Dear Friends,

This is the last newsletter of the century and it will be hurriedly written, so if there are errors, please understand that I am just barely able to complete it.

I’ll touch briefly on many matters and then if space allows, fill in with details. I won’t have time to put things in a nice order and carefully edit, but I’m determined ot get this out by year’s end. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it later.

We are overloaded with last minute Y2K preparations as the situation worldwide becomes quite uncertain.

The oil industry and the U.S. government, possibly half our water treatment plants and many other parts of our culture are not fully prepared for the new millennium. Although the government claims over 90% of their "mission critical systems" are compliant, that is not enough. "Mission critical" means those systems they cannot do without so if any one such is not working, an essential part of the government is not working.

And some systems like Social Security which claim to be ready are even now making gross errors so their readiness is in doubt.

Our own community, which should be ready is not quite, though we are far better off than most Americans. We will surely have plenty of good water and enough fire wood and we hope to have enough food for six months.

"if your neighbor is not prepared, you are not prepared" is the watchword of many Y2K activists. Our neighbors are the entire city of Arlington.

ARLINGTON RADIO: KIDS-FM

We have set up ten watt FM radio station which covers all of Arlington (Pop. 6,000, our nearest town) and can even be heard out in the community seven miles away. It could be used to organize the town but so far there is no team to manage it on a full time basis so we don’t know if there are many listeners. However as the only Arlington station, folks will find out quickly when an emergency arises. Let us know if you can help run a volunteer radio station.

We also have independent electricity for our yurt so we can continue without the grid power. and the community bought a 20 K.W. generator to run on propane.

ENERGY MAY BE SCARCE

There is grave doubt about the ability of our national electric power grids to function long past January, and transportation may also break down because extreme fuel shortages are likely. The full details are found on our new e-mail listserv you’ll learn about further down. However, I’ll write some more about this very serious matter if there is space.

We learned recently that the major oil refineries expect to close down by year’s end because of embedded system problems and it takes very skilled specialists to start them up again. They may not restart for months. There is a real danger that nuclear power is in a worse mess for the same reasons. Nuclear plants depend on the power grid to cool spent fuel rods and are in danger of radioactive meltdown if they are not cooled. Diesel generators can do it for a while but these are not totally reliable and fuel may be short. Folks downwind from nuclear plants should be prepared to evacuate.

I fully expect an economic collapse worldwide as people pull their money out and buy staples and precious metals which may rise very high. They are low now because wealthy Asians have been forced to sell their holdings.

All this looks very dismal for the "developed world". the southern hemisphere, which we have been enslaving and conquering for centuries may suffer a lot less. Most of them are still rural and poor and only their cities depend on computer systems.

Cuba may suffer not at all because of their cooperative systems. In the U.S. we cannot close the phone systems for a time for Y2K testing, but in Cuba they can, and likewise with other systems there.

Few Americans know how to live when the power and water fail. What will city dwellers do if the toilets don’t function because the power grid has failed ? Will they know how to put excrement in plastic bags and dispose of them ?

Americans have gotten rich on sale of armaments, our leading export, and so have fostered wars around the world, but never suffered that horror on our own soil. It seems to me the universe tends to compensate people who allow that and we may now have to pay for our failure to control our war-making government and industrial complex of which Eisenhower clearly warned, but only on his last day in office. That there must be some justice in the world is one reason I expect the collapse of such a system.

FUTURE VERY BRIGHT

Yet the future, for all who make it is very bright. Though there may be martial law and/or mayhem in the cities, rural cooperative communities will do better than most and millions may learn the value of cooperative living. The government is already preparing for martial law if things break down but there is little reason to hope that will work to keep cities peaceful. Many who might be called up to serve may decide to stay home and protect their families instead of going off to protect strangers. The next year or so may be very different and will call forth the most in creativity from all.

But in only a few years time decentralized energy will also be cheap and abundant because of the new discoveries in physics. Hydrogen will give us a thousand times the energy it does today and electric vehicles will make travel a joy. Cars will go 1,000 miles on a single charge. We are working now on a new form of simple helicopter that will be very easy to maintain, and I am even now seeking partners in that endeavor.

I’ll be sharing part of an article on the new energy recently published in The Village Voice later in this newsletter.

E-MAIL LISTSERV

We don’t know if the post office will continue reliable deliveries though 2,000 and we are not sure of the phone systems, but if the phones do work, then you can get our latest news by e-mail. Aquarian now has it’s own free listserv that any e-mail user can join simply by sending a blank e-mail to <fr2-subscribe@egroups.com> and to unsubscribe is just as easy. You can also select any posting by subject heading or date from the internet by entering egrops.com/group/fr2 so you

can see what you might have missed if you join now.

WHEN MIGHT THINGS BREAKD DOWN ?

Probably not suddenly on Jan. first, but it would be well to pray for more time. In forecasting the ‘END OF THE WORLD" (meaning the end of the worldly systems of selfish competition) Jesus asked us to pray that the end doe not come in the winter and there is hope that only 10% of failures will occur in January. Let us visualize enough time for people to see what is happening and get ready for it before the coldest weather. Visualizing the best is effective prayer. Intention is, in and of itself, a power that causes things to happen.

LAND OF THE FREE ?

We’ve been led to believe that we live in "the land of the free" so how is it that we have more people in prison (per capita) than any other modern country? Why is it that prisons are the U.S.’ major growth industry ? And why do we have to have so many young people, especially minorities in prison ?

In Guatamala, a country torn by civil war for decades, the state has turned over five juvenile detention centers to the Remar communal movement. Remar which started in Spain has about 12,000 people in Christian communities around the world and 95% of the leadership are former drug addicts. They have turned juvenile detention centers into Christian communities which they run with no weapons at all. Whenever they perceive that an inmate is ready to leave the prison and live in their own community they are able to make that possible.

So, why can’t we do the same thing here in "the land of the free" ?

Perhaps we can. Our daughter April is here from Philadelphia where she is studying criminology at Temple University and tells me there is a "Delancy Street Foundation" in San Francisco (and elsewhere) where offenders are able to live together in a kind of communal setting. We plan to go to San Francisco to visit them while she is here for the holidays. Their phone number is 415-957-9800

I’ll write more about our visit on our e-mail listserve which all who have a computer can join.

GETTING A FREE COMPUTER ?

Joel’s Super Mac broke down and had to go to the factory for repair but we couldn’t wait so we went to buy him a new iMac. We learned at the store that Apple Corp. would lend us the $979 to buy it, and more (over $1,100) without any payments for three months and then only $22/month. If we choose we can pay it all off at once and pay no interest. An income of $15,000 and living at one place for some years seemed to be the only credit requirements. We were accepted by e-mail in two minutes and walked out with the computer.

If the economy goes well in the next months, we can pay it all off, but if it collapses, we end up with the computer.

A DARING VISION FOR YOUTH

I’m told that Delancy Street only accepts people over 18 and they run a very severe program that seems more like the Marines than a loving community, but they do help men and women restructure their lives completely. Many come but not so many. They have about 1,000 people in about 5 places in the U.S.

Another community I’ve visited called Remar has about 12,000 people worldwide and 95% of their leaders are former drug addicts. In Guatamala Remar runs five juvenile prisons, but run them as Christian communities without any weapons. When they see a convict is ready to leave the prison, they can take him to their community where he can share a true communal life.

So knowing many very successful communities based on love, I am sure it is possible to create new communal societies where young folks especially can find the love and affection and purpose that can bring true joy to the world. I think it could best be done by combining the experience of Delancy Street and Remar and the worldwide Christian group called The Family (which has about 10,000 people - 1-800-4 A FAMILY reaches their Los Angeles office anytime). All of those groups live together in complete community without money, sharing all property.

Dr. James Prescott is a scientist who has spent his life studying the cause and cure for violence and drug abuse. He has shown that the main problem is incomplete brain development. If the pleasure centers of the brain are not developed, due to lack of affection in early life, then the person tends towards drugs and violence. Pleasure can help to correct that problem, especially in young people.

But this culture is opposed to pleasure. Perhaps that is because a lot of violence allows the government to justify controls and limit freedom. Therefore there will be opposition to any alterna-tive that really wants to end violence by allowing young folks to have the pleasure they need.

But things are changing. There is a whole new world on the horizon. We have to try new things and take the risk and we can do that best by working with the most successful groups that have at least part of the solution. Remar, The Family, and Delancy Street Fdn. are some of those.

I expect that in the hard times ahead many will turn to cooperative living and sharing of love, and some of the old prejudices will dissolve. In fact, Time Magazine recently ran a two page spread on polyamory (families with multiple partners - Nov., 1999, page 90). so new ideas of shared love relationships ore getting popular.

BLACKLIGHT POWER GETS VILAGE VOICE PUBLICITY - COVER STORY !

When I learned that Dr. Randell Mills was going to speak at the meetings of the American Chemical Society in Calif., I spent hours on the phone calling every publication I could think of to try to get them to do an article. Among them were the Wall St. Journal and the Village Voice, but I’m not sure what, if any effect my calls had.

However, I heard later that WSJ did a great article on Mills’ revolutionary discoveries, found the article on www.blacklightpower.com (Mills’ website) and printed it in my last newsletter.

But more recently I heard that the WSJ pulled that article at the last minute, never printed it, and that the reporter, Erik Baard then left the Journal for the Village Voice which wanted to expand the article and make it a cover story. I’m not sure if the Journal published theirs or not, but this one is more important. I wish I could print it all out for you but it’s to long so to read it all you have to go to the web site: egroups.com/group/fr2 where you will see all the subject headings archived in our listserv and be able to click on and read any one of them.

QUANTUM LEAP by Erik Baard

Dr. Randell Mills says he can change the face of physics. The Scientfic Establishment thinks he's nuts.

Times are tough on Robert Mills Sr.'s 91-acre grain farm in Chester County, Pennsylvania. "This year is very, very bad," he confides. "I'm glad the kids got out."

His eldest, Robert Jr., has a water well drilling business, his daughter Raeleen is a massage therapist. And his younger son, Randell, recently bought a 53,000-square-foot space satellite manufacturing plant near Princeton, New Jersey, from Lockheed Martin. He then stocked it with millions of dollars of high-tech gear. Here the younger Mills plans to overturn quantum theory as it's been understood for decades.

Randell Mills, a Harvard-trained medical doctor who also studied biotechnology and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says he's found the Holy Grail of physics: a unified theory of everything. A central part of Mills's theory explains the basis of the traditional, and paradoxical, "duality" concept of the electron as both a particle and a wave with a model where electrons are charges that travel as two-dimensional disks and wrap around nuclei like fluctuating soap bubbles. He calls them "orbitspheres."

Mills says that with this new understanding he's produced clean and limitless energy and an entirely new class of materials and plasma that will reshape every industry in the coming decade. Mills also claims breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, cosmology, medicine, and perhaps even a form of gravitational jujitsu.

"I've made the electron real," the 42-year-old Mills says. "It's a revolution very fitting to the 21st century, in a chain of revolutions man has had with fire, steel, fossil fuels, and Maxwell's description of electromagnetism. This is grandiose stuff, and when I say it, it delivers a beating from critics. But on the other hand it's fun."

Though the topics he broaches could be coming from a B-movie mad scientist, Mills's cadences are more often like those of a motivational speaker. He moves his six-foot-five frame with athletic ease and drives a BMW sports car. He and his wife, an investment banker, have two young sons and another child due in March.

His company, BlackLight Power Inc., formed in 1991, expects to receive in January patents on the energy and chemicals, which Mills says derive from "shrinking" the hydrogen atom's orbitsphere. BlackLight Power, with a research staff of 25, will submit its findings to premier scholarly journals by that time, he adds.

Despite howls from the scientific establishment that Mills is a relic of the "cold fusion" trend quashed a decade ago, BlackLight Power Inc. has raised more than $25 million from about 150 investors. While that's hardly a huge sum in this Internet-crazed era, it's coming from serious money and energy people. Prominent among them are multibillion-dollar electric utilities PacifiCorp, based in Oregon, and Conectiv, which serves Mid-Atlantic states. RS Funds, Eastbourne Capital Management, and executives retired from the top echelon of Morgan Stanley have also put in millions. With Mills holding on to controlling shares, BlackLight Power now is turning away private investors.

"I'm impressed with how Randy's gone about this," a retired Morgan Stanley executive says, "with experiments to test the theory at every step. And the potential payoff is almost unimaginable."

Conectiv senior vice president David Blake concurs: "We're past the scientific verification stage. The talk now is about commercial applications," perhaps within seven years, he says. Blake sits on the BlackLight Power board of directors.

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. is considering a public offering of BlackLight Power stock in 2000. The investment bank says that the two chief needs that will trigger an IPO are a licensing agreement with a "household name company" and more substantial academic validation of its technologies. BlackLight Power is in discussions with DaimlerChrysler, and three major corporations are already examining materials it has produced, say Mills and company executives.

In the next year, Mills promises, the revolution will be "hydrinoized."

In one of BlackLight Power's cavernous laboratories sits the prototype energy-and chemical-producing cell that is the heart of Mills's ambitions. Mills explains that in this contraption, resembling a souped-up home furnace, water is electrically then catalytically broken down into atoms of oxygen and hydrogen. Potassium atoms are introduced as a gas into the very low-pressure hydrogen gas waiting inside the cell. Under specific conditions, the potassium acts as a catalyst to collapse hydrogen's electron orbit. The energy once used to maintain the higher orbit is released as ultra-violet light, Mills says.

The heat from that process can build pressure to turn a turbine for a generator or an engine, BlackLight Power notes in a marketing plan. The smaller hydrogen atoms, called "hydrinos," remaining in the cell can then react with other elements placed there to form novel compounds with amazing properties, Mills claims. "This will change how most everyday things in the 21st century are made and used," he says. For example:

Hydrinos combined with inorganic elements produce conductive, magnetic plastics that would revolutionize circuitry and aerospace engineering, and shrink and speed up semiconductors.

Hydrinos combined with highly oxygenated matter would form the basis of batteries the size of a briefcase to drive your car 1000 miles at highway speeds on a single charge, without gasoline.

One type of hydrino combined with an acid would produce incredibly powerful explosives or rocket propellants.

Hydrino and metal compounds make for super-strong coatings, some of which could make ships rustproof, dramatically reducing crew complements.

There are "millions and millions of possible combinations" in the commercial world, Mills says, revealing himself as a practical, earthy businessman.

These qualities emerged in his teens when he made good money raising corn and hay on land he leased. He had no college plans, and skipped so many high school classes his diploma was in doubt. But when he sliced up his hand and arm in an accident falling into a glass door, the five hours of surgery rattled his sense of immortality.

"At that point," Mills recalls, "I figured if I'm going to die eventually, I'd like to at least know why. I wanted to know how it works. All of it, from the human brain to the universe."

He used profits from the farm to cover the tuition at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he graduated first in his class. After that he breezed through medical school at Harvard University, while simultaneously taking science courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The son of a farmer, and a farmer himself, turned out to be an academic superstar.

"It's the American story," says Dr. Robert Park of the American Physical Society. "But he's still wrong."

Park has concluded that the hydrino theory is wrong in his upcoming book, Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud. Park is not alone is being rankled by hydrinos. The hydrogen atom is the simplest, most common, and most tested element. It's nearly universally agreed that a free-floating hydrogen atom is in what's called "the ground state"You can't bring its electron closer into its nucleus. Telling physicists that they've got that wrong is like telling mothers across America that they've misunderstood apple pie. It's that fundamental.

"If you could fuck around with the hydrogen atom, you could fuck around with the energy process in the sun. You could fuck around with life itself," claims Dr. Phillip Anderson, a Nobel laureate in physics at Princeton University. "Everything we know about everything would be a bunch of nonsense. That's why I'm so sure that it's a fraud."

Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist based at City University of New York, adds that "the only law that this business with Mills is proving is that a fool and his money are easily parted." Kaku is a cofounder of "string"-field theory, which posits that all matter and energy are actually manifestations of vibrations occurring in 11 dimensions. String-field theory, considered radical when it was introduced, is now pretty much the only game in town for mainstream physicists seeking a grand unified theory.

BlackLight Power boosters scoff that they've seen no practical application of quantum theory since the atomic bomb and nuclear power, and say they have little time for theorists who call Mills a charlatan while teaching that the fundamental mechanics of cause and effect are subverted at the subatomic level. Mills's camp responds: Fraud? Let's talk about fraud. Quantumists have us living in myriad dimensions filled with "probability waves" and unobservable "virtual particles" that flit in and out of existence, and they say we may one day slip through wormholes in space to visit other universes or go back in time.

Kaku insists that such seemingly far-out visions direct us toward truths we can't yet see, whereas Mills, Kaku contends, is promoting something already shown to be impossible.

"I'll have demonstrated an entirely new form of energy production by the end of 2000," Mills responds. "If Dr. Kaku has escaped our universe through a wormhole by then, I'll send my first $1000 in profits to his new address."

And there's the nub, Mills's critics also charge. They're talking the scientific method, and he's already spending his profits.

"The history of science in America since money became so easily available to people making outrageous claims has gotten very complicated," says Dr. Robert Cava, a materials science expert at Princeton. "Scientists are constantly in competition and constantly under extreme scrutiny. Don't think it's a picnic. So when someone comes along and makes a big splash without going through the rigors of peer review, it makes us think that the guy has no business doing it."

Dr. Richard Wilson, a research professor of physics at Harvard who says he's still skeptical of Mills's theory after a visit to BlackLight Power's labs, says the culture clash between scientists and captains of industry is natural.

"In my experience in science," Wilson says, "no one's more gullible than the wildcatter in the oil industry. But they're both gullible and successful. Sometimes they happen to be right. They take chances. That's their game, but that's not what scientists usually do."

The booming stock market of the 1990s has loosed a torrent of cash in all industries, but wallets have been especially fat in the U.S. utility industry in the last couple of years since that $215 billion business began deregulating. States have pushed electric companies to sell power plants to new competitors at open auctions. The result: In addition to coal, they have cash to burn.

A chunk of that money has been earmarked for new energy alternatives to fossil fuels, reflecting mounting concerns about global warming that have coalesced with long-standing unease with North American, European, and East Asian dependency on unstable regions for oil supplies. In the political climate of the U.S. at least, nuclear power isn't an option. …

WELL, THERE’S LOTS MORE but you’ll have to go to the BlackLightPower website for that. -Art

Judy usually checks out this newsletter before I print it, but time is so short that is not happening this time. I bear full responsibility -Art