From day one, the Rossi saga has been far more interesting from the standpoint of human nature than from any sort of possible scientific content.

The remaining stalwarts who still grasp at straws to argue in favor of Rossi actually having something real are people faced with the dilemma of two choices:

Either Rossi's devices actually work, or

They have been gullible fools who have ignored countless enormous red flag warnings for 6 years.

It is human nature to go all in and choose option one, hoping for a miracle, rather than admitting to option two.

Quote from interested observer

They have been gullible fools who have ignored countless enormous red flag warnings for 6 years.

It is human nature to go all in and choose option one, hoping for a miracle, rather than admitting to option two.

Harsh, but true I am afraid. History is full of examples of the latter.

Quote from Eric Walker

It seems people are depressingly easy to manipulate when hope is involved.

Or greed, or any emotion that short circuits their critical faculties.

The saddest and easiest are desperate people, such as the terminally ill, who will pay money to fake healers because logically they have no other option left.

Rossi is cute because he has a pseudo-scientific plot, but really he operates on dreams and emotions just like any other con artist.

Quote from interested observer

They have been gullible fools who have ignored countless enormous red flag warnings

The irony here is that pro-IH people are ignoring all the red flags around IH. As for me, I think both IH and Rossi stink to high heaven. I'm long overdue for a shower to get the stank of this affair off me...

joshg: Who are these pro-IH people? IH is a shell company that (obviously) has made a terrible investment in a con man and otherwise has no other claim to fame. What is there to like about them? And who has ignored any red flags about them? Once this endless, idiotic lawsuit is over, I would not be surprised if IH is never heard from again. One can only hope that Rossi fades into obscurity as well.

Quote from joshg

The irony here is that pro-IH people are ignoring all the red flags around IH. As for me, I think both IH and Rossi stink to high heaven. I'm long overdue for a shower to get the stank of this affair off me...

It seems to me that your conclusion that "IH ... stink to high heaven" could easily be based on a reading of events out of order, in which the timeline is not paid careful attention to. Up to now I have come away with a very different impression of them, namely that they have stoically weathered a difficult adventure in their admittedly risky attempt to do business with Rossi.

You have been good about taking dates into account with specific statements. But there are many other statements that have been made as well which need to be placed into the timeline, and an allowance for the possibility of different understandings of different IH principals at different times.

We'll see. Woodford kicked in a lot of cash to ensure everything was in place to make sure Rossi was cornered once and for all.

Part of the self-deception required to not admit to being fooled by Rossi is the kind of comment you often see from his supporters to the effect: "if this was really a scam, it would have to be the biggest, most far-reaching scam in history".

Seriously? Bilking the offshoot of a smallish venture capital fund out os $12 million dollars and bamboozling a few hundred internet physics wannabes doesn't even make it to the major leagues in scams, much less "the biggest in history". Check into a dude named Bernie Madoff, for example.

No, the implied meaning of these statements is more like, "if a scam has fooled me, it must be the most amazing scam in history".

Quote from Alan Smith

That is a big hope, and I suspect one wish that will not be fulfilled. Rossi has more bounce and more angles that Serena Williams.

There have been scores of sucessful LENR inventors that have failed to push their sucessful LENR systems into the collective consciousness of society. It will take a real bastard and lying ornery pig headed SOB to break through into the commercial marketplace. Form what we have seen, Rossi has all the requisite characteristics and talent to get this job done.

Most of Rossi's followers understand what Rossi is and they accept him as a person who is vindictive, vicious, spiteful, malicious, callous, hurtful, ill-natured, and hard-hearted, enough do this job. It is almost identical to the way Trump followers overlook Trump's shortcomings in the hopes that he can meet his fanciful and unachievable promises.

Frank Perdue: "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken."

Quote from Alan Smith

Circassia and Theranos

Didn't know they were invested in Theranos. Ooops. What's up with Circassia though? Things look pretty rosy...

https://www.ft.com/content/b0b…32-36d9-a5ca-9e34efaa7da6

@Shane: your evolution over the past five years gives me hope for humanity

Quote from Alan Smith

What did Woodford care about cornering Rossi? WPCT is just about making money, not fighting for justice, especially since Woodford got whupped by their investments in Circassia and Theranos. The Theranos debacle especially suggests their DD was a little shall we say 'casual'. Anyway, their trust unit price down again this week, that are taking another biotech pasting.

I'm not thinking about justice. More like an undefined continuum between cornering the market and cornering a wolverine.

In probably this order Woodford wanted:

1. Rossi to get whatever he needed/wanted so that he would divulge his secret (ligitimately to IH and possibly other licensees), and thereby enable Woodford to make an outstanding profit on LENR tech.

2. Rossi to realize/determine with the help of IH (without blame) that his stuff doesn't work the way he thought, and therefore he has no useful secret, so that LENR investments could be better focussed on alternate tech.

3. If Rossi is scamming, to clear that doody out of the pool of knowledge completely, so that their LENR investments are not besmirched by a big scandal and also researchers where investment money is going aren't following some BS direction based on useless "information" coming out of a scammer. Woodford probably would prefer to put as little investment into his last one as possible. This is the second worst case scenario.

4. (This isn't what they want at all; the worst case). Rossi has nothing but runs a scam and also sues anyways, makes a giant scene, costs millions of dollars in legal fees, so that almost nothing can be recovered, even if their big investment wins a case against Rossi, uncertainty about whether Rossi had or has any big LENR tech secret continues, researchers follow Rossi-inspired leads to no avail, wasting millions upon millions more dollars, Woodford and their big investment IH end up looking bad, and their LENR investments turn into a black hole for money. And still nobody knows whether Rossi had something real or not.

IMHO

Quote from Eric Walker

You have been good about taking dates into account with specific statements. But there are many other statements that have been made as well which need to be placed into the timeline, and an allowance for the possibility of different understandings of different IH principals at different times.

Yes, I agree that there are other data points, and I can certainly see how a different narrative could be constructed out of them. I have chosen to focus on the specific points that sort of blow that narrative apart. My assessment is not just based on the events revealed in this case so far but also on other data points with respect to IH that were dug up and pieced together last year when this whole thing exploded.

Anyway, I hope I'm wrong about IH just as much as I hope I'm wrong about Rossi. And at this point it seems I'm much more likely to be wrong about IH than about Rossi. But that's about as far as I'll budge for the time being. I am open to revising my opinion about IH on the basis of new evidence, just as I did with Rossi. But my opinion on the issue is vastly unimportant to anyone but myself.

Ok, fair enough. You'll attempt to disrupt the narrative that IH are stoically suffering a misadventure with Andrea Rossi. Sometime it's not bad to have someone serve as an advocate for a certain slant on things. Not everyone can do this effectively, as it takes a pretty light touch and a willingness not to take statements and details out of context (e.g., ignoring the order of events in the timeline).

One thing that stood out to me as I thought through the timeline is that no one has reported yet seeing any statements from IH principals along the lines of "even though we know this thing with Rossi is going nowhere, we'll say to Woodford that it's all great, because then we'll get 50 million dollars." I.e., direct evidence of collusion. That places the burden for IH being evil on very circumstantial evidence and a lot of inference. I suppose they could be smooth enough operators not to leave a trail. So far I find this line of reasoning uncompelling, myself.

Quote from Eric Walker

no one has reported yet seeing any statements from IH principals along the lines of "even though we know this thing with Rossi is going nowhere, we'll say to Woodford that it's all great, because then we'll get 50 million dollars." I.e., direct evidence of collusion. That places the burden for IH being evil on very circumstantial evidence and a lot of inference. I suppose they could be smooth enough operators not to leave a trail. So far I find this line of reasoning uncompelling, myself.

Yes, it is circumstantial. That's for sure. At the same time I don't think we have direct evidence of Rossi conspiring against IH, although it's true that the circumstantial evidence against him is much stronger.

I have actually been surprised about all the things we don't have evidence about via e-mails in this case. For example: we don't have any evidence of Darden informing Rossi in advance that the Doral debacle does not count as a test. (Yes, I know that there is a lot of testimony around that issue about who said what to whom, but nevertheless there are no e-mails from IH to Darden; there is no written record.) And that is only one of many examples of things that I would have expected to see some written evidence for. I would not have expected to see them writing e-mails to each other about screwing over Woodford (or working with Woodford to screw over Rossi). That would not only have been criminal, it would have been criminally stupid. So the fact that there is no such direct evidence does not surprise me, and I don't think they need to be smooth operators, just use some common sense. So on this point, absence of evidence cannot be construed as evidence of absence.

I don't know that IH is 'evil.' I believe there is (circumstantial) evidence that they engaged in dishonest business practices at least with respect to Woodford and the Chinese (which might nevertheless be legal according to the letter of the law). But dishonesty and shading the truth in business is part of the game. So that doesn't make them evil, just dishonest, though probably not more so than similarly situated companies (and here I guess I'm really talking about Cherokee). Incidentally, that reading of events is compatible with the notion that Rossi has nothing and is simply a con man.

The circumstantial evidence for the notion that they are trying to stall or discredit LENR (i.e., that they are "evil") is extremely thin and requires a rather tendentious reading of the facts, I admit. But still and all that reading exists. I have a very cynical (or in my view, realistic) perspective of how power works in this topsy-turvy world of ours, so I am willing to entertain that possibility. In my view it cannot be summarily dismissed as a crazy "conspiracy theory." It awaits further evidence one way or the other. However I believe such a reading of the tea leaves is less compatible with Rossi the con man. It either means that Rossi really does have something (even if it's only 1.5 COP instead of 20 or 20,000 or whatever Rossi claims), or that they knew Rossi was a con man all along and used him to make LENR look ridiculous. Or hell, who knows, maybe that was Rossi's goal all along. At this point in my life, knowing what I now know, I am willing to consider any possibility, though some are much more likely than others. Bob Greenyer said that we cannot underestimate the forces aligned against LENR. I agree with him.