

[iii] See John S. Bell’s Bertlemann’s socks. 

Permission to reprint this transcript is granted by PRAXIS, provided that attribution and website are included in the reprinting.   August 25, 2010.  PRAXIS Society for Human Integrity.

www.praxisforlife.org

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by Alan Waite, President of PRAXIS 

In April of this year, three internationally known theoretical physicists – Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson, Jack Sarfatti and F. David Peat – were excluded from a major international physics conference that Sarfatti initiated (the “de Broglie-Bohm,” “Bohm,” or “Towler Institute” conference in Tuscany) because of their interests in areas considered to be outside of “mainstream” quantum physics thought.  Recently, Sarfatti agreed to an interview with the PRAXIS Society for Human Integrity and spoke about the subject of integrity and the climate of exclusivity and GroupThink that has developed within the international physics community.   A five minute compilation of the Sarfatti interview can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VHDC7jVt3g

 GroupThink and the Myth of the Cave 

In his Republic, Plato’s former tutor Socrates posits a situation where prisoners are chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall, unable to see left or right, merely straight ahead. 

The captives see only shadows projected on the wall, images of people and things passing by the mouth of the cave, in front of a fire.  Over time, those chained in the cave believe the shadows to be the sources of the images they see.  For them, the shadows are reality.   

Eventually, a prisoner frees himself, grasps the actual situation, experiences an epiphany, and returns to the cave to enlighten the captives. Happy ending? Not quite. 

Socrates asks, “Would it not be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and …that if the chained were somehow able to get their hands on the man who attempts to release and lead them out, wouldn’t they kill him instead?”   

Plato was the first western thinker to illustrate the consequences of GroupThink.

 Science and the Cost of Discipleship 

World renowned Dr. Jack Sarfatti’s lament regarding the iron curtain of GroupThink slowly falling on the stage of theoretical physics should chill us to the toes:  

 “So, that kind of idea (signal nonlocality) is considered so dangerous, disturbing the status quo so much that anybody who talks about that idea has to be demonized like I’ve been, like Josephson has been…you know what it’s like?  It’s like the Soviet Stalinist purge trials…”    

 Theorists who simply theorize are dangerous?  Demonized? The intellectual equivalent of Stalinist purge trials in today’s Science? Say it ain’t so, Jack.  

There are few shibboleths more sacred to the average fellow than the purity and integrity of Science, especially theoretical science.  To we laypersons, scientists wear white coats of purity, dream in Latin, and adhere to a timeworn code of inquiry that seeks, above all else, Truth (capital T, naturally), wherever the search for it leads, whatever that Truth may be.  

To our good fortune, many scientists are true disciples of that basic creed. For decades, however, there has been an increasing cost for their discipleship.  The cat’s-paw is out of the bag.  The rest of the cat may soon follow: too many of those who wear the white coats of purity, dream in Latin, and mime the timeworn creed are caving to fear, comfort, and the one unpardonable sin of the scientist – conformity (spelled G-R-O-U-P-T-H-I-N-K).

 Malcolm Muggeridge observed, “All activity, especially chaos, trends ineffably towards conformity,” to which Woody Allen opined, “Conformity is the vilest form of corruption.  Take it from an unrepentant conformist, vile eventually grows on you.” 

corrupt – Latin: co-rump ere. “To break, to rupture.”  lit. “Coming together to rupture wholeness….”  

 “Would it not be said of him that he went up and that he came back with his eyes corrupted?”   

Would it not be said of those today who challenge this growing gleichshaltung in Science?  The signs are unmistakable. 

In recent years, the international debate over “global warming” has raised profound and disturbing questions regarding the level of integrity within the portion of the scientific community that advocates anthro-centric global warming.  

Recent revelations regarding Britain’s East Anglia University, namely that an anointed few amidst the walls of its Hadley Climatic Research Institute (HCRI) suppressed several studies which contradict global warming models, gave voice to concerns that have been mounting for decades in many quarters of the scientific community – that a chilling political correctness is descending on academia and the scientific world, threatening the integrity of both current and future scientific inquiries.  

Colorado State University atmospheric expert, Dr. Justin Hnilo, one of many scientists whose papers were placed in cold storage at HCRI recently told PRAXIS that there is indeed a “climate of fear” across the scientific community, as organizations and individuals of great wealth have gained so much influence over the last several decades that an overriding “political correctness” now exists punishing dissenters and rewarding those who march in lockstep. 

Hnilo asserts that there is a clash between researchers, whose studies and hard data show climate trends that differ from prevailing global warming theories, and global warming advocates who rely primarily on future trend computer modeling.  In the world of global warming, he warns, the search for truth has taken a back seat to international and national political agendas, media adoration, influential moneyed circles, and the fear of losing grants, chairs, and even jobs.  With trillions of dollars at stake, there are “in’s” and there are “outs;” the favored and the pariahs. 

If true, it is, essentially, the theatre of Science Selling its Soul.   The implications of this storefront Science are nothing short of staggering.  Growing societal doubt and skepticism resulting from the abandonment of the classic scientific dialectic (that over centuries replaced Faith with Reason on the highest pedestal of truth-seeking), now asks how public trust can be restored. 

Though reality is generally more complicated, a comprehensive understanding of this scientific civil war, set forth by Eric Pooley in The Climate Wars, and Oreskes and Conway in Merchants of Doubt, confirms Hnilo’s perspective that one risks reputation, position, and even personal economy to dispute the “party line” on global warming, whether one’s data is accurate or not.  

While the noise and clamor (and “sexiness”) of the wars within the science of climatology draw the world’s attention, for many, this breach of trust raises the logical question: is there a similar phenomena unfolding elsewhere in the sciences? 

Few are unaware of the decades-long struggle inside the fields of anthropology and biology over the question of human evolution.  The preponderant thinking within those disciplines continues to advocate Darwinian evolution, though much of Darwin’s original thinking has been eliminated or modified over the last forty years.  Nevertheless, there is a counter-evolutionary thesis with a growing number of highly credentialed scientists from nearly every discipline within the natural and physical sciences that posits an alternative theory known as “Intelligent Design (ID).” 

Having studied both evolutionary theory and ID, and having examined the credentials of those who advocate both theories, witnessed university debates and questioned participants, it seems that rational and cogent arguments reside in both camps.  While ID has significant flaws, it makes singular and thought-provoking points, and even appears to refute some precepts of Darwinism. At a minimum, it deserves a fair hearing, and those who advance that theory deserve respect.  

Yet, just as the “deniers,” whose thinking risks marginalization and career advancement,  “Intelligent Design” adherents are labeled “dangerous,” “nut jobs,” “religious fanatics,” and “fringers.”  In an atmosphere as emotionally charged as the global warming battlefields, some IDer’s have suffered far beyond social and professional ostracism, having to accept demotions, grant losses, inability to find work in their fields, and even, in a few cases, dismissal.  

Dr. Jack Sarfatti’s blackballing by members of his profession reflects a similar drama unfolding within the international physics community. 

Sarfatti, a renowned charismatic and iconoclastic theoretical physicist whose decades long explorations of energy, matter, and consciousness gained for some of his theories the sobriquet “controversial,” was recently handed the “left foot of fellowship” by members of the establishment within his discipline…he was unceremoniously excluded from an international conference on an area that is not only well within his subject matter expertise – but a conference that he conceived of and initiated. 

Sarfatti, labeled “unconventional” and marginalized for both his willingness to explore “fringe areas” of science and his close associations with controversial figures such as noted psycho kinesis practitioner Uri Geller, maintains an unshaken lifelong belief in classic scientific methodology – following fact patterns no matter where they lead.  Now, the cost for that belief is being exacted. 

Sarfatti and the Cave

Preparing to meet Jack Sarfatti is like preparing for a safari – not knowing what to expect and wary of the experience, but excited about the adventure.  Painted by some self-described “mainstream” writers as a man on the “fringe,” a “nut job,” a “CIA tool” and other even less flattering terms, one expects to meet  an eccentric “Obama-Birther” type who talks of alien abductions, “whites” and “grays” quietly invading our planet, and the impending Mayan calendar doomsday prophecy. 

The fact that these caricatures do not square with his education, writings, and accomplishments should have been the first red flag that shadows might be dancing on the walls of “mainstream” physicists. 

As it happened, the first impression of Jack Sarfatti was of a gracious, down-to-earth, brilliant man.  After a lengthy formal interview and several hours of “let your hair down” conversations, the first impression was confirmed, although it merely scratched the surface of this compelling, complicated man. 

The story is told that Robert Zemeckis’s hit film series Back to the Future’s lovable and eccentric “mad scientist” character, “Doc” Emmett Brown (played by Christopher Lloyd) was patterned after Jack Sarfatti, not coincidentally, because of Sarfatti’s theories on the possibilities of time travel and his 1975 book Space-Time and Beyond (with Fred Alan Wolf and Bob Toben) that Ellie Coppola publicized at the time.  

No doubt about it, director Robert Zemeckis took artistic liberty with the “mad” aspect of the character, but the humanity and brilliance of Doc Brown fits Sarfatti to a T.  

On the other hand, Doc Brown’s easy collegiality and acceptance of others with no hint of superiority also fits Sarfatti. No hint of superiority, that is, unless the topic turns to pedestrian colleagues who lack daring and imagination, lack curiosity, or lack intestinal fortitude.  Sarfatti does not suffer fools, and pretenders and the pretentious receive no quarter in the same way a combat veteran handles a “cherry.”  If you want a quantum physics peer discussion with Jack Sarfatti, you damn well better know your stuff.     

For a so-called “nut job,” Sarfatti is warm, charming, and unprepossessing.  There is no pretention in his manner, and it is clear that he loves life, its complications, and its challenges.  Possibility is as exciting for him as knowledge, and the process of discovery seems as important as discovery itself.  Foolish peers aside, Sarfatti reflects a humility that is scarce at the highest levels of Science, rarer still among those whose accomplishments rival his. 

Candid and willing to share his knowledge or whatever experiences he’s had, Sarfatti is very clear about what he knows, when he is conjecturing, and what he does not know.  As he talks, there is an unstated understanding that the listener finds his adventure of discovery as unusual and fascinating as he finds it, which puts one at ease and is, in fact, a very high compliment.  

When discussing his unusual life experiences, Sarfatti’s perspective is that of a fascinated third party observer who is intrigued and amazed at all that’s transpired…he transmits a boyish enthusiasm that is contagious, and his stories are told with humor and a touch of irony.   

He has an uncanny knack of being able to distinguish between the real and the fake, the charlatan and the Real McCoy, the dishonest and the genuine.  This is most likely because of his life-long training in problem-solving at the highest levels of his profession and his decades of involvement in advanced weapons systems theory, research and design; environments where guile-detection is an essential tool in the survival kit. 

Sarfatti’s academic standards are exceptionally high, evincing a classic liberal approach to methodological fidelity regardless of the subject or issues at hand.  For Sarfatti, true science, that is to say science of the Platonic ideal type variety, means the primacy of the Idea, its free expression, and the unending dialectic that increases our perpetually incomplete understanding of matter, energy, time and the cosmos. 

His sense of integrity is such that means do not always justify ends, that means could be ends unto themselves, and that the journey of discovery can often be as or more important than the ends as long as the scientist is honest about his work.  

For Jack Sarfatti, there is no limit to the Idea – and each idea requires hypothesizing, reasoning, questioning, observing, testing, modifying, then hypothesizing again.  The 1960’s counter-cultural revolution ingrained this dedication to human thought, limitless possibilities, and free inquiry in those who trod the halls of “question authority” academia, with the added benefit of taking little or nothing for granted.  That belief system is reflected in Sarfatti’s persistent exploration of the paranormal, in spite of his “mainstream” critics.  

As with most of Maslow’s self-actualizers – those who have reached the highest level of human self-discovery – Sarfatti’s life reflects the characteristics of someone who has achieved balance and fully explored his potential.  He has a rich, engaging personality and an enthusiasm for the complexities and ironies of living, especially the continuing pattern of Jungian synchronicity that has so characterized his life.  

He is at ease with people, and warmly receives those his intuitive instincts approve of – and it is clear that he most values deeper, lifelong interpersonal relationships with a few trusted friends rather than a shallow retinue of glad-handers that most public figures require. This can only be because Sarfatti is extremely comfortable within his own skin, at peace within himself, and highly self-aware.  

One of his most disarming traits is evidenced in how Sarfatti appears to take little or nothing for granted, but expresses appreciation and delight at new ideas, discoveries, events, and potentials.  His is a world of wonder, a world that accepts the unusual and the possible, while never abandoning his training and discipline which demand sufficient and replicable proofs before declaring something to be “true.”  In this particular turn of mind – the unbounded pursuit of truth – Sarfatti classes with the most revered thinkers in science and philosophy. 

Maslow understood that self-actualizers struggle with life, and opined that most tend to be generous to a fault, while their reality-based self-awareness often reminds them of (or even plagues them over) the genuine gaffes they’ve made in life.  Sarfatti is candid about his losses and what he perceives as missteps, but evinces no traits of the perfectionism that typifies self-actualizers, probably because he sees the universe as following a pre-determined pathway, which means that whatever happens is part of the necessary drama of existence. 

On the other hand, self-actualizers tend to be very intolerant of ethical violations and lapses of integrity.  It is clear from Sarfatti’s blog postings regarding the Bohm Conference controversy that the wounding he feels and expresses is as much because of his frustration over the decline in academic integrity inside of his discipline as the naked affront to his own personal reputation.  

True to his belief that the future influences the past, Jack Sarfatti manages to combine anachronism and futurism.  Sarfatti the Anachronistic is clearly a Renaissance man in a world of technocrats.  He writes elegant poetry, is an accomplished musician and self-confessed lothario, and is part philosopher, part healer, and part mystic.  

Sarfatti the Futurist seeks to unravel the destiny of our universe by understanding how we can de-code cosmic signals from the future that are attempting to affect the now.  Affectionately nicknamed Captain Jack by his friends, it is not cliché-esque to paraphrase Gene Roddenberry: Sarfatti boldly goes where few have gone before.  

But there is no real contradiction here.  Sarfatti’s life reflects his near clairvoyant declaration that physics, not philosophy, is the unifying force between Science and Art, thus a true physicist treads the ridge between the two with the ease.  

In sum, it is impossible to square the Jack Sarfatti portrayed by some writers as a “whack job” with the real Jack Sarfatti.  If he is indeed as whacky as his critics contend, he is remarkably adept at concealing those characteristics.   

On the other hand, the establishment critics of Sarfatti may have overlooked one possibility – as with global warming “deniers” and “intelligent design lunatics,” he just may be ahead of his time, one who broke the chains, and the critics are the ones who believe in the shadows on the wall.  

A look at Sarfatti’s career may offer clues as to which possibility is more likely. 

Jack Sarfatti and the Breaking of Chains 

Jack Sarfatti was born in Brooklyn, New York, two weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War.  Raised in Brooklyn, Sarfatti took his B.A. from Cornell University in 1960, under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winner (in Physics), Dr. Hans Bethe.  In 1967, Sarfatti earned an M.S. from the University of California at San Diego.  

He taught physics at San Diego State University as assistant professor from 1967-71, taking his Ph.D. from the University of California in 1969.  In 1971 and 1972, he worked as a research fellow with Einstein colleague Dr. David Bohm at the University of London.  From 1973 through 1974, Sarfatti worked with 1979 Nobel Prize winning physicist Dr. Abdus Salam at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. 

By the early 1970’s, Sarfatti’s interests had advanced into the realm of black hole theory, and by 1975, a myriad of unusual experiences (including participating in the now famous CIA-sponsored Stanford Research Institute remote viewing experiments with Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff), led Sarfatti to explore theoretical connections between quantum physics and consciousness.  His work in the areas of the post-quantum physics of consciousness and the paranormal gained him a great deal of notoriety, and as described earlier, not all of it positive.  

Not unexpected for a man whose life ceased to be “normal” very early on. 

One of approximately 400 pre-adolescent “whiz kids” selected nationally to participate in a classified U.S. government program during the late 1940’s and early 1950’s – a Cold War effort to cultivate “best and the brightest” American youth to serve the nation in a variety of scientific and economic areas geared towards national defense,  Sarfatti recalls that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and noted physicist and paranormal researcher Harold Puthoff were among his fellow recruits.  

Organized paranormal studies were in their infancy, but quite prolific in the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s, and not just in the United States.  Captured Nazi archives revealed numerous secret scientific and pseudo-scientific programs of varying successes, ranging from rocketry and nuclear weaponry to occult/paranormal attempts at mind control.  The Chinese and North Korean governments developed “brainwashing” programs in the early post war years which grew into full blown mind control experiments.  KGB archives document the USSR’s decades-long interest in telepathy, psycho-kinesis, and mind control.  The Cold War was a struggle for hearts and minds, but behind closed doors the emphasis was clearly on the minds. 

Recruiting young geniuses, educating them in the areas where they are most gifted, and calling on them in the future to lend their skills to various government efforts was a logical extension of early Cold War thinking.  Compared to a plethora of darker, sinister and now infamous “black” projects conducted by the CIA and Defense Department from the McCarthy Era forward, it was also reasonable and healthy. 

As rumors of communists “brainwashing” Korean POW’s reached U.S. intelligence services in the early 1950’s, fear grew over the potential for sleeper agent émigrés who may be unknowing but lurking “Manchurian Candidate” saboteurs and assassins. 

In reaction, CIA Director Allen Dulles authorized MKULTRA – a brainwashing/counter intel program that conducted mind control experiments on persons (six unwittingly), at times using inhumane methods, including administering unrestricted amounts of LSD, sensory deprivation, torture, hypnosis, brain surgery, and electro-shock.  Former Nazi scientists quietly expatriated to the United States in the aftermath of WWII (i.e., “Project Paperclip”) conducted many of these experiments, even on children. 

MKULTRA was one of a series of mind control programs conducted over three decades (MKSEARCH, MKOFTEN, DERBY HAT, THIRD CHANCE).  Carol Rutz’s groundbreaking expose of these dark programs, A Nation Betrayed, thoroughly documents how American intelligence services believed that the human mind, properly unlocked, offered unlimited potential for defending the United States against all future adversaries, and how better to defend against enemies of the future than to recruit and train the finest minds of the future?

Sarfatti may have come to the attention of government canvassers because of his uncle Arthur Jacobson, who developed a singular reputation during his WWII combat infantry services in the Pacific Theatre.  Jacobson showed a consistent intuitive ability to sense the locations of enemy snipers and emplacements, and apparently came to the attention of Army brass, who used him as a human-GPS counter-sniper detector, and later on as a jungle warfare instructor.

On the other hand, selecting Sarfatti may have had less to do with his uncle’s  extra-sensory predisposition than the precocious eight and nine years old Sarfatti keeping constant company with his grandfather, who frequently associated with Army psychiatrists and officers of significant scientific backgrounds in late 1940’s New York City.  Sarfatti remembered, “As my grandfather drove, I would sit in the back seat, with these colonels…I mean they were always analyzing.  I was actually in the company of these Army officers a lot.  That’s when I think I met this fun colonel named Phil Corso who later wrote, The Day After Roswell.”  Carl Jung would have been proud. 

However he was chosen, Sarfatti entered the U.S. government’s World of the Unusual at a very early age. Young Sarfatti’s initiation into the world of government-run clandestine research programs that focused on the mind and its potential could only predispose him to accepting the paranormal as a natural part of life, and a natural field of study.   

At about the same time, a lengthy experience with paranormal overtones invaded Sarfatti’s early adolescence.  He began receiving a series of anonymous telephone calls that chroniclers of his life label the “God-phone.” 

As a thirteen year old, Sarfatti received the first of innumerable phone calls from an un-named metallic sounding voice that identified itself as a “computer aboard a spacecraft.”  The voice sought to speak only with Sarfatti, never anyone else.  While Sarfatti only recalls the first call clearly, and has vague recollections that there may have been subsequent calls, his mother recounted that the calls persisted for “three weeks,” and only stopped when she finally grabbed the phone out of exasperation over perceptible changes in Jack’s personality and told the “caller” never to call again.  

Who was behind the calls?  Sarfatti can only speculate, “Well, I think that maybe it’s one of two things.  Either it was what it says it was, or a government program, take your choice.  I mean, given everything else, it sounds like it’s a government project.  They’re still playing psychological games on kids, quite possibly.  So that’s the most likely explanation.” 

The thrust of the calls was, as Sarfatti remembers, to teach him things about electronics and basic physics, and let him know that there were others involved whom he would meet in twenty years…1973.  Co-incidentally, twenty years later, Sarfatti did in fact connect with several persons involved with the paranormal in one way or another, and not just the paranormal but covert government defense studies (Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ’s CIA funded SRI Remote Viewing Project with Uri Geller et-al).  Again, nothing extraordinary for someone surrounded by the Unusual throughout his life. 

By 1975, Sarfatti left academia and, at Werner Erhard’s request and funding, founded the Physics Consciousness Research Group to study extra-sensory perception, time travel, consciousness, and life after death, among other paranormal subjects.  Ira Einhorn soon connected him with Michael Murphy who owned the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, a 120 acre ocean-side retreat that offers seminars and study programs in alternative mind/body healing, discovery, and growth, where Sarfatti ran the 1976 Physics Consciousness Seminar made famous in Gary Zukav’s best-seller The Dancing Wu Li Masters. 

For the past three decades, Sarfatti has continued working with cutting edge ideas in quantum physics.  Sarfatti’s inquiry into the paranormal reflects his singular lifetime interaction with this uncharted aspect of existence.  

Because of this flow of the Unusual in and out of his life and career, Sarfatti’s ease and familiarity with the subject leads him to believe that there is nothing irrational or “para” normal about the paranormal.  Rather, not to inquire into something that so clearly exists and is so woefully uncharted but tantalizingly rational violates the basic precept of science – follow the facts wherever they lead.  

Sarfatti’s published papers are not so numerous in the publish-or-perish rat race because he left academia 35 years ago. However, they cover topics that range from relativity theory to dark energy and dark matter, little black holes as elementary particles, emergent gravity, signal non-locality and causality, and retro-causal (future-to-past) cosmology in which he says that our accelerating universe is a holographic image with the actual hologram at our “far-future Omega Sphere.”  Sarfatti pictures this “cosmological horizon” that creates dark energy as a conscious AI computer. 

In 2002, he published, Destiny Matrix (available on Amazon.com in a new version Destiny Matrix 2010). Destiny Matrix asserts that the universe has a retro-causal post-selected destiny – a destiny that is integrally tied to the present, reaching back in time and, combining with influences from the past, shaping the present, moving it towards the destined state of what will be.  It should be noted that Yakir Aharonov has a “destiny vector” extension of quantum theory’s “history vector” consistent with Sarfatti’s theory. 

Sarfatti’s website, www.stardrive.org, is a reflection of his mind – a Socratic classroom where participants gather virtually to share, mull, ponder, argue, and speculate on any and all issues concerning human existence, the cosmos, UFO’s, and the paranormal.  He prefers to give discussions free reign, and his intermittent comments evince a delight in grappling with fascinating topics and ideas, but he is the first to point out or publish any and all persuasive debunkings of preposterous claims, always careful to “seek the truth, wherever it may take you.”   

He is the cutting edge of time travel theory.  When someone tries to grapple with dark energy, anti-gravity propulsion, or warp drive, they immediately find Sarfatti’s footprints.  Freed from the constraints of academia, dependency on grants, and the need to continually justify his chair, he pursues his physics as if he were destined for that very purpose, as if the “God-phone” were still calling.  

De Broglie-Bohm (“Valentini-Towler”) Conference Controversy: Shadows on the Wall 

David Bohm (1917-1992) was one of the giants in theoretical physics.  A student of atom bomb “father” Robert Oppenheimer, and a Princeton University colleague of Einstein, Bohm was a contributor to the Manhattan Project (though he was banned from working on the project for political reasons).  Although forced to flee to England as a target of the McCarthy Era “red scare witch hunts,” Bohm made major contributions to the Science of Physics in the areas of quantum mechanics and the Theory of Relativity.   

Bohm’s ideas regarding conventional quantum theory and cosmology were well ahead of his time, and he effectively redefined physics (for many) to encompass a more holistic understanding of nature and existence.  Bohm believed that the cosmos has meaning, is orderly and understandable, ineffably “true,” and must be understood from the perspective of the whole, which includes the effects of thought and intuition.  

This approach caused some in his discipline to reject Bohm’s cosmology as too mystical, some to label his theories as simply unscientific, and others to throw up their hands and say his thinking was incomprehensible.  As it turned out, since his death in 1992, Bohm’s ideas have gained greater currency. 

Having worked closely with Bohm for a time and aware of the persecution Bohm experienced, one assumes that Sarfatti was influenced not only by Bohm’s progressive physics, but the integrity Bohm undauntedly demonstrated.   

By Summer 2009, Sarfatti believed the time had arrived for the international community of physicists to take another look at Bohm’s pilot wave theory and its implications in light of recent advances in quantum theory.  During a September 2009 stay at Trinity College, Cambridge University, he urged a young junior British colleague Michael Towler to organize a Bohm conference in 2010.  Towler had raised the question in a series of lectures he delivered on Bohm six months earlier but let the idea drop.  After talking it over with Sarfatti, Towler agreed to move ahead. 

Soon a conference indeed was organized by both Towler and a second British physicist  - Antony Valentini – slated for late summer 2010 in the Apuan Alps Center for Physics in Tuscany, near the Italian city of Lucca.  Sarfatti was listed in early conference communications (e.g. Physics.org) with Brian Josephson and colleague in paranormal studies, F. David Peat as invited participants.  

Valentini’s involvement made good sense.  His own work had extended the de Broglie–Bohm theory to include “signal nonlocality,” a concept that violates orthodox quantum theory but, according to Sarfatti, allows for interplay between consciousness and the physical world, i.e., mental telepathy, remote viewing, and other “paranormal” areas.  

Sarfatti’s previous independent idea of direct “back reaction” of matter on its guiding Bohm quantum potential was another way of looking at signal nonlocality.  Indeed, Sarfatti’s concept was cited in Towler’s original Cambridge lectures, while Brian Josephson had also published a paper with Pallikari on how living organisms needed signal nonlocality. 

As anyone would expect, Sarfatti and Nobel laureate Brian Josephson (whose life work also included paranormal study) were among the invitees, and as late as January, Sarfatti was asked if some of his contacts could help fund the event.  Towler sounded Sarfatti out about possibly speaking at the conference. 

Careful reading of the email traffic between Towler and Sarfatti, available on the web, however, shows that very early on Towler developed concerns about Sarfatti and Josephson attending, and he wrote Sarfatti that, “…so as not to scare the more traditional chaps, we’ve decided to lower the emphasis – for official publicity purposes at least – on the ‘celebrity nut job’ end of things (consciousness and all that).  Of course, in the actual meeting we can talk about what you want…” 

Like any good storm warning, that missive heralded rough seas ahead for the Bohm Conference. 

In mid-April Antony Valentini, the physicist whose work on Bohm was itself on the edge of “acceptable” science, fired a shot heard ‘round the internet.  In a stunning and abrupt yanking of the Tuscan welcome mat, and with Towler’s nod, he officially disinvited Sarfatti and Josephson (and the third physicist, David Peat - Bohm’s actual biographer) from the Tuscan Conference.  

It was akin to Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig disinviting Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, and Mariano Rivera from a nationwide players’ roundtable on the state of the New York Yankees.  One can only surmise that Towler and Valentini failed to anticipate what would happen next.  

The online community familiar with Sarfatti, Josephson and Peat erupted as the news of their Bohm Conference quarantine spread.  Reaction ranged from incredulity to outrage. While a few reacted vehemently and attacked Towler and Valentini with rage and ad hominum venom, most observers were vexed at the turn of events, and demanded an explanation. 

How could the person who “started the ball rolling” (Sarfatti) and a renowned Nobel laureate (Josephson) whose “outside the box” approaches so resembled Bohm’s not attend a conference discussing Bohm’s theories? Journals picked up the story, blogs thundered, and talk radio hosts took notice.  Pressure mounted for an explanation, and soon, an explanation for Sarfatti’s sanction was given. 

Towler asserted that Sarfatti was not sanctioned because Sarfatti simply was not invited in the first place, though when the original e-invite surfaced, it showed that Sarfatti had, in fact, been personally invited by Towler.  That explanation, of course, also begged the question regarding Josephson and Peat – were they simply not invited in the first place, too? 

The second proffered reason was that Sarfatti insisted on presenting at the conference, and reacted poorly when turned down, at which point he inundated Towler with inappropriate email, much of it profane, even to the point of threatening violence.  

Observers shook their heads.  Not only was the accusation out of character for Jack Sarfatti, it didn’t add up.  Did Josephson and Peat deluge Towler with obnoxious and threatening email as well?  What were their transgressions? 

 Ever the consummate archivist, Sarfatti produced his entire email exchange with Towler, which post dated the decision to block Sarfatti from attending the conclave. Sarfatti was incensed, to be sure, but made no threats of violence, and the language he used was not filled with profanity as alleged.  The second explanation fell on deaf ears. 

Cornered, Towler candidly explained that as the conference approached, he and Valentini received “many communications from people – both conference participants and others – complaining about the supposed ‘pseudo-scientific’ content of the conference,” which, he felt, could ‘destabilize the event’….it became apparent that some action had to be taken.”  

Interestingly, nothing in the conference announcement suggested that any discussion or presentation of paranormal subject matter would take place in Tuscany, but GroupThink generally operates from fear, and Towler’s final explanation unmasked much of the real bottom line: GroupThink pressured the organizers to keep the “kooks” away lest they embarrass (and influence) the assemblage with their “nut job” ideas.     

The online firestorm reached a peak in June.  The exclusion of Nobel laureate Josephson ultimately forced organizers to rethink his sanction.  To borrow a phrase, it became apparent that some action had to be taken to avoid destabilizing the event; action that preserved the dignity of the conferees but granted an olive branch to their critics.  

The solution?  Grant absolution to Josephson and Peat, but stand firm on Sarfatti.  After all, a blanket absolution simply would not do. 

Brian Josephson and F. David Peat were re-invited, but the controversy continued.  It did not take a remote viewer to see that something other than the basic GroupThink was behind the raging Bohm Conference controversy.  

Josephson was determined to find out.  

He did. 

In July, Sarfatti blogged the results of Josephson’s inquiries, “He (Josephson) uncovered that…it (Valentini’s disinviting Sarfatti, Josephson and Peat) was forced on both he and Towler by ‘senior physicists coming to the meeting who have long been gunning for Josephson, and obviously me and Peat, for daring to pose questions about consciousness, the paranormal, cold fusion, homeopathy and UFOs – all considered ‘crank’ and ‘crackpot’ endeavors. 

“There is also the issue of the national security military weapons consequences of ‘signal nonlocality’ suggested earlier by me and then, subsequently, taken up ironically by Antony Valentini even while Josephson was pursuing his own independent work in the area. Valentini is in fear that his work will be considered crank and crackpot because of its association through me with consciousness and the paranormal. The motives of the bosses who forced Valentini to write the letters may also have military intelligence dimensions. 

“But for Valentini, it is a real intellectual betrayal on his part.  He’s under so much pressure that he fears he will not rise in the academic establishment if he even emphasizes his own discovery…basically, that you can communicate not only faster than light, but backwards in time, from future to past, like precognition, precognitive viewing.  That this is all possible, and not only possible, but necessary.  

“So, the point is that if that kind of idea is considered so dangerous, disturbing the status quo so much that anybody who talks about that idea has to be demonized like I’ve been, like Josephson has been.  And even Valentini, they got to Valentini who’s one of the guys who pinned it down, and now he doesn’t talk about his own theory, like ‘I didn’t do this.’  That’s why it’s so ironic.  You know what it’s like?  It’s like the Soviet Stalinist purge trials.  Valentini is like one of those guys on trial in the Thirties who admitted that he did…and now he’s recanting.”  

The conference begins this week. There will be no insights from Jack Sarfatti – the very instigator of the conference; who worked with David Bohm and influenced the thinking of Antony Valentini, who then disinvited Sarfatti. 

Brian Josephson chose not to attend. Instead, Josephson provided Towler with a video of a previous presentation on his current work, which Towler is presenting at the conference. 

If something of value comes of the conference, it will be because of Sarfatti, and not in spite of him.  Without Sarfatti, there would be no de Broglie-Bohm Conference this year, or in the foreseeable future.  

There is little doubt that the Tuscan Conference controversy has sparked a debate that will not end when the conference adjourns.  For many, it has raised the same questions that Galileo faced 400 years ago, and the parallel with Galileo’s house arrest and Sarfatti’s now “official” quarantine are quite striking.  

While the Orthodoxy blackballing the Sarfattis, Josephsons and Peats of quantum physics is not a Vatican monolithic, the religious fervor with which “mainstream” physicists defend the Orthodox differs little, nor are the underlying motives different – fear, pride & reputation, control, and most importantly, money. 

Rather than heliocentrism, the debate now rages over consciousness, the limits of the theory of relativity, dark energy, and Time.  Those who’ve slipped the chains will not quietly accept the verdict of those who wittingly or unwittingly choose the shadows on the wall.  

(It should be noted that Dr. Towler was invited to give his unedited perspective on the Bohm Conference controversy but as of this printing has not responded).  

Science, Integrity and Mythos 

Some might say that an outsider, and a “layman” to boot, commenting on the Bohm Conference controversy is a tad, as Mark Twain observed, like “coming down out of the hills at the end of a battle to shoot the wounded.”  

Not having spoken with Dr. Towler or Dr. Valentini, the only insights into their thinking come from what information is publically available.  There are no intentional insinuations about their characters or accomplishments afoot save unmitigated condemnation of their insensitive and unwarranted treatment of accomplished and distinguished fellow physicists whose lives and careers demand respect.  

Both Towler and Valentini are very, very bright guys. But that is exactly the point, and it is where the paths of the lay and the learned cross. 

For all of our highfalutin consulting models, coaching methodologies, and training programs, PRAXIS is dedicated to one very simple mission: empower people to live honorably, with integrity, as truth-tellers in order to experience the goodness of being fully human.  This is the intersection of our common humanity, where we all are equal, regardless of our knowledge, accomplishments, wealth, power, or social status – sharing binding ethics with the same expectations for living honorably, with integrity. 

 We believe that civil society depends on the integrity of those who are learned to safeguard its vital institutions.  The learned hold not only a sacred public trust, but a responsibility to carry forward to each generation, untainted, the principles that enable the privileges and positions they enjoy. 

Enlightenment thinkers “got it right” – as long as the fundamental institutions of society hold a moral foundation, free thought flourishes, and with it the advancement of the arts, sciences, and human progress.  It is not a frivolous matter.  Corrupted individuals ultimately corrupt institutions, which over time, corrupt the human mind. 

The Bohm imbroglio shows that the marginalization of Sarfatti and Josephson is symptomatic of the myopia, fear, and bended knee to very real centers of power and influence that are increasingly destabilizing the reputation and effectiveness of Science.  

Any reader of the classic Roman historians will tell you that human motivations have changed not a whit since the original toga parties.  Competition, personality conflicts, fear, ambition – name a profession, those elements are at play. 

As Sarfatti observed, “Scientists are no better or no worse than most people.  They’re just like the people on Wall Street.  They don’t have a superior morality; in fact, they have an inferior morality, in my experience.  Academics in general are nasty people.  They stab you in the back.  They’re ultra competitive, just like the lawyers…”   

And so are doctors.  And so are politicians.  And so are pastors and rabbis, accountants and carpenters, managers and clericals.  It is the human condition.  

Nevertheless, we expect each other to live up to a calling higher than self-interest, to stand for integrity and live ethical lives, to uphold the highest standards of our professions.  Without those expectations, we settle for the shadows and what the powerful few say they are, and in so doing, we lose our vision, and ultimately lose the capacity to be fully human. 

The irony is that Science is the last temple of virtue in a world that has lost its heroes.  Millions even look to Science, rightly or wrongly, to drive our moral decisions, especially after the Church lost its primacy as moral referee.  Science is supposed to be impartial, factual, and free of ideological taint and superstition, interested only in truth and knowledge, knee deep in its commitment to Integrity.   

That is the mythos of Science, but it is a mythos to which, each time an HCRI scandal or Bohm Conference controversy unfolds, fewer and fewer subscribe.     

Sarfatti asserts that “the theoretical physics community at the level that Valentini and Towler operate, it’s like a mafia.  It’s a gang.  There are some powerful people, like Godfathers… and if you want to get jobs, it’s not a wise thing (to investigate the paranormal.” 

Dr. Hnilo asserted essentially the same situation exists among the scientists who bridge no opposition to their global warming models.  Certainly this is also an apt description of the state of Integrity within the international professions of climatology, atmospherics, biology, and anthropology as well.  

Notwithstanding the status quo, ultimately, truth prevails.  Institutions and human frailties can limit knowledge and progress only for so long before the innate desire to know overpowers them.  Just ask any former National Socialist Paper Clip expatriate.  The scientific dialectic is inexorable – today’s thesis is synthesized with tomorrow’s anti-thesis, and understanding grows. 

Meanwhile, the cost of discipleship is paid by those whose ethics and integrity allow them no other choice than to speak out, fully aware of what happens when the chained find their worlds of comfort and status challenged. 

Perhaps the only way that new vistas in quantum physics can be discovered – vistas that unveil astounding relationships between consciousness and matter and energy; between the future and the present, paranormal and the “normal” – is for geniuses whose life experiences gear their thinking in those directions to lead the way. Is it not so in all aspects of life that the true pioneers, those who discover new lands or lay the groundwork for others to make such discoveries, are to-the-journey-born?

Sarfatti has not lost his senses, but has spent his life coming to them, and as time goes by, his once radical assertion that there is a destiny to the universe, and that the future influences the past and the present, is quietly beginning to infect the body of quantum thinking.  

This is the eternal drama of the visionary – not if, but when the shackled will trade in their shadows for illumination. 

Whatever the current verdict may be inside of his profession, half a century from now “mainstream” quantum physics will posit a considerably different cosmology, and the theories of Dr. Jack Sarfatti and his “fringe” colleagues will be celebrated as groundbreaking, the forerunners of the new “mainstream” thinking. 

Perhaps then, the Sarfattis of tomorrow will be celebrated within their lifetimes.

   August 24, 2010, PRAXIS Society For Human Integrity.

Permission for reprinting this article is granted by PRAXIS provided attribution of  authorship       and website are made.   

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Dr. Walker and Waite revealed the nuts-and-bolts of ICDM at a national project management conference sponsored by the University of Wisconsin, Platteville  campus.  The decision-making model is multi-faceted, and can be employed by project managers, corporate executives and government officials, or it can be used by life and corporate coaches as part of their coaching practices.

ICDM was exceptionally well received by the nearly 200 project management professionals who gathered from around the country for up-to-date project management information.  Conference participants ratified the PRAXIS model as the first practical tool that can be utilized in the exercise of the “art” of project management.  Since its inception, as a field of study and a profession, project management has armed its adherents with tools that support the “science” of the discipline, but no practical hands-on applications that help professionals practice the “art” aspect of project management – until now. 

PRAXIS CEO Alan Waite shared the new project management model with the group in a workshop entitled, Re-Imagining Success: Integrity as a Key to Sustainability in Managing Projects Effectively, “You can have the most advanced technology, the best facilities, the most ingenious project plan and a pot of gold behind you,” Waite said, “but without integrity at the center of the decision-making process, sustainable success is problematic, if not elusive.”

A recent PRAXIS survey of over 200 supervisors and managers found that fully half of the decisions made while managing a project are “difficult” or “very difficult.”  The survey further found that half of respondants’ decisions involve issues of integrity in one form or another.  ICDM is the first practical methodology that can be quickly and effectively used by managers when dealing with difficult, integrity-based “calls.”  “ICDM does not guarantee a good outcome,” Waite explained, “but it guarantees that you’ve covered all of your bases – looked at every alternative and considered intended and unintended consequences.  This means that while you think each decision through, you are comparing what you believe to be right and wrong with what you eventually decide, seeking the closest match possible…”  This fosters trust – from top to bottom within the organization and with the client, and according to PRAXIS surveys, 64% of clients re-hire people and contractors on trust alone.  Accordingly, integrity based decision-making greatly increases the chances of sustainable business and repeat clientele.

Reactions to the ICDM model ranged from positive to enthusiastic:

“Very thought provoking…addresses key areas of integrity not addressed anywhere else.”  “Best value at the conference…”  “Very well thought-out and important to project management.”  “Critical to business and government in America, but can only succeed if implemented at the grass roots level…”  “Simply excellent!”  “Helped me realize a new target area for development as a leader and project manager.”

PRAXIS  asserts that over the last 50 years, American society has lost its fundamental moorings in the area of public and private ethics and integrity.  A discernable societal consensus has evaporated regarding basic human behaviors – truth-telling, keeping one’s word, living a life centered on the well being of others, moderation, and sustainability as the key to success (as opposed to instant riches – what PRAXIS terms the “Culture of the Killshot”).  Slowly, the institutions that taught and upheld those ideas and values lost their influence – churches, public schools, community organizations, and the nuclear family.  As these societal anchors lost their sway, a multiplicity of new institutions filled the void with “new”, compelling, but contradictory and ultimately, damaging value – institutions that encouraged a culture of instant gratification and materialism, trajectories that claimed ”the good life” was the raison d’etre.   The film and television industries, Madison Avenue, and a general progressive liberalization of social traditions quietly erased time-worn concepts of the ethics-driven life as the key to genuine success and happiness, replacing those ideas with the acquisition of goods, property, and wealth.   

In the process, the natural instinct within humans towards “goodness” – the classic “better angels of our nature” - which centuries of western philosophy and culture affirmed and uplifted, succumbed to the new culture’s prolific permissiveness.

Generations coming of age in the last 40 years adopted “Instant Riches” and “Bottom-lining” as a vocational ethos, and in time, the very foundation of American business has started to decay…over $600 billion lost each year to corruption, unethical behaviors, and lack of personal integrity in the workplace.  ICDM is the first PRAXIS methodology designed to help undo the Culture of the Killshot and reweave integrity into the social fabric of the nation. 

Dr. Walker Waite told a post-conference gathering that the next step for ICDM is the publication of Alan Waite’s book, H.A.T.S.:  ”Success” is a Journey, Not a Bottom-line in Fall 2010, followed by appearances at local Project Management Institute (PMI) chapters around the country.  “Our hope is that within the next five years, ICDM will be a standard in the fields of project management, corporate training, and coaching.  It is just the first of several tools PRAXIS will offer, there is much more to come…”

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Every society has its social critics.  Periods of significant social change find more than their share of people warning that the barbarians are at the gates, threatening civilization and the Natural Order.  

Just as adamantly, those who welcome change insist that change is the Natural Order of things – and indeed, most often, claims of impending disaster ultimately prove overblown –overreactions from those whose fear cements an unwillingness to adapt. “By the Furies, Marcus, that new fangled lead pipe thing is going to destroy Rome.” 

Because of this, there prevails a general lack of curiosity, if not reflexive rejection of any analysis of social trends that does not conform to the Eternal Prime Directive: all change is good.  Ergo, those not on board with the Eternal Prime Directive are cranks.   

The fly in the buttermilk is that every now and then, the “cranks” get on to something. And their batting average is barely just enough to warrant booth space in the marketplace of ideas, even if only a small booth.  Case in point… 

In 1930 Thomas Mann regaled a Berlin audience with his Appeal to Reason, warning that what lay ahead for a Germany under National Socialism was calamitous transformation.  Germans, enthralled with the rightists’ vision of “modern” Germans building a Third Empire around the science of eugenics, technology, and a bold new statist worldview, embraced a social revolution which did indeed transform Germany.  Fifty million dead later, the world understood for a time that Mann’s cranky warning was, after all, accurate: not all change is good. 

Some say, or have been warning for many years, that we are in need of a new Appeal to Reason.  Some say that we are faced with a growing social crisis that is eroding the very fabric of society, a crisis manifested in the recent crises in our business and financial systems, but a crisis that evolved slowly, until it now pervades all levels of life.  Some say it is a meltdown of human Integrity and the loss of clarity and purpose that Integrity brings.  And those who say these things are no longer “cranks”.   

In the mid 1990’s, along with four other business executives, I formed a corporation that marketed a bio remedial technology for speedier and more effective environmental and toxic wastes clean-up, NVS Technologies, Inc.  I served as board chairman and Senior Vice-president of Public Relations, Technology Development & Deployment.   

While we were in the process of negotiating an agreement with the Director for toxic remediation in Mexico under the NAFTA accord, an investor in our company with significant Russian funds behind him induced our patent holder to break his agreement with our corporation.   

 After a prolonged legal battle, NVS Technologies, Inc. ran out of funds, and we eventually were forced to give up the fight and close our doors.  The patent holder and his confederates fell out three years and several million dollars later.  Because key principals in the venture failed the test of Integrity when it mattered most, everyone ultimately lost.  It was, to say the least, a life-transforming experience.

What’s Unclear About “Clarity”

During those three years, I came to accept what generations of Americans  believed about Integrity – that it must be the nexus of everything we do in life if we seek genuine success, happiness and contentment.  Without Integrity, there is no trust. Without trust, all we value is at risk. Life is simply Darwinian, clawing for primacy in a world ruled by self-interest and opportunism.  

Without Integrity, relationships are transitory, disposable, and momentary.  People eventually isolate themselves from each other, feeling vulnerable and disillusioned.  Nothing is affirmed; nothing of lasting worth is preserved and passed on to future generations  Simply put, life without Integrity is life apart from Truth, and without Truth, there is no clarity, no purpose.   

It occurred to me that what I’d experienced in NVS Technologies was, in microcosm, what an increasing number of Americans have embraced: means-ends ethics; classic utilitarianism.  Not that utilitarianism is a new phenomenon. Individuals have employed utilitarian means to achieve their own ends since the dawn of humankind.  The difference is that in the chaotic struggle between our current society’s competing ethical systems, utilitarianism is winning.   

Sadly, I found that all too often, I too was a skilled practitioner of utilitarianism, and in key areas of my life.  I also found it very difficult to change; means-ends thinking is habitual, and once ingrained, dodgy and crafty when resisted.  One almost instinctually weighs all things using the scale of personal gain.  Putting others first becomes counter-intuitive. 

But if so, what’s wrong with that?  The answer is clear when one asks a different question: if we accept that general happiness is what most people seek in life (and any number of surveys over the past 50 years underscore this certainty),  how does utilitarian behavior foster and empower sustainable happiness?  And if utilitarian living is antithetical to sustainable personal happiness, what actually does foster and empower it?  

Now we are closer to the primary reason for PRAXIS. 

“Deon” Who?

American society bought-in to many ignoble and destructive yet beguiling notions during the last half of the 20^th century, notions which eroded the fundamental beliefs that had bound us together as Americans for hundreds of years. 

A fundamental shift in world view came about during those decades of social turmoil and political upheaval – the foundational societal consensus surrounding our daily living unraveled, shifting from a primarily deontological (“right and wrong” is generally discernable by anyone, and those two ideas are unchangeable throughout time) to a teleological (situational ethics) perspective. 

The journey from situational ethics to relativism (every moral system has equal value) is a short one, and from there to utilitarianism (whatever makes one more powerful, profitable, or noteworthy is ethical), a mere side-step.   

Three powerful impulses drove societal change in the last five decades – an emerging and increasingly influential Counter-culture which rejected the traditional world-view, a progressive movement of social reform, and unparalleled prosperity.   

The Counter-culture opposed all things traditional, often with great hostility. Given prominence and validation by the increasingly influential communications and entertainment media, the Counter-culture openly advocated relativism and stigmatized deontology, which after years of ineffective apologia, lost its “relevance,” and accordingly, much of its influence.  

However, the Counter-culture offered no cogent system of personal ethics as a replacement for traditional thinking… it was simply reactionary, not visionary, and worse than that, overly naive. Its purpose was opposition – to an Establishment that it saw as rife with hypocrisy, corruption, and cover-ups.  The Counter-culture tore down, and while it was skilled at innovation it was incapable of meaningful renovation.   It made us skeptical, cynical, and unclear about ourselves, our society, and our purpose. 

At the same time, progressive social change moved forward in primarily traditional ways – through legislation and public debate.  Social change was sorely needed, and great advancements were achieved in a wide spectrum of societal areas where regressive attitudes and practices were normative, most notably in the areas of civil rights, the role of women in society, economic justice, criminal justice, the increasing contributions of Science, consumer advocacy, ecological consciousness, and therapeutic retooling within interpersonal relationships. Life changed, and changed at a pace unparalled in human history.  Lumped under a catch-all “modernism,” constant change = modern living, all things came under the microscope, including long-held values.

Simultaneously, the third impulse, materialism, took root and flourished.  Overall prosperity increased significantly in these decades…new and easily proliferated technologies allowed people to achieve more and more outcomes quicker and more frequently.  “Instant gratification” became part of the cultural lexicon as people began to believe that conventional wisdom, which at times demanded personal restraint, was outmoded in the new era of personal liberation.  

All Change is, Well, Change

Change.  Massive change.  Constant change.  How does traditional wisdom survive in a world that not only experiences constant change, but demands it, and perhaps is ultimately addicted to the stimulation that comes from it? 

Answer: it cannot.  Traditional wisdom becomes archaic, fades, and is ultimately lost as each generation moves further and further away from the days of social consensus.   

So, slowly, the object of life has shifted…in a relativist, utilitarian, teleological world, the goal of living is not how life is lived, it is instead what life provides.    

Baby-boomers and generations since then have, in the main, re-defined “success” not as, foremost, a life well-lived with honor and Integrity, but as the unbridled acquisition of things, status, and sensory gratification.  In this grand reinvention of “success,” we’ve managed to dissolve the cultural epoxy that held us together for so long, those social nerve centers that reinforced our societal glue – the family, public and private education, the workplace, the church, and our civil institutions. 

The result has been intellectual and ethical chaos, as the recent implosion of our business and financial communities so clearly exposed.  The new institutions which now hold primacy over much of our thinking convey such contradictory “truths” that the old and the new truths are now not only opposed, but irreconcilable.  

We inherited over two thousand years of western political, religious, and philosophical wisdom, and built our social nerve centers around it.  The benefit of that wisdom, we once agreed, was that knowledge gained from past experience increases human happiness by helping individuals avoid costly mistakes and empowering them to make better life choices.  We not only do not agree with this principle anymore, we never even discuss it.

Enlightenment Era thinkers had a clarity that empowered a revolution in human religious, intellectual, economic and political liberty.  They understood the vital relationship between human freedom and ethical or integral human behavior – freedom requires a people who share a common moral and ethical vision and live according to that vision.  American Enlightenment thinkers – Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin – described how this linkage is necessary to preserve representative government, agreeing that only a “morally sound” people can nourish and protect the institutions which safeguard the fragile phenomenon of human liberty.  Essential to “moral soundness,” in Enlightenment thinking, was Integrity.  It still is today. 

“You Mean Success Is Not Success?”

There is power in being truthful, and in being people of our word, and that power comes from, as a Roman philosopher once said, “Right reason in harmony with Nature.”  True success can only come in right living, in truthful living, and in honorable living, which connects us to the “laws of Nature’s God,” as Jefferson observed.  The emptiness of the soul which seeks fulfillment solely in wealth, position, and power, is not a literary invention.  It is evident throughout our society – from Watergate to Enron to Bernard Madoff.  Its witnesses are therapists, addiction centers, correctional institutions, and broken lives, families, and relationships.  Its monuments are loneliness and regret.   

That is the mission of PRAXIS – to reinvigorate relationships, education, commerce and industry, and our civic institutions anew with the vintage ideas of Integrity and personal honor…to take back the word “success” and make it whole again, and empower people to become word-centered truth-tellers while holding each other accountable.   

In PRAXIS, people commit to a life of integrity, join into fellowship with others of the same stripe, and are continually encouraged, supported, equipped and held accountable.   

It is time for Imagination to meet the Possible and become Reality. Imagine an academia at all levels where plagiarism is rare, cheating uncommon, and honesty has the highest value.  Imagine a world where honor codes are lived out more and more, not written and forgotten.  Imagine increasing numbers of people  speaking the truth to each other in love. Imagine more businesses running at the highest levels of Integrity, more workmen and contractors keeping their promises to their clients, workforces that don’t steal time or material from employers, public officials who don’t steal from the people and say what they mean while meaning what they say, and a people that places Integrity above all else in daily living.

If you can imagine all of this, then you are sharing the vision for PRAXIS.  So why not join with us?  

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PRAXIS recently partnered with Trans-Atlantic Environmental, Inc. (TAE) as the consulting arm in a major international waste-to-energy initiative for the African nation of Ghana.  PRAXIS is providing consulting in the areas of project management, communications, and quality assurance.

 Ghana, a stable democratic west African nation whose strategic location has made it a major player on the international stage, is enduring a waste disposal crisis that is destroying the lives of tens of thousands of Ghanans and ravaging its environment.

The TAE waste-to-energy initiative enjoys the support of the government of Ghana and several key tribal leaders, and is spearheaded by the CEO of TAE and Ghanan-American Dr. Daniel Kwame Acquaah of Ghana tribal royal ancestry.

In many African nations, especially in Ghana, inadequate waste disposal threatens the sub-Saharan ecosystem and the health and longevity of the population.  Landfills have long overfilled their capacities and solid, liquid, and toxic wastes are simply dumped in above-ground sites that continue to fester and contaminate the areas surrounding major cities, like the Ghanan capital of Accra. 

The child mortality rate in Ghana is at tragic levels – nearly 11 million children have failed to reach their fifth birthday as a result of preventable illnesses over the past decade.  The World Health Organization attributes poor sanitation and inadequate waste disposal as key componenets of the rising level of child mortality.  The problem is not limited, however, to child mortality.  Current waste disposal systems are antiquated and depend on open-air combustion, creating an uncontrolled and extremely hazardous air quality which has led to respiratory illnesses and shortened life spans.  It is estimated that one in three Ghanans living in or near urban areas suffer from significant respiratory problems.

TAE partnered with PRAXIS for help in offering a solution to Ghana’s environmental crisis – a solution that involves a proven, effective, and inexpensive technology that is not only environmentally safe, but creates electrical power as a by-product.  The solution is known as plasma gasification. 

Gasification uses extremely high temperatures to break down all forms of solid waste into a usable by-product (e.g., a substance used in road construction), and the heat from the gasifiers can power steam generators to provide signficant amounts of local electric power.  Hundreds of jobs are created and once current daily wastes are handled, landfills can be re-opened and processed, reclaiming lands that would otherwise be lost in perpetuity.

Currently, TAE and PRAXIS and their technology partner are in the process of securing funding from several key international funds that target developing nations, all with an eye to piloting a waste-to-energy process on the outskirts of Accra by mid-2012.  If TAE is able to secure adequate funding, PRAXIS will continue its consulting arrangement by providing overall quality assurance and contract monitoring in an effort to guarantee the ongoing  integrity of the project.

TAE CEO Dr. Acquaah hopes that the United Nations will soon be involved in the intiative, “The United Nations has provided assistance for Third World nations for decades, and in these times, when preservation of the African environment is critical for its future, there is a key role for the UN to play in bringing waste-to-energy where it is sorely needed.”

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By Jaques Alexis

As I started writing this post, I was wondering whether there was a difference between ethics and integrity?  I willingly admit that the answer to this question was not clear-cut in my mind.  So I had to look for help. Word net 2.1, a free web-based dictionary maintained by Princeton University defines integrity as “moral soundness”.  

In my opinion, which is primarily derived from personal experience, the Project Management profession is one of the most stressful white collar professions  -  a PM is daily exposed to situations that create conflicts of interest.  In today’s economic conditions, where unemployment has surpassed double digits, where competition is global and becomes tougher and tougher every year, one may wonder: how can a PM survive without giving up his or her integrity, individual values and beliefs?  

Evidently, this is not an easy question. I have found myself in situations where, in first blush, I believed that I would have to resign, but ultimately,thankfully,  it never had to happen.  On the other hand, in many situations, a decision-maker might not even see the “bright” side or the advantages of doing the right thing because the effects of a short-term gains (cost/benefits analysis) blurs the good judgment of the decision-maker. 

It is the responsibility of the PM, based on his/her uprightness and expertise, to identify the advantages of doing the right thing and prove that that it is the best courses of action – especially if the organization is to continue as a going concern (and values sustainability).  

This is a great debate!

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By Daniel Lamm

To talk about integrity, I think we need to first define it.  Merriam-Webster defines it as a term from the 14th century. 

One definition is a ”firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values.”  (incorruptibilty)  The second is “an unimpaired condition” (soundness).  The last is the quality or state of being that is complete or undivided (completeness). 

I tend to see integrity as primarily the first definition, though I think the other two lend meaning as well.  I see integrity as staying consistent (through your words and actions) with your own personal ethical or moral code, especially when it isn’t convenient or expedient to do so.  In my opinion, only your peers can judge effectively as to whether you have integrity or not.

Taking integrity into the workplace and project management brings us into the topic of professional ethics. 

Professional ethics is a topic that fills books and courses on it’s own, so I’ll only touch on it briefly.  One can describe a person as having ethical integrity to the extent that everything that the person does or believes: actions, methods, measures and principles – all derive from a single core group of values (wikipedia).  I would also say that it involves accountability for your words and actions.

So how does integrity play into project management?  What does having integrity give the project manager in practical value?  An example I observed in my experience as an engineer came from observing a senior engineer in my first job out of college.  As I was learning the ropes on taking time studies, I observed how he conducted himself.  He would readily admit if a mistake had been made on a rate, and make sure all backpay was accounted for.  Looking back now, I can see that he performed his work with integrity.  It provided him the value of being trusted at a higher level, not just by the union employees, but by other office staff and management.  While it made his job more difficult at times, I would say the investment in integrity made it easier in others.

As to project management application, I think integrity boils down to trust. 

As an example, I would look at a customer and supplier relationship.  When both parties conduct themselves in a consistent manner, it makes it easier to invest more in the relationship; such as making sure an order goes out to the customer with integrity even overtime has to be worked.  What does the supplier get out of it?  Perhaps a situation where the customer doesn’t change when prices go up because of the perceived value of the relationship.

What do you think?  Post to the response box below, or if you would like to contribute more substantially to the discussion, send your comments to questions@praxisforlife.org .

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PRAXIS is a movement?  That’s “a pretty bold statement” for a society with just under one hundred members, even though we only opened our doors in September 2009.  Bold indeed, but we believe it, and more than that, we expect our movement to grow significantly in 2010. 

True, few people have heard about PRAXIS so far, but in 2010, that will change.  We will reach across the world wide web, using social networking, and bring our ideas and movement to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.  Social networking is in its infancy in terms of outreach, but its power is practically unlimited.  The power of the PRAXIS Way – transcendant truths for achieving genuine happiness and understanding true success culled from two millenia of western (and to some degree, eastern) philosophic, ethical, and moral teachings- combined with the power of social networking means an opportunity for unprecedented growth.  So, we say again, 2010 will be nothing short of thrilling here at PRAXIS.

But in the upcoming year, our outreach will be even broader than utilizing the power of social networking, with radio and television appearances scheduled, workshops in several major cities planned, and interviews slated with a number of public figures that will be published on our website. 

PRAXIS is a movement on the move, and the message we bring to the nation is as important as fiscal responsibility, job creation, good health care, and strong national defense – perhaps even more important for our future. 

The idea of America can only survive if our people re-embrace honesty, integrity, and truth.  With these qualities upheld, affirmed, learned, and practiced, we can and will solve the financial, domestic and international problems that threaten our Republic.  With these qualities once again as the bedrock of our national life, our personal relationships, our commerce, our criminal justice system, our trades and manufacturing, our craftsmen, our governments, our arts, and our educational systems will reverse their decline and reinvigorate, rebuild, and grow.

With this in mind, the PRAXIS Society for Human Integrity announces the formation of a panel to create PRAXIS  chapters at colleges and universities. Target date for the first student chapter is Spring 2010.  Our long term goal is a presence on every college and university by 2015.  Very ambitious, but absolutely possible.

We need your help. 

If you want to be a part of a national movement at ground level, now is the time to step up and join in…if you believe in what PRAXIS stands for and are willing to give of your their time and talents. you can grow with our organization as it expands in the years ahead.   Fire off an email to questions@praxisforlife.org and we’d be happy to talk in more detail about what a posting with PRAXIS is all about.  Remember, however, PRAXIS is not for everyone, and everyone is not for PRAXIS, so part of the process of coming on board is to make sure that the fit is right in both directions. 

AND…if you are interested in starting a PRAXIS chapter at your own college or university, or at an institution close to your heart, shoot us an email.  Can you imagine thousands of college graduates entering the public and private sectors each year, devoted to living out the PRAXIS Way in their vocations and personal relationships?  Can you imagine the impact that will have on our lives, the lives of our children, and the future of our country?  Thousands each year, who in turn influence thousands and thousands more.  That means change. Genuine change. Meaningful change.  Lasting change. 

Yes, PRAXIS is a movement.  Perhaps you are being called to become a part of it?

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Summary: This inventive, entertaining, and surprisingly faithful-to-Dickens film is a must-see for everyone during the 2009 Christmas season.  We at PRAXIS predict that it will become a Christmas classic by 2010, joining the likes of other traditional annual holiday treats like It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and George C. Scott’s/Alistair Sim’s versions of A Christmas Carol. 

Jim Carrey’s performance as Ebenezer Scrooge and a host of other characters (all three of the ghosts and Scrooge at all ages), is as outstanding as any of his other exceptional works (The Mask, How the Grinch Stole Christmas). The supporting efforts of Gary Oldman, Cary Elwes, Bob Hoskins, Robin Wright Penn and Colin Firth are perfect fits, giving the film a richer and fuller texture than Disney would have produced using actors of lesser skills and accomplishments. 

Writer/Director Robert Zemeckis’ 3-D presentation (you must see the 3-D version) of Motion Capture technology (Mo Cap) is visually superb – the film opens with a thrilling Disneyland-esque flying carpet ride over the rooftops of early Victorian London, a treat that Zemeckis reprises later in the film. His clever and creative use of Mo Cap takes the viewer into the sometimes dark but richly iconic world of Charles Dickens’ London the same way audiences experienced the North Pole in Zemeckis’ The Polar Express .  

Most surprising, however, is the faithful adaptation of Dickens’ storyline and dialog.  Movie goers will leave the theatre having experienced much of the original A Christmas Carol story on screen –  and enjoying so much of its uplifting spirit.  This is not to say that the screenplay is a literal adaptation – there are plenty of cartoonish twists and turns tossed into the film to give young and old alike added visual treats (Scrooge being chased by Death driving a careening horse and carriage, for example…a scene that is probably a little intense for 6-and -unders, by the way).  But these additions only enhance the production and remind us that Disney still can produce Disney films when it chooses, capiche?    

 Honesty and Integrity: By now, the story of Scrooge finding the true meaning of Christmas through the intervention of spirits summoned by his deceased and tormented partner, Jacob Marley, is familiar to almost everyone who draws breath.  Characters in the story – Scrooge’s nephew Fred and his clerk Bob along with the whole Crachit family, not to mention Scrooge’s past employer Fezziwig and colleagues who collect for the poor each Christmas season, embody the spirit that Charles Dickens thought many Londoners lacked in the 1840’s.   

The Dickens notion of Christmas – charity, mercy, generosity, joy, and thankfulness – what were considered to be “Christian virtues” in the mid 19^th Century, are lifted up and affirmed in this rendition of the classic holiday tale.  Hooray for Disney, and hooray for Zemeckis, we say! 

Religion: As with the smash hit thriller 2012, this film chooses to ignore the usual Hollywood treatment of the Christian religion, and stays with the general theme that Dickens wove into his original story – Christmas is a state of mind driven by the teachings of the Prince of Peace.  In two scenes, for example, Christmas carolers sing verses that actually contain the word “Christ” (rather than choose verses that avoid “God” and “Christ” as many directors have done in the past when they included Christmas carols in their films).   In another scene, as the audience “flies” over Old London Town, the camera zooms in and pauses while focusing on a cross sitting atop a church.  Again, the Ghost of Christmas Present tells Scrooge as they both look in on a bakery where hungry children seek scraps that, in essence, many London ministers talk the talk but fail to walk the walk when it comes to reflecting Christ’s love for the poor.  All in all, no political correctness here, and a fair and straightforward treatment of the Dickens religious message. 

Bottom Line: Simple – go see this movie in 3-D, then buy it when it comes out on DVD!

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