Industrial Heat's James A. Bass: President of Reactance Engineering Inc and Engineer for JM Products

Quote from Shane D.

This is not a debate on the merits, or not, of unemployment payments. If you need it, well you need it. All I said was that this Mr. Bass needed public assistance in his retirement years, after what appears to be a stellar career. I have never known an engineer with his resume, having to do that.

Unemployment insurance is not "public assistance." Shane, you keep repeating that as if his UI claim represents some sort of neediness. It doesn't. It is no indication of desperation. You might not have known any engineer doing that, but, in fact, many do, and don't necessarily talk about it. It takes some special conditions. This has nothing to do with "retirement years." He could be collecting retirement income and UI at the same time, the former has no impact on the latter.

I am not claiming that Bass did not knowingly participate in fraudulent representation. Maybe he did. Maybe he was paid much more than he'd have made as an ordinary contract engineer for the time. What I was saying was that if he didn't, he would probably be okay, if he simply tells the truth about the whole thing.

If he did know, he might still be okay, if he makes it right by full admission of what he knew. He was certainly not the prime mover, the big fish.

Abd,

Thank you for adding that last sentence.

Quote from Shane D.

Abd,

Is there anyway you could imagine yourself being lured into a cheap scam like this by someone with a history like Rossi? Put yourself into this James Bass' shoes for a moment.

Uh, Shane, "history like Rossi" would mean that many sincere people would be fooled. If he was fooled, he didn't know, and he's not responsible. They simply used him. In the other direction, he might have known. What I'm seeing here is lack of imagination being converted into a kind of certainty. If "I can't imagine ..." then the opposite must be true. Very common, and it can be a huge mistake.

All I wrote was that it's possible that Bass did not know. I also wrote that it is possible that he knew. And in either case, I would not expect him to be, at this point, making some public announcement. Any lawyer would tell him to STFU. If something comes up that actually starts to cause harm, he might consider action. But nothing like that is happening, so far, as far as we can tell.

Quote from JedRothwell

Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

People who went into the warehouse and saw the equipment were not fooled. People who saw the data (including me) were not fooled. Not for one minute. As described in Exhibit 5, it was egregious, outrageous, in-your-face, not even pretending to be real, fake fake fake. If the machine had been made of paper mache it would hardly have been more obvious. Shane assumes that Bass visited the warehouse. If he did not even visit, he is guilty of pretending to be a manager at a company he never went to. If he visited but he did not see it was a hoax, he is the world's most incompetent engineer.

I think he is a software engineer, Jed, no sign of any training that might give him much information. I would think that Bass met the IH people at the warehouse, so he was there. We do not know what he told IH. This is all made-up, Jed. I am simply declaring possibility. Again, outside his expertise, "incompetent" is a weird judgment. With some scenarios as to what he said, yes, he'd be lying. With others, no.

Sure, anything is possible. It is possible I might be elected president on Tuesday with write-in votes. But we should not waste time contemplating such unlikely possibilities.

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Go fly a kite. You'll get further. It is much more possible that Bass did not know what was going on than you make out. To me, he probably knew something was fishy, at least, but accepted the job. How much did he know? Did he know that $89 million was riding on this? Very, very likely not. Back when Bass met the IH people, that was probably a closely-guarded secret, Rossi would not want to spook IH. He would not tell anyone. I wonder if Johnson knew, in fact. Johnson, much more likely. Rossi's real estate attorney and Leonardo President.

We don't know what story Rossi told Bass, but, remember, Rossi fooled a lot of quite smart people. Even you. Perhaps it would be appropriate to remember that as you are so quick to judge someone else.

Quote

Abd,

Is there anyway you could imagine yourself being lured into a cheap scam
like this by someone with a history like Rossi? Put yourself into this
James Bass' shoes for a moment.

This skinny, slick looking Rossi guy approaches you with a cash offer. ..possibly he is next to you in the UI line.
Then he drives you to a small 6,000sqft commercial building on the
outskirts of Miami, and says "we are going to manufacture a product here
that absorbs almost 1MW thermal, with the rest being vented out a small
toilet vent, and that contraption on the other side of that low wall
you can easily look over, produces all that heat from only 20KW
electrical".

Then he hands you a cheap looking "business card" that says you now
represent some company that mimics a famous company you know of. You go
home and immediately do a Google search and see Rossi's extremely
controversial history.

Seriously, could you ever see yourself being so gullible? MrSS?

Maybe I am wrong, but I just not cannot imagine any real degree of innocence here.

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First of all, I doubt that James A. Bass would take some cash payout. He'd want regular payment he could depend on for his services and use to file unemployment after his contract ended.

Secondly, I think it is very possible (although we don't have proof either way) there was a plant of some kind that utilized an endothermic chemical process to produce a product. And even if the plant couldn't absorb all of the heat (or less than 1MW of heat was being produced), there was additional ventilation (those gigantic bay doors). I don't see why James A. Bass wouldn't have thought it was a sincere and honest operation if there was actual manufacturing equipment that he was placed in charge of. What you are proposing would require James A. Bass to accept a part in a knowingly fraudulent enterprise from the start. With his highly credible job experience and track record -- not a thing negative I can find anywhere -- I doubt he would have agreed to participate in a deceptive scheme.

Now, let's say there was an endothermic process being utilized that produced product. His job had nothing to do with working on or operating the "source" of the heat. As long as he operated and maintained the manufacturing equipment, he would be performing his duties. And lets say that a full one megawatt wasn't being produced the entire duration of the test. Maybe at times Rossi exaggerated to IH and others and only a couple hundred thousand kilowatts of heat were being produced. If the heat was adequate to sustain the production rate that JM Products Inc. had specified, it wasn't his job to ask questions or run calorimetry about the source of the heat.

Thirdly, the business card was amateurish, but why do business cards have to be flashy? I've met professional individuals (engineers, lawyers, and doctors) a few times who had very plain and ordinary business cards that was only a few styles of text on a white background. At least James A. Bass's business card HAD an image!

Fourth, I don't consider Andrea Rossi's history as extremely controversial from my point of view. I view him as a smart, skilled, mostly self-educated, obsessive work-a-holic who is sometimes overly paranoid but to a certain extent HAS A RIGHT TO BE since he's literally holding the only viable commercial LENR technology in the world. He shouldn't play games like he does on occasion and he shouldn't break contracts and prevent people from inspecting his plant. Also, he should be more open and transparent. But overall, I view his technology as real, and, so far, I don't view him as some master con-man like most people make him out to be.

To answer your question, if Rossi was a little bit easier to get along with and not quite as difficult, I wish I had been an engineer so I could have been hired by JM Chemical Products. Why? Because I think excess heat was produced and there was real manufacturing taking place. Of course, I will admit I could be wrong and although some level of excess heat was produced, there could have been zero manufacturing and the whole issue of a customer producing a product could have been a giant hoax. In that case, even if it means he never gets to commercialize his technology, I hope he is somehow forbidden from any LENR work for the rest of his life. But I really don't think that will happen. I expect a wabbit. Maybe not a giant fat one, but at least a skinny malnourished one.

Timar,

I think there are certain individuals who are very irritated with me, because I'm looking deeper into the Rossi saga than simply the Doral affair. I'm considering everything I know about his him and his technology from his earliest testing with Focardi to modern times -- combined with my views of the replications that have been made by third parties. Because I'm trying to look at the situation from more angles and from a broader vantage point, I'm not pointing at his seemingly mischievous behavior and dishonesty during the one year test with one finger while jumping up and down and in a huff. The truth is that there are more possibilities (between total fraudulent scam and completely successful test with COP of 50) than some parties want people to realize. I understand why people are irritated with him -- I am too. The difference is that I'm convinced he has developed, through exhaustive testing along with his own intuition, a number of variations of his technology that are all capable of producing HIGH POWERED (1000 watts per gram) LENR. Also, due to the understanding that I believe to have gained of him, I find it extremely unlikely he would have performed a year long test (spending many hours a day in the plant) to waste time on a hoax when he could be furthering his technology. He's not someone to twiddle his thumbs or stand still. Sitting in a plant like that pretending to monitor fake reactors would drive him stark raving mad. Regardless if he fudged numbers, exaggerated figures, or committed serious acts of deception, I believe Rossi was conducting a real long term experiment that was producing excess heat. I also think there was likely some sort of manufacturing process. This does NOT exonerate him of anything. And I'm not saying he is owed or not owed a red cent. But the idea that any aspect of the year long test was "real" is something certain individuals can't tolerate us even considering. However, I'm going to keep on considering it until I see hard evidence otherwise.

The good news is that I think the replicator community has the opportunity to catch up pretty quickly to Andrea Rossi. I see a number of paths that could be taking utilizing information that has been acquired in the past few months. In my opinion, these are the same paths that Me356 followed. After combing through the literature (not necessarily LENR literature or papers) everything he said from his earlier posts to his final ones make sense. He gave us a really good bread crumb of puzzle pieces to follow. Thankfully, I don't think it has a thousand tiny pieces, but only a far fewer number of large ones that are pretty simple to put together. Basically, pretty much every variation and improvement of the E-Cat was either about hydrogen absorption or triggering. The same goes for Me356. These subjects are nuanced and require thought, but we can crack them in reasonably short order, I think, if we follow the information Me356 and Rossi have made available to us.

Once we crack these issues, I believe the Rossi Effect will seem miraculous at first (hundreds to a thousand watts per gram of fuel rather than single digits) but then the issue will become more mundane requiring standard engineer: how to make materials that can endure long term, how to transfer the heat where we want it, how to build systems to practically utilize the heat, designing algorithms to control the application of stimulation, how to optimize the stimulation to produce the highest COP with the least permanent damage to the nickel lattice, etc. Most importantly, once we've mastered the reproduction of the Rossi Effect and share the knowledge with the world, there will first be hundreds of replication videos made in the first couple months and then thousands of variations developed within six to nine months. No one party, company, organization, or government will have overall control of the technology. It will be dispersed and democratized.

I'm really excited about living in a world where the Rossi Effect is totally and completely "out there."

Quote from THHuxley

You are right. His behaviour in the one year test does not make sense if he has working technology. Nor does the whole one year test contract, which is clearly dysfunctional. I wonder whetehr you think IH insisted on this strange contract? It seems most unlikley to me, the large up-front payment is not what any VC would want to see because it prevents the inventor from having any inducement to help with the technology development.

What I find, reviewing the history of cold fusion, is general failure of imagination. At any given point, a practically limitless range of possibilities exist. Much of learning is exploring these and restricting them. If we look at the reaction of scientists to the FP announcement and the early events, we see two kinds of scientists: those who considered "it" impossible -- which is a generically defective argument if there is no clear definition of what "it" is, and those who dreamed up ways in which LENR might occur. I would say that, with hindsight, all those ways -- or almost all -- were not what was actually happening. But my point here is that some were willing and able to stretch in this way, and some were not. Those who were not willing to stretch outnumbered those who were, and social forces took over.

With something new and challenging, that is quite to be expected!

Then, some who did accept and explore cold fusion saw things, drew conclusions from them, and became unable to imagine how their conclusions might be in error. Failure of imagination, there are always possibilities. There are people who seem to naturally be able to move beyond this, without falling into gullibility, but it is not particularly normal. The scientific method requires this imagination to fully function. It requires imagination to construct hypotheses for something new, and it requires imagination to think up how our own ideas might be wrong. The latter runs in contradiction to much human instinct, or if it is not instinct, it is certainly common conditioning. We don't like being wrong, we think it looks bad, etc.

The other day I pointed to an observed phenomenon in Lett's work, a resistance drop immediately prior to the observation of anomalous heat, and other researchers have confirmed that they have seen this. I asked Kirk Shanahan if he could come up with a *nuclear explanation.* It appears that he was unable to do so, even though he had mentioned that ionization in the electrolyte could lower resistance. He knew enough to come up with an explanation, but it appears that his mind was literally blocked. I interpret this as a rapid arising of objection that it's impossible, therefore it must be something else.

Here, I proposed the possibility -- a possibility only, not a claimed fact -- that Bass did not participate knowingly in a fraud. The response is essentially that this is unimaginable. That is, literally, a failure of the imagination. I have since worked on the possibility a bit more, fleshing it out, and I could present a scenario, that, to my mind, is plausible, given what we know about Rossi and even more how the situation appeared in early 2015, which is when Bass was presented.

Instead of presenting this scenario, I'm going to ask those who seem convinced that Bass must be "guilty," to see if they can imagine it, suggesting that they do not focus on shooting it down! That can come later. In my opinion, we simply don't have enough evidence to know, so coming to any firm conclusion now is restricting possibilities unnecessarily. We all have the right to present our present conclusions, based on how matters appear at this time.

However, we lose analytical power, essentially we lose intelligence, if we slam doors shut without being entirely clear what's in those rooms, and without any present risk of damage from open doors.

Ah. The contract.

The Agreement was the way it was, I infer, because IH was dealing with a man who insisted on being firmly in control. If they insisted on something more "sensible," they expected he would simply refuse, and if they did this more than as some suggestion, he would stop talking with them. He actually did that many times with possible investors, and I assume that they knew that, they knew far more than we knew as the public.

It is remarkable that both extreme skeptics and critics, and "believers" in Rossi, think the Agreement was terrible. However, what I see is that IH had adequate protection, they could easily lose $11.5 million, but not the $89 million. They accepted that first risk, it was worth risking that in order to "crush the tests." So what about the other side? What about, for example, the restriction on Rossi disclosing IP, but not on IH?

The question in this case would devolve to why Rossi would accept that, and my suggestion is that Rossi has far overblown trust in himself. He did not consult with lawyers, or, if he did, he ignored them. He didn't notice the lacuna, perhaps assuming it was obvious. How could he imagine that a GPT with no written consent would be valid? Quite simply, he was thinking along a different track entirely.

This is setting aside the possibility of pure scam, in which case $11.5 million in the hand is worth much, and worrying about other details, no, let's get this thing going! It still took almost a year.

As to spending a year on something useless, most of what we know about Rossi's behavior during that year comes from Rossi. If he believed that he was setting up a payment of $89 million, that would be enough motivation. But I do not know what Rossi believed, I can only know what he has written and said. I do know that at least one quite intelligent person, who knew Rossi personally, was devastated to see the Rossi email to Darden about Industrial Heat. Rossi can obviously be very engaging and likable. And then something else is going on. There are hidden dimensions.