Posts by Eric Walker

@Tony:

If you had been on this forum for several years and suffered tens of people with little else to say but to accuse forum members and mods of being tied to IH somehow (the connection usually being money), you might draw the following conclusions as well:

• Someone making such insinuations doesn't really know what they're talking about.
• Someone making such insinuations is unlikely to have anything of value to contribute to the discussion about LENR, ever.
• Someone making such insinuations is likely to spend their time attacking the motives of other people on this forum rather than addressing issues of substance.

I don't know who you are, and you might have been here in an earlier incarnation. Assuming that is not the case, you have not been here for several years. Instead you have a new account with no known background and are presumably unaware of the (too) numerous discussions that have been carried out on this topic in the past. We no longer have much patience for conspiracy theories of this variety. If the interest is a consuming one for you, I suggest you pursue it elsewhere on a blog (although don't expect to win goodwill doing this).

As for people who appear to take a neutral position, they can be sent away if they use a sock puppet account, especially to evade an earlier timeout. Another situation is that someone is on a list because of a history of intentionally provocative (= trolling) behavior, they have nothing else of note to contribute, and they cross a line one last time.

Thank you for the clarification, Dewey.

Goodbye Adrian.

Dewey, your attitude leaves something to be desired. If you can clarify how your assertion that Mats Lewan has been blackballed by the IVA is to be found in writing, please do. If you have inferred that he's been blackballed from the link you provided, please indicate that that is the case.

Note unrelated to anything above: if you're going to switch to another account, please let the forum team know, and you should be fine. If you do that, discontinue use of the old account. Don't use an alternate account to evade a timeout.

I recall reading that Mizuno took some notes on the incident. I'm curious whether those notes are or might be made available to take a closer look at. (Perhaps they've already been linked to earlier in this thread; I remember only the description in Mizuno's book.)

THHuxleynew I don't think it was moved into this thread. I recall Dewey responding in this thread. (If that turns out not to have been the case, another possibility: perhaps a move of another post was botched.)

If I might draw upon several years of experience in fringe-ish forums to impress upon the open-minded initiate that there is a nontrivial possibility that the following topics will lead to a general conflagration and a war of all against all, involving the some of the very same people active in this specific thread: politics, anthropocentric global warming and religion. If your posts trigger such a food fight, no matter what other points they make, they will be rounded up with the replies and dumped into the "Clearance Items" thread. And then we'll have to start clamping down on things. So resist the urge to go there, if only to ensure that your entertaining posts remain in this thread.

I find the story of Mizuno's bucket of water interesting in at least two ways. First, it is interesting at a sociological level to observe how Kirk, on one side, and Jed on the other, can spend many words and, nominally at least, come no closer to arriving at a shared understanding of the facts of the incident and what can be concluded from them. Is a shared understanding possible in this case? Something tells me it is not. Second, I find the account interesting scientifically for what it suggests (but does not prove) is possible, since data were kept on the incident, which elevates it above the level of mere anecdote. But in this regard it is still in the category of scientific curios.

My conclusions:

• There are smart people who will not agree on things, no matter how many years they're given to hash the details out.
• Mizuno's bucket is an interesting incident but remains in the category of scientific curios, and only a protocol that results in something interesting in the hands of someone of a skeptical frame of mind will break the logjam. (Either that, or Rossi selling his UL-certified QX reactor on the market; don't ask me how likely I find this to be.)

It's not that your questions are nefarious. It's that your questions often seem to suggest or imply nefarious intent among a circle that goes well beyond Rossi. You are permitted your doubts about the straightforward explanation I gave. But do not be surprised if your questions raise eyebrows and the thought that you are delving into conspiracy theories. That is your choice, and not one that is likely to cause issues.

Thank you for the clarification, Ascoli65.

Quote from Ascoli65

May I ask you to explicit this hypothesis?

The straightforward account is something like this: (1) When Jed Rothwell was advocating for Rossi a few years ago, it was a sincere advocacy that was due to his being aware of test results that were promising and due to his being in contact with people he trusted who were closer to Rossi's activities and who were also enthusiastic. That (2) Rossi was not an agent of the DoD or a similar agency, but rather an independent actor who had gained attention in various quarters with his claims. And that (3) any activity vaguely traceable back to the DoD and other government agencies was presumably due to genuine interest and not, e.g., their masterminding a revival of interest in LENR for underhanded purposes unrelated to LENR.

Hopefully this reading will seem like the straightforward reading to you as well?

Dewey Weaver, (1) Please don't use this forum for veiled legal threats. (2) If that person really is here, give us your evidence offline, and if the evidence is adequate, he's gone.

Ascoli65, a year or three ago I went to the effort of verifying with you, yourself, on this site, what the outlines of your suggestion were. Shall I dig up the thread? You are good at this kind of thing; perhaps you will be kind enough to do the honors. Or perhaps your position has not changed since that exchange, and you can point out what in the description above I got wrong in comparison to the previous attempt?

Quote from Ascoli65

It follows that almost every other hypothesis appears to be more plausible.

In your sleuthing, you are studiously ignoring the most obvious and straightforward alternative hypothesis. Namely that things are what they seem.

Quote from Ascoli65

No conspiracy. I'm not proposing any of such theories

Ascoli65, once you start from the premise that the DoD and related agencies may have launched a scheme that involves both Rossi and Jed Rothwell (and Melich and now, apparently, Ahern) and that uses LENR only as a cover in order to achieve other goals, you are unavoidably within the realm of (highly implausible) conspiracy theories.

I don't think the bluster around setting up a bet concerning Rossi's new tech is as impressive as it must sound to some in this thread. It really looks kind of (looking for the right word ...) ill-informed to object to people attempting to set up reasonable conditions prior to entering into the bet; or to call out people for reneging on the bet when the terms have yet to be negotiated in first place or people's individual positions clarified; or to object to requests that the terms go beyond a simple report in a reputable newspaper as being unreasonable (after all, there were several mentions in Forbes of stuff about Rossi, and we see where that has gone).

Undoubtedly, this bluster was to be expected.

Quote from Shane D.

Yours is also the first speculation I read that Rossi *may* have first worked with the DOD, and then gone on to introduce himself to Focardi.

This is Ascoli's attempt at speculatively piecing together a coherent account in which (a) the DoD and related agencies are shadowy puppet masters that cooked up a LENR revival in or around 2011 in the service of ulterior motives, (b) both Rossi and Jed Rothwell are smaller players in this scheme, and (c) faculty at the University of Bologna used the good name of the university at Italian taxpayer expense to wittingly or unwittingly lend credence to these machinations. I have seen Ascoli's questioning of Jed for some time now, and it does not seem to have taken any other direction over the last few years. He is all diligence and assiduousness in pursuit of the remaining details needed to fill out his already settled thesis.

Quote from Shane D.

Only one not fooled it seems was Brian Ahern.

Perhaps more accurately: I gather that among LENR longtimers there were different levels of optimism, pessimism and skepticism. What optimism there was was due in part to the direct connection to Focardi and through him the indirect connection to Piantelli. There was a willingness among some to withhold judgment until adequate information was available to make an assessment, and, until then, scary tidbits that turned up here and there might be allowed as the result of possible quirks of character. The tests by Levi et al. provided additional grounds for optimism up until (but probably not including) the Lugano test, and after that, Parkhomov's and related reports.

It was in this context that there were few who had openly expressed a clear judgment on the matter one way or another.

Quote from Tony

I sort of got the idea that questioning the behavior of any member of this forum was a terminal sin...

One certainly doesn't want to make a habit of it. And attempting to point out the (implied or claimed) hypocrisy/unfairness/bias of mods won't go far either. Making the discussion one about mods and moderation: bad. Turning the discussion back to one about the comments on Rossi's blog: good.

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

I would appreciate a couple of examples what you considered were "boorish" enough to be banned. I find that hard to believe after the hundreds of posts by Mary Yugo.

Sorry Adrian. I have few suggestions for you, and I'm not going to engage further in this discussion. There have been numerous occasions when clear explanations have been provided for why we find ourselves in this cycle, and yet we have still come to this point. There's not much I can do for you at this time except hope that you'll somehow mellow out and engage points of fact rather than spoiling for a fight and diverting the conversation to make it one about other forum members. It is incontrovertible that Mary's behavior is also boorish.

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

You also accused me of getting facts wrong and I requested examples of those too, but you never replied.

No. You merely misunderstood my suggestion. I suggested that you stick to matters of fact, i.e., rather than personalizing things with other forum members. You seem to have taken that to mean that I was suggesting that you had said things that were untrue (i.e., nonfactual). That was not the suggestion, although I did not have enough energy to clarify the point.

I get that your views differ from mine, as they long have. It is a practical problem. When someone has no argument to make and only launches into people, calling them trolls and the like, the real discussion gets sidelined, and others with similar tendencies come out of the woodworks. (One wonders whether that is the very purpose of such behavior.) You may disagree, but your fortitude for that kind of thing is formidable. We hope to make this a place where quieter, shier people are also willing to contribute. They will keep quiet if this place is repeatedly allowed to devolve into a food fight.