Category: Planet Rossi

the universe of Rossi, believers, and critics

Hope for Planet Rossi

On E-Catworld, Chapman wrote a post about the Quark-X, put up by Frank Acland, which looked at some of the same facts and ideas as I just covered on my consideration of the Gullstrom report, part of Rossi’s blog: Fact, Flabber, Flim-Flam, or Fun?

Chapman definitely lives on Planet Rossi, but here shows a willingness to recognize that something is missing. That is a cause for hope (when this happens on any “side.”) It’s worth looking at. So his report and my comments are below. I’d much rather respond here than there, though I will probably toss a nickel or two in that pond. Continue reading “Hope for Planet Rossi”

Rossi’s blog: Fact, Flabber, Flim-Flam, or Fun?

Whatever, it begins with F. If a reader knows me, the reader will expect that, every time, I’ll vote for Fun. Yay, Rossi! Endless generation of excess fun!

Okay, was it fun for IH? I recommend they declare that. Otherwise, $20 million down the tubes, a stupid mistake, start to finish. But fun is irrevocable, if we say so. Life is fun, and then we die. Does that change “life is fun”? I say not.

Onward with FFFF: Continue reading “Rossi’s blog: Fact, Flabber, Flim-Flam, or Fun?”

How to drastically overvalue a company

To pull off this trick, the company must have both ordinary and preferred stock. From this page from the Journal of Accountancy:

To value a business having both common and preferred shares, CPAs should value the preferred shares first and deduct that value from the entire equity of the entity.

The trick? Ignore the difference between preferred stock and ordinary stock, and then use the price paid for preferred stock and multiply it by the total number of shares. Presto! Massive overvaluation, it can be! Continue reading “How to drastically overvalue a company”

OMG! Good news!

This LENR Forum development gives me hope for humanity. Arguments have been raging about the alleged flow limitation raised by Pace in his opening arguments on Day 3 of the trial, Rossi v. Darden.

This was based on the Smith Supplemental Report.

Planet Rossi has been loudly claiming that this was the height of stupidity, so bad that when Lukacs pointed it out to Pace and Bell, IH attorneys, before the evidentiary phase of the trial was to begin on Day 4, realized that their entire case was utterly hopeless and laid down and played dead.

Then Rossi went at it hammer and tongs in his Mats Lewan interview. Utter ridiculous stupidity!

There is some discussion of this issue on Pumped Up or Stupid Mistake.

Those folks on LENR forum decided to actually obtain one of these pumps and actually measure the flow rate. What? And give up all the fun of arguing endlessly and firmly proclaiming that the “other side” is not just wrong, but insanely-stupid-wrong and someone-must-be-paying-them?

Apparently, yes. Giving that up, we can hope. So I’m applauding, and commenting on this test idea and implications. Continue reading “OMG! Good news!”

Settlement Agreement?

Rossi has granted an interview to Mats Lewan. 

[I have written an extensive review of the interview on a page here. I’m saddened to find it necessary to write this.]

The interview includes a link to a “settlement agreement” between all parties to Rossi v. Darden, stating “undisclosed source.” The agreement is unsigned and undated, it’s a draft, then. I have made inquiries to determine if this is legitimate and accurate. But here is the settlement-agreement-draft.

[Update: I am informed privately that the Lewan draft is probably correct, and, as well, that it was eventually signed by all parties. There has been, to my knowledge, no joint announcement, only the eventual entry of a joint stipulation which included nothing about the agreement other than showing the joint request for dismissal with prejudice.]

In the Lewan interview, Rossi makes many statements that, from the clear evidence in the case, are, at the very least, misleading. Lewan’s summaries are, themselves, misleading. (Lewan has often shown that he didn’t understand the case, and is continuing that.) I will cover that interview in detail. There are two other documents hosted on the Lewan blog linked from the interview, they are Rossi handwritten notes, full of words like “stupidities” and “middle school math.” Classic Rossi. Continue reading “Settlement Agreement?”

The drama continues

Unfortunately. The flow of libelous posts on JONP had stopped but, sad to say, it seems to have started up again. Sifferkoll is echoed on JONP.

This is long and detailed. Unless a reader is interested in the massive flabber generated on Sifferkoll’s blog, and implications, including evidence that Sifferkoll is being directly deceptive, I suggest skipping this. Continue reading “The drama continues”

I posted on JONP June 27

I wrote:

Bob Belovich, perhaps I made that call, I did publish this on coldfusioncommunity.net at 9:20 AM Monday. I was informed, last week, of the change to Wednesday, so it is odd that Dr. Rossi apparently did not know. (His comment here is why I checked, first thing Monday.) Judge Altonaga’s office told me that Jury selection would begin at 12:30 PM.

I waited until comments after this were approved. This comment was, then, likely “spammed.” Recent comments approved after Rossi said he would not be attending to the blog (but someone would be approving posts, or spamming them Continue reading “I posted on JONP June 27”

The study of Rossi v Darden provides an endless supply of flabber.

The Quark-X is powered by quantum accelerated coherent collapse (quacc) of  Meshe Gas with itself. E-cats are fueled with liberal applications of Flabber Gas and Rossi Grease. Rossi v. Darden provides  a limitless supply of flabber, enough to serve the needs of sarcastic writers far into the future.

Every time I look at Rossi’s blog, or at the case documents, there is no shortage of material, the question is always where to begin.

Mike Dunford of The Fogbow was flooded with flabber, reading the License Agreement. I am told that Fogbow is flooded with lawyers. I’ll agree, it seems that way, but … it takes all kinds. In any case, Mike reported that he had to read the Agreement more than once, because he wasn’t believing what he was reading. It couldn’t be that stupid.

Of course, Mike has not been following Rossi. It could be that stupid, and routinely is. So, then,  the koan: if Rossi has the reverse Midas touch, that whatever he touches turns to shit, why did Industrial Heat, which has a long history of engaging with risky ventures, and which certainly would afford counsel and indeed, had in-house counsel handling IP issues, go ahead and agree, and pay Rossi $1.5 million for the Plant and $10 million, based on a very shaky “Validation Test”?

That is a koan for advanced students. The answer I came up with is counter-intuitive, but few of us would have the intuition needed to cope with Darden’s primary business, Cherokee Limited Partners, an LLC that creates many LLCs, each one taking on some risky project. If these projects fail, they will lose up to $25 million or so of Cherokee Funding.

Normal thinking Is that if a risky business fails, the investment was a mistake. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained. The business of Cherokee would not be in avoiding risk, as such, but  in estimating, perhaps quantifying it, and comparing that to possible gains. CIP projects might fail more often than not (though I don’t think they do), but if CIP invests in projects with sufficient possibility of success multiplied by the probability of success, it cannot be said that an investment was an error, merely because it failed.

If Darden et al’s sense of possibility and risk is, in general, more likely to be right than wrong, in mercato veritias. If they are losing money on every  transaction, but trying to make up for it with volume, they would not be running a $2.2 billion investment fund, apparently successfully.

In 2011 and 2012, Rossi enjoyed massive publicity in the LENR world. He was commonly discussed on the private CMNS list My sense of the majority opinion was that it was possible he had something, but his rejection of sound scientific approach (“I don’t need controls, because I already know what a control will do: nothing”) was very visible. The errors of Kullander and Essent were obvious. But those errors did not prove that Rossi had nothing, only that their conclusions were flawed. And that Rossi was “eccentric.”

It appears that by 2012 Darden et al had decided to enter the field of LENR research and development. It appears that their first investment was a modest one, in Brillouin Energy. However, all other LENR working groups  were working with modest levels of power, at best. Clear XP at a watt is often considered a significant result.

Who would want to invest in technology that is so far from commercial feasibility, when Rossi was claiming many kilowatts? They decided that they needed to know the truth of Rossi’s  claims, and they needed to know either way, because the uncertainty was causing harm to the field. There is an IH deposition where they stated that if there was any possibility of a reality underneath Rossi’s bluster and even obvious deception, if this was as low as 1%, it would be worth continuing. In 2011-2012, I would have estimated the possibility of Rossi Reality (i.e., a real LENR effect, generating  significant power, as would be known  with conclusive tests), at perhaps 10%. (90% he was mistaken or creating fake demonstrations.)

Given that functioning LENR at the power levels claimed (say 10 KW per reactor, at a COP of 6) could be worth a trillion dollars, a 1% chance of success could be worth $10 billion (but investors would’t cut close to those values, unless the buy-in is truly cheap.) They were obviously willing to risk about $20 million. I would assume that they knew it would be difficult to recover that investment if Rossi were insane or even a deliberate fraud, unless actionable fraud could be shown, and if Rossi had let matters stand as they stood before the fraudulent Guaranteed Performance Test, he might have gotten away with it all.

It didn’t work out that way. That Rossi took IH to court has to stand as a major mystery in this case. I explain it with insanity,  which more or less means “it doesn’t make sense.”

However, I have called the IH investment “brilliant.”  That’s because it created desirable results. Confining desirable results to commercial success with the Rossi technology will miss that they wanted to find out, and to find out they needed independent testing, fully under their own supervision, and validated by others. To do that they needed to buy the IP. So I assume that they had already decided to accept the Validation Test, no  matter how much it stank.

Rossi wrote the Agreement. It’s bonkers in many ways. It gets even worse to  see how Rossi interpreted it and the Second Amendment. IH could see this, I’m sure, it was immediately obvious when I saw the Agreement, and more than one lawyer has opined in this direction. Mike saw this, from the Agreement, section 16.18.

Any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to this agreement, or breach of it, shall be settled exclusively by the Court of Miami, Florida, USA.

Rossi did not have a lawyer draft the agreement. As Mike points out, this is a $100 million agreement, secured with an immediate $1.5 million payment. In case anyone doesn’t notice, there is no “Court of Miami.” This usage is common on Planet Rossi. Given that the specified court does not exist, for it would necessarily be referring to  a specific court, this was a major flaw. However, the entire thrust of this provision is something that no ethical lawyer would recommend. IH certainly had fallen into a “controversy,” but lawsuits are a last resort. Before then, instead of jumping into Court to settle the issues, the parties will attempt to settle the issues, by negotiation. Instead of attempting negotiation, before the end of the “test,” where IH raised their lack of agreement to GPT and ERV — which is very well supported, possibly enough for summary judgment — Annesser threated to sue them immediately for anticipatory breach. Pugncious in the extreme. Lawyers like this create losing situations for their clients … but more legal fees.

However, it is possible that Annesser was just following orders. The lawyer had a fool for a client.

Another little tidbit from Rossi’s blog:

Yrka
June 23, 2017 at 9:39 PM

Dear Mr. Andrea Rossi.
I wish you success in court.
You will win! Serious interference in your work will be eliminated.
Advise where you can follow the course of judicial supervision.
Yuriy Isaev
engineer
Russia, Tyumen

Andrea Rossi
June 23, 2017 at 10:46 PM

Yrka:
Thank you for your sustain.
I think the official pacemaker is the source for information on internet, but I am not sure.
Warm Regards,
A.R.

There is common opinion that Rossi is many of those who comment on his blog. For some of these, evidence is reasonably clear. However, in this case, the question may be sincere. Rossi’s answer, again, shows his lack of clue. There is at least one follower of Rossi who has acknowledged the  value of this blog, and especially of the Docket page here.

The “official source” is PACER. See our introduction to the docket page. “pacermaker” or “pacemaker” is a complete error We have also seen “the pacermaker of the Miami Court.” Or variations. PACER is the document retrieval system of the U.S. Federal court system. It happens that the United States Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida is currently located in Miami.

Pacermonitor is a site that sells access, and that, for a short period of time, shows the Docket entries. They charge roughly  twice what PACER charges (Pacer is being sued over the fees being illegally high, at ten cents per page, with no limit for some documents, like the docket itself, they charge to show a subscriber the index to the documents.)

So if the questioner is sincere, Rossi misled his supporter. Someone with a conspiratorial mind might think that he doesn’t want his supporters reading the actual documents. Some have bailed after reading them.

Rossi also says that the trial begins June 26, tomorrow. Maybe. The information I have is that it begins Wednesday June 28. I will be talking with the Court tomorrow,  and, obviously, I will be checking. Rossi also treats “one month” as a fixed length of time. He’s naïve. However, it may not matter.

i have confirmed, this morning (Monday) with Altonaga’s office. 12:30 PM Wednesday, June 28 starts jury selection. I knew this last week (I.e., I had information, and I was told it was public.) So why didn’t Rossi know it?

 

If it is said enough, does it become true?

Certain ideas are repeated over and over, in spite of obvious correction. One particularly egregious example is what Paul Lamacraft of Woodford allegedly wrote when Industrial Heat gave him a preliminary copy of their press release in March, 2016, at a point where Rossi was claiming to his public that there was no problem with IH. This is commonly misquoted in a way that allows an interpretation that is weak or impossible with the original Lamacraft comment, pursuing a Rossi theme, and this began with Rossi making the claim in court, with that misquotation. This is so bad that a misquotation ends up as “agreed” by the parties. Essentially, a subtle difference can sometimes be overlooked.

On LENR Forum, SSC wrote:

oldguy wrote:

It makes perfect sense – They (Peter and Henry) traveled around the US visiting most of the researchers supported by IH. It would be hard to say they could not visit Rossi. Your assertion that Darden used Doral as a showcase is not correct. I think the “showcase” was elsewhere (possibly the work by Cooper and that by Miley).

You keep on discounting all the other work and the visit on the same US trip by the Woodford group to all the other places. Rossi (I think) was the last place the visited on the way back to the UK.

You assume way to much.

You are assuming too much when you say that the showcase was the work of Cooper and Miley. Everyone knows that the most famous name in the LENR world has long been that of Rossi and it was Woodford (or rather McLaughlin, if I remember the name well) to say that Rossi was their core business. So it is far more likely that Darden has focused above all on the Doral plant to attract investment.

As is common on LF, this is all unsourced. There were two visits by Lamacraft to Doral, one in February, at the beginning of the “test,” and before there was any preliminary Penon report, and one in August, after Rossi had rejected the Murray visit and IH was definitely on edge, and shortly to explicitly deny that Doral was the GPT and Penon the ERV.

Oldguy often writes as if he has inside knowledge. I am not aware of evidence on the “Woodford” visits to other researchers or inventors. However, Oldguy might well have some kind of private knowledge — or I have missed the evidence. However, SSC then cited something he “remembers” which is misleading. This has been brought up many times by IH Fanboy, as alleged “truth,” always with misquotation, so here is, once again, the reality:

In reply to J.T. Vaughn, Paul Lamacraft wrote:

This is clearly very disappointing, given that Rossi’s technology was a core element of the initial investment.

Rossi, having obtained this email in Discovery, presents it as evidence to support a claim, but reinterprets it (by adding an “explanation” in brackets — which explanation then, if Lamacraft had actually stated that, would be proving his point. This is an example of what I found in reviewing the Rossi arguments: the manufacture of evidence through creative interpretation. He wrote this:

On March 4, 2016, Woodford Funds explained that “Rossi’s
technology was a core element of the initial [$50 million] investment.”

Was Lamacraft referring to their $50 million? It would be strange, in context. “Explained” is supplied by Annesser; this is actually Lamacraft commiserating with Vaughn, a principal at the company that actually made the “initial investment,” in 2012-2013. It would be odd for Lamacraft to refer to their own investment in IHHI — which didn’t go to Rossi at all — as “the initial investment.” If he meant what Annesser is claiming, he would have referred to “our investment.” That investment was apparently, from the Ampenergo notes, committed in 2014, before the Doral test began — and what was committed was up to $200 million, also covered by the Darden deposition, as I recall. That IH owned a Leonardo license, would be important for reasons I have explained many times. However, Woodford did not invest in “Rossi technology” as such, that’s obvious, they invested in LENR research, so oldguy is essentially correct. Rossi has distorted reality to make him and his technology the center of the LENR universe.

Yes, Woodford would want to see the Doral plant for themselves. However, Rossi’s claim is that Darden and Vaugh touted the Rossi technology in order to induce Woodford to invest. It’s actually not his business, this is all part of a Rossi smokescreen to create some sort of appearance of impropriety, whereas IH did not actually receive any money from Woodford, directly. Woodford invested in IHHI, insulating their investment from all things Rossi. IHHI can decide to pay IH expenses, or can let IH fall into the gutter. It’s a choice. They own it.

Rossi, in his Motion for Partial Summary Judgment, has:

55. In May of 2015, during the course of the GPT, Defendant IH closed on a $50 million investment by non-party Woodford Investment Funds. See Composite Ex. 3 at 170:9-14, 204:25-205:5; 206:6-207:6; IH-00021986 (4/21/2015 IH memo from Darden to P. Lamacraft); IH-00080193
(5/15/2015 email chain between Darden and J. Spear, S. Hartanto, P. Lamacraft, N. Woodford, and S. Saha); IH-00099714 (3/4/2016 email chain between P. Lamacraft and Vaughn); IH-00112920 (11/2/2015 IH Business Development memo), appended hereto as Composite Ex. 34.

56. Woodford Investment Funds later claimed that “Rossi’s technology was a core element of [this] investment.” See IH-00099714 (3/4/2016 email chain between P. Lamacraft and Vaughn), appended hereto as Ex. 35.

It is true, apparently, that the Woodford investment “closed” during the Doral test. But that it was based on the Doral test is quite unlikely, given the timing and known facts. Woodford committed about $200 million in total funding, in 2014, as shown by the Ampenergo notes. The initial payment was to be “$25-50 million.” Lamacraft visited the Doral plant in February, 2015, as the Doral test was just beginning, there would have been no report from Penon. The investment apparently “closed” in May, 2015, i.e., that is when the $50 million shows up in IH Holdings International, Ltd, the company set up, at Woodford request, to receive it.

This quotation in ¶ 56 of the Lamacraft statement is again misrepresented, to make it appear to refer to the $50 million. In the other quotation Rossi counsel did at least have the full quote and only added an interpretation. Here, they eliminate the word “initial,” replacing it with “this].”

In the Joint Pretrial Stipulation, this is listed as agreed fact, though it is incorrect. The brackets have been dropped.

89. In May 2015, IH closed on a $50 million investment by non-party Woodford Investment Funds (“Woodford”). Woodford claimed that “Rossi’s technology was a core element of this investment.”

It is possible that IH attorneys did not notice the shift.

In fact, what Woodford thought is not really relevant to Rossi v. Darden: this was a casual comment in response to the coming IH press release (not any kind of official Woodford statement; it was private email, a personal note).

The context here presents the conclusion that “this investment” — which is not what Lamacraft actually wrote — was the $50 million. If Woodford actually thought that (I cannot consider it impossible, though that is not consistent with continued IH and IHHI behavior after May, 2016), it still has no legal relevance. If IH used the fact of the “Rossi investment” for some kind of gain — in this case to raise money for other research — this would not be unjust enrichment, it would merely be a consequence of their very risky investment.

reliability NOT

This is too juicy. On JONP, Leanne or Joanne wrote:

Joanne
June 16, 2017 at 8:32 PM

Dr Andrea Rossi:
Let me inform the readers of the JONP of what is happening in the blog paid by IH ( Lenr Forum): a guy presented himself as an attorney of the USA, expert of litigations like yours with IH. He wrote a lot of stupidities, like you will lose the case because of a lot of issues that still have to be discussed in court. Since no serious attorney would ever discuss publicly about a litigation on course of which he is not part, I asked an attorney my friend if he could check if this guy is really an attorney. My attorney, after one hour, informed me that:
1- in the USA does not exist any person with that name that has ever participated to a case in a court
2- this fake attorney has stolen the identity of a person that never appeared in any court (this is why I prefer not to name him)
3- at the address indicated on Lenr Forum of this “attorney”, there is a post office!
This having been said, since he cites particulars that only the gang of the ventriloquist of Raleigh can know, it is clear that this clownerie has been organized by IH in their home-blog.
Certainly IH must be scratching the bottom of their barrel… The comic aspect of this squalid thing is that a puppet of the ventriloquist -obviously on Lenr Forum- has commented that a NEUTRAL (!!!) attorney, at last, has explained to us the truth about the litigation.
Comments?
Ad majora,
Leanne

 Previously, this JONP user posted as “Leanne,” Leanne Tuffy,” signed as “Joanne” and now as “Leanne,” seems strangely confused as to her name. I assume “her” because the identity is female, though many of Rossi’s apparent socks on LF (which Rossi claims not to read, though he often has responded to comments there … though usually through an obvious sock.)

Andrea Rossi
June 16, 2017 at 9:22 PM

Joanne:
No comment.
By the way, I do not read LENR Forum.
Warm Regards,
A.R.

Rossi has commonly referred to LF, as I recall, as “owned by IH.” It is a very strange opinion for those who are familiar with that Forum. If anything, LF is owned by a person sympathetic to the idea of Rossi Reality. The claims by Leanne or Joanne or whoever are strange. I don’t see a real name, nor any address, in the LF commentary on this alleged lawyer. Rends wrote:

It is like painting pictures, Howard Michael Appel, nickname woodworker … https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/user-post-list/2411-woodworker/

…a very experienced lawyer, describes his experiences inside the US law system and gives Rossi et.al no chance at all to win this trial. But, is this really the truth? Maybe, but the Americans have also elected Donald Trump, so we have to see what happened to Rossi. 😉

… a quite ignorant comment, because Trump was not elected in a deliberative process, but a primitive amalgamation, well-known to be vulnerable to massive stupidities by voting system experts. Trump is not the question here, but is this a Forum moderator doxxing woodworker? By the way, if woodworker revealed private data and later deleted it, I would also delete references to it here, unless the public interest in identity becomes overwhelming (which I don’t expect). Mary Yugo outed herself, by an apparently inadvertent post years ago, but that does not make it a wilful revelation of real-life identity. Mary is persistent and sometimes “her” real-life identity is relevant, but I won’t insult Mary by claiming that doxxing is harmless. It can chill discussion.

(Note added: Simon kindly pointed to where Howard gave his name.)

The link Rends provided is only to woodworker’s contributions. It does not establish the name. However, this was in the first post by woodworker that is still up (there could be more, and the profile might have had personal information, removed)

I am a noob to this site (sort of). I spent the last month or so catching up to this point and still have another 12 or so pages to fully catch up. I have held off replying/commenting on posts so far because I thought it best to wait to see if comments I might respond to had already been addressed. But I have to respond to Mr. A. Smith’s comment “Deeply untypical. And whatever happens it will be appealed by one side or the other. That’s when I expect to see rebuttal evidence, not before.”

No disrespect to Mr. Smith, but this is total nonsense. I am not a scientist nor an engineer. I am an attorney who has practiced for over 25 years, including opposing Jones Day (a/k/a Jones Day, Night & Weekends for the amount of billable hours expected of their associates and Jone, Day, Reavis, Pogue & Satan, also by their associates). I started with a “small” firm called O’Melveny & Myers and then spent time with Hughes Hubbard & Reed before going inhouse.

This is not consistent with the LF owned by IH claim. Alan Smith is a moderator, one of the most active. Nor is this friendly to Jones Day, Night, Weekends, Holidays, and the Kitchen Sink.

This is, however, lawyer humor, very recognizable. And woodworker definitely writes like a lawyer, he’s well-informed on law. The claim that a real lawyer would never say these things would be made by a person naive about real lawyers. They say all kinds of things, particularly in private or where they are not legally responsible. Who is this person? Rends has an idea, and does not say where he got the idea, his link is nothing specific. However, Howard Michael Appel is definitely a lawyer. It is possible that there is more than one by that name, most information sites were a bit vague, and the California Bar member listing was down. A California attorney information site had:

Howard Michael Appel
Admitted to Bar 9 June 1992 (25 years ago)
Status Active
Bar Number 158674

Woodworker on Fogbow signed Howard Michael Appel (Ca. State Bar No. 158674).

This establishes high probability of connection. Leanne/Joanne is likely lying, as before. However, what if LF “woodworker” is an imposter? Why would Rends name this person, since woodworker didn’t (on LF)? Or did he? [He did, I just missed it.]

As is common on LF with some users, more attention is paid to conclusions than to fact. It’s true that lawyers will be normally cautious about predicting trial outcomes. This is common with professionals in difficult fields. I asked my urologist what would happen if we didn’t treat my prostate cancer. He said, “I can’t say.” I then said, “You have experience. I am not asking for a definite prediction for my case, but, in general, in your experience, what is likely to happen?” He then told me, and I concluded, with support from published medical literature, to stick with “watchful waiting,” which proved to be an excellent decision, so far. In fact, for a time we thought the cancer had disappeared. In fact, it simply never was large, it was small enough that a second biopsy later missed it, and it shows no sign of rapid growth.

If you want the best advice, you need to know what questions to ask and how to get informed answers, in a situation where doctors are afraid that any incorrect statement can earn them a fat lawsuit.

However, a lawyer with experience can, in fact, predict outcomes with better than chance success, sometimes much better. Woodworker gives legal fact and also his opinions. Those who don’t like his conclusions ignore the facts presented, that’s all too common. His opinions, however, were factually based. That doesn’t create a rigid and certain conclusion, merely something considered likely.

Woodworker is not the Fogbow user who started up a Rossi v. Darden thread, where I have added some comments. In that thread, there is some good reporting and analysis and the usual uninformed knee-jerk reactions whenever cold fusion comes up. And I’m going to visit a real live human, now, I’ll be away from the computer till tomorrow. If all hell breaks loose, save it for tomorrow. (actually I get notification by iphone of comments here, which is now usable since I enabled a good spam filter.)

Patient, Persistent, Stubborn, Fanatic

I’m okay if my enemy is bad continued covering this obsession, that if it can be shown that Cherokee Investment Partners are bad in some way, this will help Rossi’s cause. The drumbeat was maintained on Rossi’s blog:

Anonymous
June 10, 2017 at 9:06 PM

Leanne:
Great!

Tyron
June 10, 2017 at 9:50 PM

Leanne:
Bravooooo!
Tyron

Readily noticed: when someone puts up obvious errors on, say, E-catworld.com, it is normal for another user to correct them. Yet here, “Leanne” makes a post dense with error — such as the idea that Cherokee built houses on the Zeneca/Campus Bay property — and it is simply praised. The user names on JONP, except for a few ECW users who post there from time to time, and who use very different language and concepts from the ones we think may be Rossi socks, show a radical difference. While ECW is explicitly intended for E-Cat supporters, and it does repeat many Planet Rossi memes, it is more normal repetition from people who simply believe or trust that Rossi’s work is real. The JONP claque is not that (again, setting aside the distinct users who ask Rossi questions, etc., like Frank Acland and some others). It is, as it were, fanatic.

E. Zatopek
June 11, 2017 at 3:30 PM

Dr Rossi,
The ventriloquist never thought this trial was going to
be heard by an honorable Jury.
Victory is right around the corner. Never give up.
Cheers

Ultimately, Rossi is boring. “Ventriloquist” is an oft-repeated Planet Rossi meme for Darden; however, Darden has expressed no opinions on the subject of whether or not the case would go to jury. (My own opinion was, as I’ve expressed, that Rossi’s primary case would be dismissed on Summary Judgment, or part of it, but that other matters would still be presented to a jury.) Darden, as far as we know, is not telling anyone what to say or think. There is only one regular participant in discussions who is in communication with Darden, and that’s Dewey Weaver, and I don’t recall Dewey Weaver predicting that the case would not go to a jury. Maybe he did, but, if so, I missed it.

Dewey Weaver does not sound or write like Darden, what we have from Darden, at all. Yet Rossi has obvious puppets who, not surprisingly, sound like like, use his language and concepts, far more closely than seen with any other group. Some attempted to protest the usage of “Planet Rossi” — though that is not, in itself, pejorative — by using “Planet IH.” But there is no such extensive coherence of ideas and language, there is only what we would expect from people who have studied the same thing and may have similar ideas.

I do use “Planet Rossi” to include many who write on ECW, but … Planet Rossi is a broad term, and it does not mean “Rossi puppets.” Yet Rossi and his puppets do frequently assert “puppetry,” where, in fact, the only common theme of these “puppets” is critique of Rossi.

Emanuel Cirelli
June 12, 2017 at 11:26 AM

Leanne:
Fantastic discovery, at last the king is naked, as somebody said.

This all appears to be intended to counter worship of Darden as savior of the planet, but … I don’t see anyone doing that. We will see this theme become more explicit on LENR Forum, with the claque there.

As well, the stories and documents found don’t mention Darden. Some of them reveal Cherokee Investment Partners as having invested in Campus Bay. The most that I see in the documents revealed (and many others I have reviewed) is that Cherokee underestimated cleanup costs, but contrary to the stories promoted by Planet Rossi, they are not in legal trouble. They are technically and conditionally liable, but not as Cherokee, rather as Cherokee Simeon Ventures I, which limits possible losses to their investment (not a known figure, but my guess is about $25 million — though it may be less). They did not go into bankruptcy as had been claimed. (A case was filed and then dismissed at their motion.)

Their partner, formerly known as Zeneca, is a huge pharmaceutical company that had set aside $100 million for remediation, and is actually responsible, from before, and had, before Cherokee invested, spent some of this on a plan that they imagined would save money, but didn’t, and which may have made the situation somewhat worse. The real toxic waste disposal problem was quite old. So “the king is naked”? Someone has a strange imagination. Who is the little boy and what does he see?

Cristin Kozan
June 12, 2017 at 11:50 AM

Dr Andrea Rossi,
The ventriloquist says Cherokee Investment Partners has been a victim of the environmental disaster of Richmond, California…after they made all the money disappear…isn’t it funny?
Cristin

What money? ele, the probable current Rossi account on LENR Forum, provided a list of “awards” to a Cherokee-affiliated finance company, seeming to think that Cherokee was getting more than $50 million per year in “taxpayer money.” Planet Rossi is not known for clear intelligence. Those were tax credits, not cash grants, to encourage investment in brownfield projects. This was all long after, as far as anything I’ve seen, the Cherokee Simeon Venture I project and probably had nothing to do with it . There are no claims of missing money outstanding with any Cherokee project. Except, of course, from Planet Rossi, which seems to think that Darden has this magic that makes money disappear, allegedly $250 million raised by Industrial Heat by bragging about Rossi’s reactors, all of which was old rumors, misunderstood, apparently (and not supported by case documents, contrary to ele claims. There was only $50 million from Woodford, which didn’t go to Industrial Heat, but rather to the new parent company and it appears that much of it is still there, much as cash, the rest as assets (which might, of course, be of unclear value: a major asset would be the Rossi License, what is that worth?)

I thought that “they say” may have been a reference to me, I may have pointed out at some point that Cherokee lost money, but I didn’t call them a “victim.” They take on risky remediation projects and apparently do quite well with them, on average. It is not clear what the ultimate outcome will be of the Campus Bay project.

However, others have pointed out something similar. In one old case, the Enfield project, Cherokee sued a former project officer for embezzlement, which may have contributed to that project failure. What Planet Rossi has been doing for some time is dredging up anything that might make Cherokee look bad as long as one squints. Unsavory exercise of political contributions. Failed project that had raised public money as grants, where there was shoddy oversight and so an investigative reporter tossed some mud. No follow-up has been found showing any improper Cherokee behavior. Just accusations with no resolution. Very Planet Rossi.

I could look at the discussions of ele on LENR Forum, but, today, this is enough. Basically, those who are accusing others of being “puppets” and lying … are lying. ele attacks Dewey Weaver, of course, but Dewey Weaver, like Jed Rothwell, myself, and quite a few others are real people using real names and responsible for what we say. Who is “ele”?

On Planet Rossi, at the center, Rossi himself, lies and deception are normal and excusable, and so Rossi would want to accuse everyone else of it. But the Rossi v. Darden record doesn’t show any lies on the IH side and many on the Rossi side, even dragging in others, inducing them to collaborate in deception: certainly Bass was so induced, Johnson appears to have allowed the Johnson Matthey idea, not contradicting Rossi though he knew much more than was revealed to Industrial Heat, and then Fabiani seems a tragic case, how much he knew is unclear, but he was loyal to the liar-in-chief and destroyed data.

I know people who knew and trusted Rossi. He betrayed them.

I’m okay if my enemy is bad

The effort to dig up dirt on IH continues on Rossi’s blog. I covered this a week ago in A word to the wise is sufficient – a hint to the foolish is proof.

Then, it was Anonymous and “Leanne Tuffy” Now, it is Leanne, or is it Joanne? She seems a bit unclear on her name.

Leanne
June 10, 2017 at 9:50 AM
Dr Andrea Rossi,

I discovered that Cherokee Investment Partners LLC, the company that owns Industrial Heat and is owned principally by Tom Darden and John Mazzarino, is liable for the catastrophic environmental disaster happened during the remediation and re-vitalization of a brownfield named “ZENECA SYTE- CAMPUS BAY”, in Richmond, California.

Not even Rossi claims any more that CIP owns IH. The claim that Darden and Mazzarino “own principally” Cherokee is probably false, but I’ve never seen ownership stats on Cherokee. As to Cherokee being liable for that “catastrophic environmental disaster,” this appears to be false. Bad start when the first paragraph is so densely wrong or so poorly established.

The poor grammar and spelling (site as “syte”) are SOP for Rossi blog socks as are various other usages (Taxpayer with a capital T, the use of “nothing,” etc.)

What happened is that they got financing for enormous amounts of money of the Taxpayer and after getting this big money they remedied nothing, re-vitalized nothing, but built houses upon the poisoned land of the brownfield.

I don’t think so. The story that Shane D. found has it quite differently. I have not seen figures for the financing of that project, nor has “Leanne,” apparently.

What Cherokee routinely does is to create an LLC for a project. They put in perhaps $25 million, other investors toss in their nickels, and then loans and grants are obtained. Some of these projects fail. “Taxpayer money”? Sometimes. In this case, as we will see below, the LLC involved with this project declared bankruptcy in 2012, I confirmed that. The major debt was $42 million from a loan, not taxpayer money. Without doing more specific research, I cannot tell if the LLC (Cherokee Simeon Ventures) received any grants. From the Law360 coverage of the bankruptcy:

EnviroFinance said that Cherokee Simeon failed to honor its loan obligations due to a flurry of interferences.

“Shortly after the loan was made, things started to fall apart for [Cherokee Simeon], EnviroFinance said. “A citizens’ group prodded the Department of Toxic Substances Control to take supervision of the property, and the remediation effort appears to have been more extensive than [Cherokee Simeon] expected. In addition, the real estate market fell apart and [Cherokee Simeon’s] financial condition worsened.”

As a result, Cherokee Simeon could not progress on the rehabilitation project, the firm said.

This is the story according to the company suing Cherokee Simeon. That is probably what happened! Back to “Leanne”:

In that field, upon which they built houses, the Department of Toxic Substances Control has found carcinogenic substances, hidden under the houses. I knew this from a person of a Citizens Committee, made after cases of cancer appeared with anomalous statistics in the area.

This appears to be a distorted rumor from what Shane found. Leanne is probably lying, telling a story derived from news. It does not appear that any houses were built.

This person informed me that Cherokee Investment Partners LLC, after the Department of Toxics Substances Control has published a report with the results of the discovery of the risk of cancer for the population, has filed for Chapter 11 (bankruptcy) in the State of Delaware of their “front company”, named Cherokee Simeon Venture I LLC, that they used for the “job”. Obviously the money collected from the Taxpayer disappeared.

The bankruptcy was filed in 2012, long after those problems were found. Cherokee Simeon was not charged with toxic waste violations, rather those charges were against Zeneca and the University of California.

Who is the “they” that used Cherokee Simeon? That is not a “front company,” it’s an actual remediation project company. If this is actually a Cherokee company (which seems possible, this is the kind of work they do), this is how they do it. “Front company” implies something that is not at all evidenced here.

When one of the project LLCs goes bankrupt, Cherokee loses their investment. If they actually made money “disappear,” they’d be in very hot water. In a bankruptcy, the creditors will be searching for any “leakages.” Basically, when one of these LLCs loses money, Cherokee loses money. They make money, overall, based on the balance, for when projects succeed, they can become very valuable. Some fail!

Now: I wonder how Cherokee Investment Partners LLC can still be qualified to receive public funding by means of their their society ” Brownfield Revitalization LLC”.
Cheers,
Joanne

CIP didn’t go bankrupt. This particular project failed, the most likely reason being that cleanup was going to be far more expensive than anticipated. This extremely fuzzy thinking is common on Planet Rossi. So … ele brought this promptly to LENR Forum. At one point, ele claimed not to read JONP. Yeah, right. And Rossi surely never mentioned “Johnson Matthey.” They made that up, those greedy bastards. Heh heh.

ele wrote:

[quoting the entire post by Leanne/Joanne]

Googling I have found also some interesting links with millions dollars of public money about that Brownfield Revitalization LLC:

I’m presenting the links more compactly, and giving the award sums. This is a series of awards to Brownfield Revitalization LLC, which provides loans for remediation projects. I’m also sorting this by year

2007 $92 million
2010 $56 million
2011 $50 million
2012 $50 million
2013 $43 million
2016 $70 million

If I understand well the average amount of public money given to that compeny was about 50M$/year for 6 years this sum up to about 300M$ !

Well, not necessarily. Is this an allocation of public money or is it something else. Perhaps the intrepid researcher here could get a little curious. These are NMTC Awards. TC means “Tax Credit.” From the About page of the Awards web site.

The CDFI Fund achieves its purpose by promoting access to capital and local economic growth in the following ways:
…
2. through its New Markets Tax Credit Program by providing an allocation of tax credits to Community Development Entities which enable them to attract investment from the private-sector and reinvest these amounts in low-income communities;

These are not cash grants. Rather, it appears that this program allows a CDE to provide financing for projects at lower interest or taking on higher risk, through allocations of tax credits (making the investments more attractive). Ele has completely misunderstood this. These are not “taxpayer dollars,” as such. No money is given to the LLC receiving the awards, just an allocation of tax credits which they may then provide to investors according to the rules of the program.

WOW !
more documents can be found:
[Google “Cherokee Simeon Venture I LLC”]
So the content of the comment in the Rossi Blog seems real !

It seems real to those who have no clue what they are looking at, but are simply looking for dirt or what seems like dirt to them.

Rossi had attracted the interest of a group of investors who run a multibillion dollar company, apparently quite successfully, and he spat in their faces. Not so bright.

I found, through the search above, a ruling on a motion for sanctions against Cherokee Simeon Venture I LLC for an alleged bad faith bankruptcy filing. The document does give a little information. Yes, this is the same Cherokee (i.e, affiliated with Cherokee Investment Partners, though there are many related Cherokee funds). (The motion for sanctions failed.) Cherokee Simeon Venture I LLC was a joint venture of Zeneca and Cherokee Simeon Holding Company, LLC. Originally the latter was the managing partner, but in 2011 this was taken over by Zeneca.

I’ve been attempting to find out what ultimately happened to that Richmond property. There is no sign of taxpayer money going into it. Cherokee Simeon Venture withdrew that bankrutpcy petition and appears to still be operating. See this 2015 meeting requesting reduction in assessed value.

There is weird stuff in the search. There is a pages claiming that there is a women’s clothing store called “Cherokee Simeon Venture I LLC.” The address of the store is a toxic cleanup site. Dun and Bradstreet.

Aha! Proof!

Proof of what, I have no idea, but WOW!

 

Update

A more detailed newspaper story on the history of Zeneca / Campus Bay, Providing the history that UC Berkeley, owner of the adjacent contaminated propery, had joined with Simeon Properties as a partner, and Cherokee Investment Partners and Simeon created the joint venture that later filed for bankruptcy. However, as was surely missed by our intrepid wanna-be Sifferkolls, that bankruptcy petition was withdrawn. From the article:

While the university was legally responsible for cleaning up the legacy of California Cap, AstraZeneca—the giant London-based pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturer—was held liable both for the Stauffer site and for contamination at RFS that had come from the Stauffer plant. 

Aha! Proof! A U.K. based chemical company! The plot thickens. Zeneca was also a partner in Cherokee Simeon.

Now, notice this: if one buys a contaminated site, one can become responsible for the cleanup, and at the time of purchase, the full expense of that may not be known. Doing what Cherokee does is then very risky, though ultimately beneficial. This would be the equivalent of a Cherokee LLC buying the PetrolDragon Italian properties, if we want to compare with Rossi’s history, as has now happened on JONP.

Reviewing this, it is completely obvious why Cherokee uses special-project LLCs for this investment: it would otherwise be way too risky, one failure could take it all down. The ultimate result is public benefit, but there is also a risk of public loss: these cleanup operations can attract grants, and sometimes a project that receives public funding fails. They can and do take out loans, mortgaging property. There are various missteps in this that could create more legal problems, but this is common in business.

However, entirely contrary to what was claimed on JONP, Cherokee did not cause the toxic waste problem, but attempted to support remediation. The citizens advisory groups were not angry with Cherokee, at all. The University of California took most of the flak, and the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, which had asserted jurisdiction, and which was seen as inadequate (which could have come from their concern being water quality, due to toxic chemicals leaching into the Bay, possibly fixed, at least for the near future, by the burial and capping which was done

The plan the water board approved for cleanup at the Stauffer site proved controversial from the start, in part because it called for burial of most of the hazardous wastes on site rather than their removal to an approval toxic waste disposal landfill—the costlier option chosen by the university.

Possibly as a result of community pressure, jurisdiction ultimately devolved to the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), an agency staffed with a wide range of scientific experts.

As a result, the Stauffer cleanup cost expanded dramatically and probably unexpectedly, and, as reported above, there was also a drop in real estate values, leading to possible Cherokee Simeon Ventures insolvency, hence the Chapter 11 protection issue. I still have no information on current status of the project, most Google hits are old.

So on JONP:

Leah
June 10, 2017 at 4:16 PM

Dear Dr Andrea Rossi:
I read the comment of Leanne of today: now we can understand all the falsity and the hypocrisy of the “Minime” of Darden ( JT Vaughn) when in his deposition said how scandalized they got when they read about your past!!!
Please win for us all against this gang,
Godspeed,
Leah

LENR Forum dislikes detailed examination of issues, but then tut-tuts when users, instead, simply express reactions, like, “What idiots! Pure Planet Rossi!” However, the solution: point to analysis elsewhere, like here! Increasingly, LF moderation is not tolerating evidence-free or misleading posts like those of ele.

So what is Leah talking about? There is no mention in the pleadings of Rossi’s Italian environmental disaster; my first thought was that “Leah” was thinking of Krivit, who is not mentioned anywhere in the case that I’ve seen (beyond a mention of him, mispelled, by APCO’s McLaughlin in an email to Rossi)

However, someone has possibly read the Vaughn depositions (there were at least two) and there is plenty in the depositions that has never been cited in the pleadings, such that I’d have noticed it. Slogging through this stuff can take high motivation. So who would be highly motivated?

The Vaughn depositions are listed on this study page. (Eventually I would hope to condense that; as can be seen, there are many exhibits from the same depositions, but they may include different deposition transcript pages. As the case stands, it is a colossal mess. However, depositions are generally text files and can be searched with the site search facility — many documents are images, not text. I’d say that the court system is about two decades archaic and primitive.)

“Petroldragon” is mentioned in the deposition of Rossi.

Not, apparently, in any Vaughn deposition, and I also looked for other terms with no success. However, anyone is free to point to what I might have missed due to the nonspecificity of the “Leah” claim or some inadequacy in my search.

It would not be surprising, and would not show any hypocrisy. Cherokee, and Vaughn — corporations cannot be “hypocritical,” that requires being human — did not cause the Zeneca-Campus Bay mess, it was created long before Cherokee existed. Rossi created the PetrolDragon mess, by commission or omission. People can argue about whether it was his “fault” or not, i.e., may assert “excuses,” but — no Rossi, no PetrolDragon disaster. Cherokee and Vaughn are not remotely close to that level of responsibility. Legally, they are not responsible for cleaning up the Zeneca site, rather than lies with those who caused it (Zeneca has inherited that responsibility from Stauffer), and then, that failing, with those who own the property, and the closest Cherokee Investment Partners gets to that is that they are investors in a joint venture that bought the property, so they can lose their investment. Zeneca is a large corporation, now AstraZeneca

with assets, according to Wikipedia, of $60 billion. However, notice: AstraZeneca did not buy the property, but Cherokee Simeon Ventures did; they are investors in CSV. The company most in trouble over Campus Bay would be AstraZeneca. How did that arise? Stauffer Chemical.

Stauffer was bought by Imperial Chemical Industries, which, in turn, divested itself of its bioscience businesses, creating Zeneca. And that is how Zeneca ended up holding the bag.

The wreckage of the past lands somewhere. It is only relatively rarely that we can find someone clearly responsible for cleaning it up, and possessing the means. Lack of caution about environmental damage was routine, until recent years.

Qur’an, about those who came before: “for them is what they earned, for you is what you earn.” 

Look around! I point to what is obvious for me, with what I have seen, and I attempt to make it possible for others to see what I’ve seen. That can be quite unpopular: in my training, there is a saying, “If they are not shooting at you, you have not done anything worth wasting bullets on.”

If I err here, or anywhere, please: corrections are welcome. I am responsible for what I create, including all my errors and omissions. Taking responsibility is how we create a future worth living into.

Blaming others is how we maintain being stuck in the past. It is, practically by definition, disempowering.

 

 

 

 

Unspecified “they” is always a figment of our imagination

T is for Them :: U is for Us

Joshg is one of the most coherent writers identifiable as Planet Rossi.

On LENR Forum, he wrote:

JedRothwell wrote:

I had high hopes that I.H. would fund research. I think they would have, but they have been derailed by the lawsuit. They fired the technical staff. They may be funding a few studies, but I doubt they will contribute significant amounts of money.

So that R&D center they opened up near Raleigh headed by Antonio La Gatta is just a figment of our imagination?

This is common on Planet Rossi: “they” is fuzzy and amorphous. Genuine questions:

  • Is there an “R&D center” opened “near Raleigh”?
  • If so, who opened it?
  • What does this have to do with Industrial Heat and their plans?

First of all, see this LENR Forum report, posted by Alain Coetmeur, in May, 2016. The company in question is HMRI R&D, Inc. The Registered Agent is Paul T. Winter, very likely this CPA. This is largely meaningless, CPAs often serve as registered agents with very little involvement in the actual business. The business office shown is 13000 Weston Parkway, Cary, NC 27513, which appears to be a 57,000 sq. foot office building, that was for sale and for lease in 2015. Other companies have the same address, so HMRI — or their accountant — may only have a small — or larger — office.

The creation filing, August 12, 2015, shows an “incorporator,” who is merely an attorney, Byron B. Kirkland with a Raleigh address, and then two initial Directors: Antonio La Gatta and John T. Vaughn, with the same address shown as is shown for the Registered Agent. These are the persons of interest.

Antonio La Gatta. La Gatta was working with R&D at TSEM, a sponsor of ICCF-19 in Padua in 2015. His sister is a manager of that company. She told the interviewer this, in May, 2015: “my brother Antonio will travel to the US to direct the new US operational units in Texas, in collaboration with MIT, Texas Tech University, Indusrial Heat [sic].”

This was a plan in May. While there may be a correct substance to it, it’s a confused rumor. “Collaboration” with MIT is meaningless. MIT is not involved with LENR. Peter Hagelstein, a professor of electrical engineering there, is. “Operational units” of what? TSEM? Perhaps HMRI is a “unit” of TSEM? As to Texas Tech, again, this would likely be a reference to the Duncan et al group there, which was announced at ICCF-19.

While a connection between Texas Tech and HMRI is certainly not impossible — they were looking for additional labs to work on the heat/helium project, beyond themselves and ENEA (Violante) in Italy — I have no information about such a connection. Industrial Heat is not connected to the Texas Tech project, which was independently funded.

However, Vaughn is an initial director. This is JT Vaughn, an officer of and investor in Industrial Heat — and a defendant in Rossi v. Darden. This news, however, does not establish that Industrial Heat “opened up a research center near Raleigh.” Cary is indeed close to Raleigh, about twelve miles. What is HMRI R&D up to?

There is some information in the Murray deposition, for which we have the full transcript. IH had a research operation, investigating various LENR approaches, and Murray reports on some of that. He testifies:

·1· · · · Q.· · Of all the systems you tested in Industrial
·2· ·Heat, were there any that you were able to validate and
·3· ·verify?
·4· · · · A.· · No.

This is thoroughly discouraging, for many. However, this, or most of this, may have been seeking to find a way for Plan A: rapid commercialization. Plan B was my name for retrenching, going back to the most basic science and nailing it. For Plan B, small results can still be very significant, even more so of the “small results” show correlations. Heat/helium is the quintessential Plan B project, because there are many supporting reports, and the vast bulk of the evidence confirms the correlation first reported by Miles in 1991. This has practically nothing to do with NiH research, which, if NiH effects are real and not artifact, would surely have some different ash. Murray goes on:

15· ·[…] And in many cases the heat that they were
16· ·producing, the excess heat, the anomalous heat was very
17· ·small.· They, they had amounts that were very small.
18· ·And so any small errors in their sensor systems or small
19· ·errors in their assumptions would mask that level.
20· · · · · · · So we went through and carefully analyzed
21· ·their data, and in a few cases we actually reproduced
22· ·their experiments.· We had two groups that in the
23· ·validation verification phase we came up with what I
24· ·would describe as nebulous results.· They weren’t
25· ·positive, but we certainly just couldn’t say here is a
·1· ·major problem that has to be overcome before we could
·2· ·legitimately verify and validate it.· And so in those
·3· ·cases we worked very closely with the inventors and
·4· ·organizations to help them do independent reproduction
·5· ·in our lab.
·6· · · · Q.· · Okay.· And those were successful
·7· ·reproductions?
·8· · · · A.· · No.· Ultimately, the reproductions, yeah, we
·9· ·didn’t find anything that had excess or anomalous heat.
[…]
15· · · · A.· · The first one was Dr. Mizuno in Japan.· That
16· ·was a plasma-based system.· And the second one, which
17· ·was very much at arms length, I did not have privy or
18· ·access to this one, was HMRI.· It was a, it was only a
19· ·partial investment into it.· And so I was kind of, me
20· ·and the rest of the engineering team were kept at arms
21· ·length.· We weren’t allowed to have access to all of
22· ·their data, so I just got summary reports and briefings
23· ·on some of the things they had done.
24· · · · Q.· · I thought you were able to reproduce their
25· ·experiments in your lab.
·1· · · · A.· · So, yeah.· No, we, what we did was, based on
·2· ·the limited knowledge we had of their system, we
·3· ·reproduced an electrolytic cell that to the best of our
·4· ·ability looked like what we had understood they were
·5· ·doing.· And we could not achieve the same results that
·6· ·they were giving us at this kind of arms length.

There is a little more description of the HMRI relationship:

25· […] Likewise with HMRI, the way the contract was
·1· ·structured, we were kind of at arms length, so we only
·2· ·got a little bit of information, and the information we
·3· ·were able to receive, we structured some experiments to
·4· ·understand it.· That was actually very late.· That was
·5· ·probably June of 2016.

There is more about HMRI, some misc findings, on Misc Mash. There is an indication that I could not confirm that an HMRI “proprietary process” was being “moved overseas.”

Back to Joshg’s claim, essentially that “IH” established HMRI “near Raleigh.” From what we have, HMRI is independent and the collaboration expected (from La Gatta’s sister) was arms-length, and limited. While there was likely some IH investment in HMRI, it was limited and it cannot be reasonably said that this Cary lab shows IH’s continued commitment to LENR research.

On Planet Rossi, though, extremely limited information is interpreted and extended and reports as fact, and then others repeat it and it becomes “well-known,” like the alleged $200 million investment by the Chinese, and then the question becomes “where did that money go,” rather than the question that would reasonably precede it, did it exist at all?

A brilliant example of all this arose on LENR Forum, it’s mentioned on the Misc Mash page.  March 2, 2016, David Nygren wrote:

Now we need to dig deeper! It is valued to over 1bn dollars?

IH HOLDINGS INTERNATIONAL LIMITED
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/09553031/filing-history

This is not my field so please help. For you who are good at counting, do these tasks!
23M shares * $ 45 = weather over $ 1bn??

Here we have 20 companies listed (59 page / 8 Jun 2015)
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/09553031/filing-history/MzEyMzczNDg0OGFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf&download=0

Indeed, not his field. However, he does not show where the $45 came from. He links a listing of companies on a signature page for an authorization to issue Series A shares, i.e., ordinary shares, valued at $0.01 each, some for cash and some for other consideration. The total value to be alloted, I read as $11,098.78 plus $25.907.15, total $37,005.93. A tad short of $1 billion, eh?

Barty asked David what this meant. The blind leading the blind.

AlainCo provided some correct information (the $50 million investment by Woodford a few days later), but did not actually correct the Nygren error. AlainCo noted the use of different classes of shares that can allow company founders to retain control even when receiving a large investment. AlainCo’s other post on this, Mar 3, was much better but still confusing and inaccurate.

June 30, 2016, I came across the discussion, researched it, and corrected it, giving sources for everything. The Woodford investment has been incorrectly reported by news sources that apparently did not look at the original documents. Woodford invested exactly $50 million US. To be precise, Series A shares (not the original Series A, apparently, later called “ordinary shares”) were preferred shares, issued at $45.049996 per share, and two Woodford trusts bought 1,109,878 shares, which works out to $49,999,999.50. My guess is that they actually paid $50 million, so inquiring minds want to know where the extra fifty cents went.

sifferkoll immediately exploded:

are you playing stupid again Abd? I said $1bn valuation, which roughly means Woodford bought 5% of IH with $50M.

Later, I remembered the $1 billion error was sifferkoll’s, probably because of this post. My guess is that Siffer had written this on his blog — I’m not researching that now — and that Nygren had picked it up from there. Maybe. What Siffer is showing is a total lack of understanding as to how a company is valued, and what that means. Had Woodford purchased ordinary stock for $45 per share, this would have made some sense, though it would still not have created a billion dollars for Darden to somehow “disappear.” But Woodford did not do that.

My point here is that LENR Forum and those who write for it have no habit of correcting errors. We can see people coming up with false information years later, because they read it in a post, perhaps, in this case, a post by the Founder of LENR Forum. There is a reservoir of held ideas about IH and this case, based on what was stated back then based on assumptions from shallow research. “Toilet paper stock,” mentioned by Sifferkoll, is a common idea. “Shell corporations.” (But the only genuine shell corporation here is JM Products, Inc.)

Siffer wrote “Darden simply pocketed the money and made it dissappear [sic].” But what money? A billion dollars? In fact, Woodford invested $50 million and, while IH Holdings International doesn’t broadcast much detail, much of the money still exists, as cash or other holdings of IHHI (including some valuation for the Rossi License). Siffer has in mind a billion dollars that he made up, that never existed. And then there is the alleged $200 million from the Chinese, that apparently also never existed, or if it existed, it had little or nothing to do with Industrial Heat, it was Chinese money, invested in a Chinese project with very little connection with LENR, if any.

Derricut on investment flabber

Simon Derricut, as a comment here, wrote:

(and I comment).

One thing about the money that is being talked about is that every year IH (and all the other players) will need to produce accounts and pay taxes. That means that people who do some digging will find out the truth or otherwise of all the rumours. There are legal implications for lying about the money.

Indeed. Darden and Vaughn have high experience with Cherokee, making risky investments, where some fail, and would be thoroughly aware of the possible pitfalls of failure to fully disclose risk to investors, and knowing that fraud would likely fail to escape detection. In the attempts by Planet Rossi to show that Darden and Vaughn are crooks, examples are dredged out of Cherokee history; but, when examined closely, none of these have held up as evidence of fraud or deceptive behavior; the fact that reporters have strongly implied fraud and that investigations have been started is used by Planet Rossi as if it were proof, but the lack of conclusions is actually evidence of the opposite. The worst thing found, so far, was an accounting error, an understandable one, arcane, where a particular expense was, by securities regulations, not to be charged to investors, whereas IH did make that charge. No wrongdoing was found, only error.

Similarly, if IH did get Rossi’s IP to actually run, and later try to sell it without acknowledging (and paying) Rossi, then he will have legal redress. They can’t “steal” the IP and get away with it.

Right. Again, Planet Rossi must imagine that somehow the IP would be hidden, disguised. I can only imagine that as possible if the IP were not actually patentable. Further, to pull off this scam, IH would be risking billions in legitimate profits, all to … what? Take some secret payments under the table from some other company, perhaps Brillouin, where they have only a relatively small and old investment? They would be risking that some whistle-blower would reveal their perfidy. Rossi tried hard to find evidence along these lines and apparently failed, though we may not have seen everything.

The point about VCs (Venture Capitalists) is that they are gamblers. Where most investors want to get a certain return on investment, VCs estimate the risks of losing their money and calculate whether the possible gains outweigh the risks so that, on balance, they gain more money than they lose, but it is known that since the investments are high-risk then a certain proportion will in fact fail and they’ll lose their money on those ones. In fact, if not enough projects fail then the VCs are not earning their money, since they ask a high percentage of the profits of those that succeed. No-one would take a low-risk project to a VC, after all – it costs too much.

This accords with my understanding. VCs are gamblers, but in a game where they can act to play odds that, overall, favor them. This all is dependent upon their ability to estimate those odds. Typically, there are not betting the farm on a single project, but engage in many projects, distributing risk, increasing the potential gain, or hedging it.

(That is, they might bet on exclusive possibilities. This is the simple answer to why IH was not immediately offering to return the License. After all, what if Rossi actually has something? What are the odds of this? And … what would Rossi be offering in return? He seems to have imagined that he could just unilaterally cancel the License “for nonpayment,” but the Agreement was certainly not written that way, this was just another Rossifiction. IH has a License until and unless they give it up or a Court takes it away — which is unlikely unless their investment is returned, at least the original investment.)

Analysing the risks correctly requires that the truth be told by the receivers of the VC backing. At least the truth as far as they know it. IH of course knew that Rossi tended to not tell the truth, which raised the risks somewhat, but the payback if Rossi had actually had some real technology was sky-high and a 1% probability of that was deemed to be worth the risk. Dewey states that 1% probability as their cut-off point.

They will, if sophisticated, include the possibility of lies in their estimations. Humans lie.

1% is actually conservative, if the loss can be sustained. I estimate the value of a practical LENR technology, something like what Rossi was claiming, at about a trillion dollars. So 1% would, in theory, be worth about $10 billion. However, straight game-theory play is not how humans actually operate. We want better. We also have alternatives, other ways to invest, and may seek maximization among choices, not merely some absolute average return from one.

I think that all of the above should be pretty self-evident to most people who have been watching, and that most of these points have been made at various times. Everyone (IH, Woodford etc.) should have been aware of the risks of backing Rossi. There’s also an obvious risk in backing LENR in general, since the main scientific consensus is still that it is a measurement error.

Yes. The risk involved with LENR, however, may depend on time-horizon. Short-term returns in LENR are very unlikely. Longer-term profit is much more likely, even probable. But “longer-term” might be in excess of twenty years. I assume that IH and Woodford were quite aware of risk, and quite aware of the extensive criticism of Rossi. They certainly knew about Krivit, and we see McLaughlin taking Krivit (mispelled) into consideration in February, 2015. I would assume they had read everything Krivit had written. Krivit, however, is a yellow journalist, and draws firm conclusions from evidence that is less than conclusive. And WTF does a certain unfortunate figure’s child molestation prosecution have to do with Andrea Rossi? Is Rossi responsible for every reprehensible action taken or allegedly taken by everyone who supported him?

Krivit wrote about the obvious, so I’d assume that IH knew all this, likewise Woodford. This was all extensively discussed in the CMNS community, which was mostly very skeptical of Rossi.

Still, the big profits go to the people who correctly bet that some fringe science can be turned into a technology. Of course, the profits can be even bigger if you can get the government to put the initial research money in and you then utilise that research, but that’s another story….

Right. So part of an IH strategy might be to encourage and support governmental and other non-business investment in research. That is where APCO might shine. I see a sane long-term IH approach as being an observer, ready to act quickly if the opportunity arises, but not routinely spending a large budget. Probably maintaining a lab but only engaging substantial staff for specific and vetted projects.

As I see it, IH began with a fairly low estimation of achieving success, and during the Doral test that estimation went down (below 1%) because of the way Rossi ran his operation, stopping any verification of his process. It seems unlikely that Tom Darden would have kept such estimations secret from Woodford or anyone else who intended to invest, since that would open him to being sued for fraud by such investors. Since we haven’t seen Woodford suing Tom Darden, it stands to sense that they must have been happy, and are still happy, with his honesty in telling them what he knew of the risks.

For reasons that others have stated, we cannot conclude from the absence of a lawsuit that Woodford is happy with IH. However, there is no sign that they are unhappy, so far. There is no sign that they have attempted to withdraw their investment. I’m sure they are unhappy about so much being spent on lawyers, but it is possible that this, or some of it, might come back from Rossi and Johnson. I don’t expect Bass and Fabiani to be big sources of recovery. Sad cases, in my opinion. I doubt criminal indictments would stand there, but … if one through carelessness aids a civil fraud, one can be held liable, and this could be “joint and severable” liability, where the total liability can be collected from each.

Though we’re not privy to what went on between IH and Woodford, that lack of any legal proceedings implies strongly that there is no problem with that relationship and that Woodford are happy with the information they received from IH. They may be annoyed with Rossi, though.

Though we may not be able to trust what people say, what they do is a reliable indicator.

The operative word is “indicator.” So often in internet discussions, indications are taken and presented as proof.

More on the investment flabber

On LENR Forum, Eric Walker mentioned a post by joshg. While the link was incorrect, I did some searching for joshg (LF), and Josh G (ECW). I found comments I had overlooked.

joshg, himself, overlooks timing. It’s easy to do this when one is defending a thesis, looking for proof. One will come across some evidence that seems to prove the thesis, but events have been collapsed, and what happened later, in fact, can be asserted as a cause of what happened earlier.

4/21/2017, joshg wrote 

I have frequently been challenged to substantiate my claim that Darden et al. basically defrauded investors by using the 1MW test to raise $50 million from Woodford (plus some kind of joint research endeavor with the Chinese plus who knows what else).

Josh is not promoting the $200 or $121 million Chinese investment in IH meme. However, was the 1 MW test “used” to raise the $50 million?

Continue reading “More on the investment flabber”

The Troll’s Playbook

The Secret Playbook of Internet Trolls. ‘Disrupt, Misdirect and Control Internet Discussions’

It’s ironic — or is it? — that Planet Rossi routinely accuses the “Ventriloquist of Raleigh” of spreading FUD, of paying people to attack Rossi. At the same time, IH Fanboy claims that those who claim others are lying are likely to be liars themselves. Many are eager to find fault with others, to toss any garbage they can find or invent, and this does happen on all “sides,” — but Planet Rossi is organized around Rossi Thought, as expressed for years on his blog, JONP.

A common troll tactic is having a series of Favorite Topics, arguments, sometimes based on something resembling a fact or which can be claimed to be fact, that are then raised to avoid discussing something else, such as any losing issue. Ele did that with the claim that IH had raised $250 million (as if this proved Rossi Reality, if it were true) and I covered it on

… and that second post goes into some detail on origins of the “$250 million” story.

Eric Walker, on LENR Forum, confronted ele over this (as previously mentioned). ele came back:

ele wrote:

Cite and quote the court document that has this number and I’ll move your post back to the Rossi v. Darden thread. Eric

Ele normally does not provide accurate citations, has no academic habits (which is like Rossi, who has not worked in academia for a very long time). What ele quotes here was not written by ele, but was a comment added by Eric Walker when he moved the off-topic comment to the Playground. Before going on with the ele response, here was that original ele post, what Walker moved:

oldguy wrote:

250M exists only in “Rossi says”.

No. is written in the documents of the trial. This figure was cited many times here and no one from IH have never negated it.

Darden’s visits to Doral with investors are alo [sic] documented.

Cite and quote the court document that has this number and I’ll move your post back to the Rossi v. Darden thread. Eric

I’ve looked and have not been able to find one. But there are thousands of documents and some of them have hundreds of pages. However, I have found what appears to be the original claims. It was very likely Rossi Says.

ele responds with what does not address Eric’s challenge. He claimed a court document, that’s what Eric dinged him for, not for the $250 million itself. He then provided some “evidence” for large numbers, but not $250 million. Not the court document number that anyone can check.

Basic troll rule: make claims difficult to verify. Waste the time of those who might disagree with you, burn them out with repetition. This is not mere disagreement, people may disagree and then collaborate in finding reality. Trolls are about provoking upset, which can include irritating others through repetitive, unresponsive claims. While insulting them as having nothing, as ele did in this sequence, even though those others were simply stating what is obvious from court documents and community discussions.

I would assume that Eric would want to see the original post edited to make it potentially useful. Not another post adding “more evidence,” never checking or confirming the original claim.

This is like the repeated claims of Dirt in Cherokee history. These claims have been tracked down and analyzed many times, there is very, very little there, essentially nothing surprising for a company that works as Cherokee works — which is legal. Evidence is cited that, if one actually follows it (most people don’t follow evidence, take the time to read court documents, etc), shows Cherokee as a victim of fraud, not a perpetrator of it. But the fraud was an officer in a Cherokee company! So it looks bad. This would be like condemning Cherokee for fraud because they engaged with Rossi. In fact, the trolls do that. They should have known better, and, obviously, they only wanted to impress investors to extract money from their pockets. Yet the documents don’t show that, not at all. IH only dealt with investors who knew and were willing to assume the risk. Woodford has a different class of investors, to be sure, but Woodford has only a small percentage of those funds invested in LENR, through IHHI, not IH, and, while Rossi’s alleged technology is part of the full IHHI portfolio, the Woodford money didn’t go there, which probably pissed him off no end.

IH did visit Doral with investors and others. However, we know from the Ampenergo memo that Woodford, in particular, was not terribly impressed, at least according to Vaughn, speaking privately with Ampenergo well before the Doral test was over, and with no reason to lie to him. The timing of investments and the documents we have on them do not support the Rossi claim that investors tossed in funds based on being impressed by Doral. Definitely not Woodford, that investment was planned before Doral started up. Another visitor was Pike, who may have Chinese connections, but Pike was already an investor (a fairly large one).

ele went on:

Dear Eric,
The big amount of money raised from Darden is also a public information.
Just as an example please have a look to this page: Donbot.com

It is rather easy to notice that this is not a court document. It is rather easy to notice that the page doesn’t source most of the information. However, it was taken without credit from another page that does give more sources, on Hydrofusion.com, the web site of Rossi’s licensee for a few countries.

One of the sources is a Huffington post article, Interview With Andrea Rossi, LENR Energy Pioneer, October 6. 2015. Full of errors — and Rossi lies, including Stuff and Nonsense about the “customer,” the monitoring systems in Doral, etc.

Quote
WIM, or Woodford Investment Management, had said earlier in the year that they had invested in Industrial Heat. At the
beginning of October, they revealed that they had performed due diligence for 2.5 years, and their investment came to $50
million USD. [….]

While this is not precisely correct, it’s true in round outline. Woodford did not invest in IH. They invested in IHHI, which bought all outstanding IH stock, exchanging it for IHHI stock. Woodford received “preferred stock,” which doesn’t give operational control (Woodford doesn’t have voting power commensurate with the value of their investment) but which does have certain other special rights. It is reasonable to claim that Darden raised this funding; Woodford apparently trusts Darden. This money, however, did not come because of the visit by Woodford reps to Doral. There were actually two visits, one very early in the “test,” and the other after relations had actually broken down, after Rossi refused to allow the IH engineer, Murray, to visit the Plant. Woodford did not invest because of these visits; they were apparently not impressed. A plant with a steam outlet running through a wall into an inaccessible area, and no visible signs of generating a megawatt, but only the say-so of the inventor or the puppet Bass — now there is a legitimate usage of “puppet” — would not impress any intelligent observer. Unless they like seeing all those blue boxes, Rossi did, indeed, put on a show!

But this isn’t the point. Where’s the beef? The other $200 million or so?

Tom Darden, CEO of Industrial Heat, signed a cooperation agreement with a newly created strategic financial center in
Beijing. The “Technology Ministry of Science and Innovation Park” will participate in technology transfer with 20 companies
from the U.S. This sparked rumors that the E-Cat technology recently patented in the U.S. would somehow become the sole
property of the Chinese government. However, these ideas were assuaged, and China invested the equivalent of $121 million USD in LENR technology.

This is copied from Hydrofusion. I’ve added a link that was there. The link is to Google translate for a document on that Park. While Darden is CEO of Industrial Heat, he is also CEO of Cherokee Investment Partners, and many organizations are (or were) involved with that Chinese project. There is no sign that LENR is a major part of it, though it’s certainly not impossible, and Darden may have spoken about LENR in China.

Where were the “rumors” “sparked”? I can think of one likely place, where Hydrofusion might get their information. There was this, about the Park. I followed the link to the article in Chinese. No cheese down that tunnel.

It is clear, though, that Darden was in China representing Cherokee and possibly Research Triangle Park, not Industrial Heat.

And then this E-Cat world article cites Hydrofusion for the $121 million figure. While ECW, following Hydrofusion, speculated that the $121 million was for LENR, the research Park would be a huge project, with probably billions involved. And the plot thickens. From that ECW article:

Alain asked Andrea Rossi if he knew about this on the Journal of Nuclear Physics today, and Rossi responded, “yes, I saw it, it has been reproduced from other publications”. Alain asked if AR was involved in this deal, and he responded, “no, it is an action IH made in his Territory, for which has been licensed from Leonardo Corporation”

Notice that Rossi assumed it was about LENR and the E-Cat.

ele claims that “This figure [$250 million] was cited many times here and no one from IH have never negated it.” Of course, he has just responded to Dewey Weaver, the only person blogging on these issues known to be from Industrial Heat — as a contractor for them and investor, apparently from the beginning, who would know about such transactions as an insider — who had just denied it. If ele is not lying, ele is not seeing what is immediately in front of him.

Trolls, when they make mistakes, almost never go back to correct them….

Frank Acland went on:

It’s still a bit vague as to what exactly is being financed, but Industrial Heat does have an E-Cat license for China. Perhaps they are going to be manufacturing E-Cats in China in this Science and Innovation Park that has been established, or since IH is supporting other LENR groups, funds could be used for supporting non-E-Cat LENR technologies.

Still, it this number of accurate, it shows a significant commitment from the Chinese to support the development of LENR.

Like much speculation on E-Cat World, there is practically no basis for this. Someone might, I suppose, have asked Hydrofusion where they got that information. Did they? AlainCo asked Rossi, not Hydrofusion, but Rossi only had second-hand information.

There is no evidence I’ve seen anywhere that IH received substantial funding from China. The agreement signed, from the Chinese sources, was for technology cooperation in establishing a research center in China, there is no clue of any major investment in (or involvement by) Industrial Heat.

The Darden visit to China was in September, 2013. IH had just received the 1 MW Plant. It is highly unlikely they would have been heavily promoting anything at that point.

So that is not a “Rossi Says”.
Here :
https://translate.google.com/t…spx%3Fid%3D845&edit-text=
is the photo of Darden in China…..

Darden visited China, proving … proving what?

That there are “documents of the trial” is “ele Says,” which certainly sounds like Rossi Says. Now, Rossi has seen IH discovery, that we, as the public, have not seen. To reveal this, though, ele would have to out himself. More likely, Rossi, like others, picks up rumors and repeats them as fact, particularly when they serve his purposes. The general purpose here would be to provide “evidence” that the IH people (a whole series of them) are liars, since they claim they could not confirm the technology, but they “sold” it to so many investors for so much money.

Of course, in September, 2013, IH had not had time to confirm the technology, other than by relying on the Validation Test and Penon’s analysis. Rossi Says is commonly clueless about time, when things happened.

Eric didn’t buy it.

Well, let’s look at the (surely misleading) numbers you quote. Nominally from Woodford we have 50 million, and nominally from the Chinese we have 121 million. That’s 50 million + 121 million = 171 million dollars. You’re short by 79 million to get to your 250 million that you’ve mentioned on several occasions.

Normal people will concede points to trolls. Eric, here, is not accepting the $121 million figure, but is only pointing out that the original claim of $250 million is off by a third, even if that figure is accepted.

Now let us recall the article that clarified that only 20 or so million from Woodford had been disbursed to IH.

I noticed the problem here and so did ele, of course. “The article” is vague, and what is reported is possible an interpretation, by someone unspecified. What I know of is the IHHI financial information. It does not specify what is “disbursed to IH.”

Go to Companies House.

07 Nov 2016 Total exemption full accounts made up to 31 December 2015

I can read and interpret this such that, as of the end of December, 2015, the first year of IHHI operation (the Woodford investment was in May, 2015), IHHI had spent roughly $17 million in the year, and had current (short-term) liabilities of about $3 million. They had cash beyond those short-term liabilities of almost $14 million, but they had “investments” valued at almost $28 million. Without knowing what those investments are, saying that only $20 million was disbursed could be very misleading. That might, for example, include the value of IPH, i.e., mostly of the Rossi license. The total investment in IH was about $20 million, raised from the original group of investors, apparently. (That was the stock issue authorized when they raised the $11.5 million in 2013). So, with the Woodford $50 million, of a total of $70 million raised, it appears that it has been spent on Rossi and other operations, so far, leaving roughly $14 million. We could probably come up with what they have spent on Rossi, I think that’s a court document. Millions of dollars went to Ampenergo, all part of the cost of the original Agreement.

And let us recall that the Chinese number was probably a commitment and does not appear to have been intended to be directed to IH.

Speculation but reasonable. The stories cited as sources in the old discussions of the China connection do not show any investment in IH, at all. This was, first of all, Cherokee participation, not IH. (Confusing Cherokee with IH is a Planet Rossi trope, it’s very common, and there are news stories that also confuse the two.) Then this was all about a technology park in China paralleling Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. Not about LENR. That was Planet Rossi speculation, making the kinds of assumptions often made in that community.

There is no source for the $121 million, which is an awfully specific number to stand as a vague rumor.

We are now far shorter [short of] the 250 million. Please stop repeating that IH raised 250 million as though it were a fact unless you can substantiate it. Or, if you do repeat it as though it were a fact, your post will probably go into the bargain bin.

Clearance Items. Far superior to arbitrary (or judgmental) deletion.

ele came back again.

Eric Walker wrote:

That’s 50 million + 121 million = 171 million dollars.

This is not just few money. I remember also other figures in the docs and I will search the exact document….. but ok lets take 171 for now

In other words, “I was wrong but I win anyway, because $171 million is a lot of money! Therefore Darden is a lying crook! That I lied is not important. So what if I lie? I’m just a troll, you don’t know who I am, and I can disappear anytime I like, like randombit0.

Eric Walker wrote:

Now let us recall the article that clarified that only 20 or so million from Woodford had been disbursed to IH.

Please cite the aricle yourself. You have not.

Above I cite a source. I think, though, that Eric had something else in mind, that IH spent about $20 million on the Rossi affair. That wasn’t from Woodford, though some of the last expenses may have been supported with Woodford money, through IHHI, which is sole owner of IH.

Eric Walker wrote:

And let us recall that the Chinese number was probably a commitment and does not appear to have been intended to be directed to IH.

Are you sure ? The only internet articles I found with this figures are related to Darden visit. Remember that IH holds the rights for China.

This was all Planet Rossi, making assumptions, i.e., Darden = Industrial Heat = Cherokee. The articles actually talk only about Cherokee and Raleigh and Research Triangle Park there. No mention of Industrial Heat. Somewhere, though, there is an indication that Darden may have mentioned LENR. The timing of the Darden visit to China is an issue here. It was September, 2013, when IH had only the month before received the Plant, certainly did not have time to test it.

Yes. IH holds the E-cat rights for China, which shows what? They were nowhere near starting up manufacture. You can’t make millions if you can’t make one. Cherokee doesn’t hold the rights, never invested in Industrial Heat. Rossi was never clear about who and what he was dealing with.

Eric Walker wrote:

Or, if you do repeat it as though it were a fact, your post will probably go into the bargain bin.

As you see I’m not repeating.

I feel, but of course I can be wrong, that there is a double standard here. People from IH can openly offend and insult other while I’m just trying to reconstruct how much money IH has rosen.

Raised. Liar.

He is trying to prove something, not to learn or “reconstruct.” There are, so far, no sources for either the $200 million or $121 million figure, other than a report from Hydrofusion that seems to have inspired a flock of reports. That report is itself vague and implies previous discussion, talking about “rumor” The story has “the equivalent of $121 million,” implying that this was not a US dollar investment, and many have opined that if China were to invest, it would not be in a U.S. company like Industrial Heat or IHHI (which denominates investments in USD).

We know how much money IH has raised: $11.5 million in 2013 with a stock offering, with that issue allowing up to $20 million, and since they needed more money, I assume they did raise it, probably up to the limit. Then Woodford invested $50 million in IHHI, and there may have been some smaller investments, I don’t recall the numbers. So we are looking at total investment, not counting promised future investments, of roughly $70 million. There is no sign of anything else. It certainly isn’t in IH Holdings International, Ltd.

No, ele was claiming that Dewey Weaver, who would actually know, was lying, by claiming that this $250 million figure was well-known and then, nutty as it was, pointing as proof to a way-crazy web site, donbot.com, without bothering to look for actual sources.

And then there was this unfortunate post:

Rends wrote:

The main question remains, had IH the full sum of money in order to meet the obligations of the license agreement at any time available?. The answer is no!

Speculation as to how they could have raised money is superfluous, because they have signed a contract with the knowledge that they can possibly not raise the sum and so they could not be interested seeing Rossi successfully running a long term test – because they did not have that $89 million at no time!

Rends, quite simply, has not been following the documents (and has shown that he doesn’t understand what he does read). Woodford gave $50 million to IHHI to support LENR research, and committed another $150 million. If it were needed, they had found the money. No, they never had it sitting in the bank, but companies almost never do. Money sitting in a bank is wasted. They didn’t have the $10 million for the IP payment either, until a few days before. But they knew how they could get it.

I signed a contract to buy a house, to pay the better part of a half million dollars for it. I didn’t have the money — but I secured the agreement with $1000. This is totally routine! For a house, I could obtain a mortgage, and did. It is paying large sums for nothing, or something of highly speculative value, that’s difficult, but Darden has high experience at risky investments. The companies he has started through Cherokee, investing about $25 million of Cherokee funds, have often raised hundreds of millions of dollars, it appears, with investments and loans and grants.

See the Ampenergo memo for information about the Woodford commitment, but there are other documents in the record. The idea that IH didn’t have the money, and therefore defrauded Rossi when they signed the Agreement, is a standard Planet Rossi trope. Rossi himself apparently believes it. His attorneys tried hard to claim that.

I transcribed the entire memo.

this is from the first page of it, dated October 3, 2014:

Woodford > first deal / public deal
$25-50 M (up to $200 M) (or more if they need to buy out Rossi)
Dutch entity > will become parent
Dutch entity > currently a subsidiary of IH. IH’s IP has been transferred to Dutch entity

So an initial Woodford investment was planned by October 2014. The plan then was to make IPH (“Dutch entity”) the parent. Instead, Woodford wanted IHHI to be formed in the U.K. (see page 7 of the memo).

The Ampenergo memo is devastating to many Planet Rossi tropes. Cassarino was (and, I’m told, remains) a friend of Rossi, from way back. Ampenergo had invested in Rossi. Ampenergo is also an investor in IHHI; owned equity in IH; this in lieu of some of what IH owed Ampenergo for their release of the License to them.

Any questions?

Enough idle chatter, the market is the judge

One minute of silence is worth a lifetime of idle chatter. — The Joys of Live Alchemy, Michael Levy.

“Enough idle talk.” He stood up. “I must return to the laboratorium.” “But, sir, can you not — ” “I have no time for petty matters,” he said, turning for the stairs. Alchemy and Meggy Swann, Karen Cushman.

Bernie Koppenhofer
April 6, 2015 at 8:09 PM

Dr. Rossi: There are so many super skeptics ready to discredit your results (should they be positive (: ) what steps have you taken to insure the results are “iron clad” showing your customer has saved x amount of dollars during your year long test?

Andrea Rossi
April 7, 2015 at 7:41 AM

Bernie Koppenhofer:
The rules of the market are totally strange to the chattering: if the test on course will confirm that the E-Cat works and the Customer is satisfied, the E-Cats will invade the market.

I give you a simple example: when cars have been invented ( late XIXth Century) most of experts said that those things could never substitute horses, for a lot of reasons, theoretical and experimental.

But cars worked, people bought them when the industrial manufacturing made an accessible price available and from then the contrary opinion of the experts counted nothing.

This is how things go: what is important is not what sceptics say, what is important is the product works properly.

Warm Regards, A.R.

Setting aside the weird argument about cars, Rossi has long argued that the market is the judge. Real customers, real money changing hands, real power being generated and used, saving the customers money and them gratefully paying for that.

Andrea Rossi:

June 9, 2010 at 8:13 AM: Fortunately, the real judge is the market: to copy a paper is easy, to say to have invented something is easy, but to sell and make a plant you need the plant. That’s not easy and that’s the real difference between a wannabe and a technology maker.

January 16, 2011 at 4:01 PM: We have passed already the phase to convince somebody. We are arrived to a product that is ready for the market. Our judge is the market.

April 16, 2011 at 2:27 PM: This is why we continue to repeat that the market, only the market will be the final judge: if our E-CATS WILL RESPECT THE GUARANTEES OF ENERGY PERFORMANCE AND SAFETY, WE WILL BE PAID. This is the sole validation that counts really, at the end.

August 7, 2011 at 3:45 PM: I have already explained all that my attorneys told me to explain. The rest will come from the Court. Of course during a litigation there are two different versions, this is why we want a vedict made by a judge, to have an undisputable truth. Facts, not chatters. And, by the way, there is not much to dispute: we made all our duties, they did not respect their financial obligations. The sole reason of the break is this, all the rest is chatters.

Deja Vu all over again. “The market is the judge,” until the Judge is the judge, apparently. This was all chatter. As is common, Rossi does not understand legal process. It does not generate — nor does it need, in civil matters — “indisputable truth.” Markets, to be sustained, ultimately need to be grounded in reality, that is the reality behind Rossi’s oft-repeated and hypocritical claim.

The above was about Defkalion. It appears that Defkalion, taking a closer look at Rossi claims, decided they could fake heat just as easily as Rossi, at lower cost. The market judged. As far as we know, no litigation or arbitration was filed. (But we do not know with clear and legally-admissible evidence what happened with Defkalion, unlike the case with Industrial Heat, where there is an enormous body of sworn testimony, which Rossi and proxies continue to lie about. I am here looking at a tiny fraction of it.)

July 26, 2012 at 9:01 AM: I am not at all worried about external reactions. I receive daily blackmails, insults, subtle proposal of collaboration aimed to hit us from snakes disguised as enthusiast friends….( we have very good intelligence): just tennis balls against a tank. We are marching, the market, supreme judge of any product, will confirm if our work is useful or not.

The market has spoken, mostly by not speaking. Rossi, in April, 2015, misled a strong supporter of his, Bernie Koppenhofer, about the “customer.” How did he established that the “customer” was satisfied? Who was the customer?

There were two, one paying real money, the second a legal fiction, nothing other than Rossi and Friends, run entirely by Rossi, funded entirely by Rossi, with Rossi as sole defacto authority while pretending independence. How would we know if the “customer” was satisfied?

Rossi hired a retired engineer, paid him to speak for the customer, and told him what to say, this is all in the attested evidence, indisputable. That engineer, James Bass, told visitors that he was very satisfied. Johnson, the President of Leonardo Corporation and of JM Products, Inc., the shell corporation Rossi and Johnson created, owned by a trust with an old friend of Rossi as beneficiary — the old friend put in no money and risked nothing — supported Bass and Rossi claims by submitting invoice requests to be billed $1000 per day per megawatt, as informed by Rossi.

So, of course, if a “customer” was willing to pay so much for power, it must be real! But who would have paid those invoices, if IH had gone ahead and submitted them?

Rossi paid all JMP expenses through Leonardo Corporation, this is totally clear. Rossi claims that this was to be repaid by JMP out of the sale of processed product. Sale to whom? To Leonardo Corporation, of course — or anyone else who buys the product. What product? “Product” is alleged, as a vague word, but what do we see when we get down to brass tacks, real market considerations, when we look at “how much product?” What was the product made from? A few grams, at most, of palladium sponge. No matter what was done with that sponge with low-temperature steam, the “megawatt” could have been replaced by any ordinary tea kettle, for far, far less than $1000 per day. And then there is a claim a small amount of graphene processing. Again, no sales actually evidenced, and certainly no independent sales. This was Rossi playing with some materials, at enormous cost, in order to have a cover story.

The only “market” here was fake, and Rossi lied about it again and again. Something may be noticed, though. Rossi did not directly lie to his fan. He merely allowed the fan to read his comment in a certain — normal — way. This is quite visible in many filed documents. Rossi did not, in writing, claim that the “customer” was Johnson Matthey, but wrote many things that would be read by a normal person as confirming the JM involvement, and, as well, claiming an independent customer, strongly implying it was JM, reporting what the customer supposedly told him — when, in fact, he was, for all intents and purposes, the customer.

What brought all this up for me was an ele comment on LENR Forum.

JedRothwell wrote:

Rossi’s 1-year test is not a scientific claim. It was a crude attempt to defraud people. Anyone familiar with conventional instruments and boilers can see that the Penon report is fake, and that even [if] the data and configuration in it were real,

Again your usual Leit Motive. Now you push even further no evidence eve if data is true.

A perfect example of “Four legs good, two legs bad” statement something you have to repeat and repeat and repeat so to try to convince others.

Idle chatter, evidence-free. The issue of the Penon report data has been extensively discussed, and is at issue in the trial.

Rothwell’s point stands, the Penon Report is not a “scientific claim.” One could never get it published in a scientific journal. The only reason Penon is not a counter-claim defendant in Rossi v. Darden is that he disappeared, made himself unavailable to be legally served. One of Penon’s largest errors was in his claim that it was unnecessary to even inquire about the customer’s usage of power. This was not the statement of a “nuclear engineer,” but a legal and business opinion, and any engineer worth his salt would know that one needs as many validations of measurements as possible.

If Rossi really did have a heat exchanger running, that could have been an independent validation, from measurements of the air flow and air temperature elevation. Much more likely, at this point, is that Rossi simply lied about that, this time under oath, and my suspicion at this point — I am not a lawyer — is that this might be provable beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard for a criminal conviction.

Rossi has accused Darden, in a pleading, of perjury. He may want to duck, bounceback incoming!

So for you a COP >80 is nothing ?

http://www.e-catworld.com/wp-c…7/03/197-03-Exhibit-3.pdf

This is the exibit. If you don’t agree go in the Court and explain your reasons under oath.

Very Planet Rossi, ignorant of legal procedure. Rothwell has no standing to say anything in Court, unless subpoenaed. He isn’t a witness, he is an independent observer with substantial experience relating to what he writes about. Rothwell saw Penon data long ago, and wrote about it, and was roundly criticized for claims that he could not prove. The actual Report, once published, confirmed what he had written.

Planet Rossi misrepresents IH claims in the suit. They have not claimed that anyone “faked” data. Rothwell might say that, casually, but he’s not in Court, is not IH, and is not speaking for IH.

“Fake” data is not well-defined. What is clear from the Penon data is that something is off. Just to start, the data was crudely reported, making analysis very difficult. Fabiani’s data shows that data collection, while reported to four significant figures, very high apparent precision, was, in fact, only digitized crudely, losing much information. The instruments were poorly chosen. Legally, Rossi can defend that by claiming that IH approved the “test protocol,” which appears to be true or at least reasonable, but there is no evidence that the “test protocol” was for a Guaranteed Performance Test, merely for a different “350 day test” with Penon as “ERV” — and that itself was never explicitly confirmed. This appears to have been done because Rossi wanted it — and didn’t mention “test.”

Rossi represented the Doral installation as an opportunity to sell power to an independent customer — allegedly much more “believable” than the test IH wanted to set up — and to demonstrate the technology for investors, to sell Plants, costing only $200,000 to make, for presumably much more (Rossi’s megawatt Plant price was $1.5 – $2 million, stated at various times.) Suppose he’d been straightforward and had written “and we can complete our Guaranteed Performance Test, so you can pay me the $89 million that is burning a hole in your pockets. Heh. Heh.”

I think we know what the outcome would have been.

Rossi claimed IH didn’t have the money to pay, never intended to pay, but this is all extensively contradicted by the evidentiary record.

What is most bizarre here is not that a lunatic or con artist — I’m not sure which it is! — is crazy or lying, but that he has fans who continue to support utter nonsense, repeating it as if fact. If they read the court documents, it’s even more amazing to me. If they go back and read JONP, how can they miss it?

But people apparently do miss it.

Apropos of little, I just watched a bit of Feynman. Don’t fool yourself, for you are the easiest person to fool.

So, what’s it like to be a 17-year-old kid, over the top in intelligence, I didn’t know anyone as smart as me … until I went to Cal Tech, where comparisons became difficult. Like me, many had 800 Math SATs. Off-scale. … what’s it like for such a kid to meet Feynman?

You could ask!

And what’s it like for that kid, now in his 70s, to read “science-worshippers” — “cargo cultists” in Feynman language — like Henry … or, for that matter, so apparently on the “other side” … ele?

(Or before ele, randombit0)

… with their comments about Science and “professors” that show terminal cluelessness as to the science, the love of beauty and truth and reality beyond authority and attachment, I drank with milk, sitting with Pauling and Feynman and then diving into the pool myself.

Fun, that’s what it’s like, tinged with a sadness. Life can be so much better! A kind soul just gave me a session in an isolation tank. Yipee!

A word to the wise is sufficient – a hint to the foolish is proof

Transmutation is accomplished by complementing the frequencies of the elements by means of symphonic wave interactions of light and sound.

from Cabalsgame.com

My occasion here is a post by Ahlfors on LENR Forum. This was put up in Rossi v. Darden Developments, where it was almost totally off-topic, then moved to the Playground.

“There is no $250M investment from anybody (yet) and your ongoing spewage that R was central to anything … Cheers, Sustain and Godspeed”

The quotation was from Dewey Weaver. I’ll return to the “$250 million” issue below. “Sustain” was sarcastic, imitating RossiSpeak.

And then followed an Ahlfors trademark, an image of text, with no source. I googled a phrase from it and found the source, the description of a fraud involving the sale of a right to purchase stock that allegedly gathered 2,000 pounds within hours of opening an office in Cornwall — and then the seller disappeared with the money, about $1 million in today’s dollars.

The book is The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison, By John Emsley, and it has an extensive section on alchemy, and this passage was a piece of it.

This led me to Franz Tausend, and the lead phrase apparentlylfrom him(?).

See also RexResearch on Tausend. From that article:

Just before World War II, a controversial young man named Franz Tausend entered into the industrial manufacture of gold. His business methods led him to be accused of fraud, but there is some evidence that he actually did realize the secret of low-energy transmutations of base metals to gold.

There are many aspects to this old story of interest to us. And none of it proves anything, other than the human propensity for foolishness, and for treating managed demonstrations as if scientific evidence.

Ahlfors seems to be suggesting that there is chicanery involved in Industrial Heat. Planet Rossi commonly suggests that there is something sinister about “shell corporations,” though, as far as what I’ve seen, there are multiple entities, all right, but with an open and reasonably logical relationship. The plan was to move overall ownership to IPH in the Netherlands, but when Woodford came on board, they wanted a U.K. company to be formed, since they were becoming — by far — the largest investors. So IPH remains a simple holding company for the IP, owned entirely by IH which is owned entirely by IHHI.

The idea of $250 million disappearing is common on Planet Rossi, I think Rossi has mentioned it several times. I did some digging on this and found that there was a claim of $200 million being invested in a Chinese venture loosely connected with Darden — who definitely visited China. There is nothing more than a vague hint that this had anything to do with LENR, and this would have been Chinese money going into a Chinese venture, not Darden’s pocket, as is commonly and casually assumed. There is nothing to connect this Chinese investment — if it existed at all — with Industrial Heat and the Rossi Agreement, other than Rossi’s idea that the world revolves around him.

So ele bringing up the $250 million, as one of his many RossiSpeak posts, is not surprising.

Rossi has been fishing for dirt on IH:

Anonymous
May 28, 2017 at 8:43 AM

Dr Andrea Rossi:
The puppets of the “ventriloquist of Raleigh” have made a mess about your past, from which you have been cleared, but we have discovered that Cherokee and Tom Darden, through affiliate companies, have a very dirt skeleton not only in their past, but also in their present, related to series of frauds in the environmental and financial fields, about which they are far from being cleared. We are a group of American citizens that sustain your work and we are disgusted by what is going on against you. We are preparing a dossier completed with all the precise references about what written here above. Where can we send it?
Never give up, you will win this litigation and from the papers so far published your case is much stronger than theirs.
Anonymous

Andrea Rossi
May 28, 2017 at 1:46 PM

Anonymous:
No comment.
Warm Regards,
A.R.
P.S.
Send the evidence, if any, to:
info@leonardocorp1996.com

The appearance of posts on Rossi’s JONP blog that repeat the Rossi party line, using the same idiosyncratic phrases, such as “the Ventriloquist of Raleigh,” apparently Tom Darden, and using other Rossi language (such as “sustain” for “support.” That was pointed out as a false friend cognate from Italian. (The U.S. English usage would have “sustain” mean “provide material support for,” not just approval, the way Rossi uses it, “thanks for the sustain,” and he doesn’t mean “thanks for the donations,” he uses it for any comment of praise or appreciation.

There is no evidence that Darden is involved with any of the derisive commentary on Rossi or Planet Rossi, found mostly on LENR Forum, and setting aside Dewey Weaver, who is openly an investor in Industrial Heat, a contractor to them, and who is strongly opinionated; there is no clue that Weaver is commenting on behalf of Darden, he is simply an insider with a higher level of direct knowledge than almost everyone who writes on the subject.

Rossi, however, formally accused IH of a defamation campaign, based on communications with Levi and Bo Hoistad, targeting his Nobel Prize chances. That fell like the lead balloon it was. (There is no Nobel Prize for engineering and invention; this was all a fantasy rooted, apparently, in the late Sven Kullander being on a Nobel committee.)

IH has not emphasized the Rossi past, aside from the technical violation of the Agreement with regard to tax payments; that only got attention because Rossi, instead of simply admitting what was true and, if there had been a problem, asserting that it was fixed and ultimately harmless — which it apparently was — made a huge fuss about how it was all coming from evil intentions to bring up his “messy” past.

Rossi and others routinely lie about that past. It was not all “cleared up.” Rossi served time and was released for time served, not because of being “cleared of all charges.” This is all irrelevant to Rossi v. Darden, it only makes a difference in how people moralize about it. Darden and Vaughn, like anyone with a serious interest in LENR, knew about that past. My own conclusion was that — obviously — there was a risk of Rossi being dishonest, but that we could not tell the difference between an inventor who wanted to look like a con artist (the Mats Lewan idea, after Rothwell) and a con artist who wanted to look like an inventor looking like a con artist.

Rossi approves all posts for JONP, presumably. He picks, then, what will appear, and, over and over, it’s what he wants to say or suggest. Then, for legal reasons, he writes “no comment.” Even though sometimes he comments.

The dirt referenced almost certainly is about Cherokee Investment Partners, because this has been brought up over and over, on JONP and on LENR Forum, and even here as an anonymous comment that was irrelevant where placed (this has nothing to do with Rossi v. Darden).

Leanne Tuffey
May 29, 2017 at 11:31 AM
Dr Andrea Rossi:

I agree with the comment of Anonymous published here yesterday and I too have information to send you on the matter. They are “serials” and repeat every year the same things with the same system.
I am sending too material to you.
Godspeed,
L.F.

Andrea Rossi
May 29, 2017 at 12:29 PM

Leanne Tuffey:
No comment.
Warm Regards,
A.R.
P.S.
Send the evidence, if any, to
info@leonardocorp1996.com

If it is every year the same, how many years have they been at it? There ought to be copious evidence, one would think. The evidence that has been presented, so far, is miniscule and inconclusive, showing nothing more than ordinary business for the kind of venture capital operation that is Cherokee.

If these JONP posters are real people, they are idiots.

Nobody has been censoring this “evidence.” However, it seems LENR Forum is getting a bit weary of the repetition.

Update

Today this appeared on JONP:

Anonymous
June 4, 2017 at 8:41 AM

Dr Andrea Rossi:
Did you receive the papers that Leanne and Tuffy promised you regarding Cherokee?

Andrea Rossi
June 4, 2017 at 2:36 PM

Anonymous:
Yes, I received 1247 pages related to the activity of Cherokee from 2002 to today. We are studying. …

I’d be astonished if Rossi asked his attorneys about this and they said, “Sure, fine publish that!” Unless they wanted to earn more fees. Rossi has provided, on the blog, with this reasonable cause for a request for production of those pages and all information about their provenance.

If these people had truly hot material, seriously harmful, they would be doing harm to Rossi by providing him the information like this, distracting him (dirt about Cherokee is irrelevant to Rossi v. Darden and he would not be able to introduce it unless somehow it were directly relevant and he could show that), and tempting him to break various laws or commit various torts.

Anyway, I decided to look for more comments about Cherokee on JONP.

April 26, 2016, a post by Luis Navarro copied gossipy material from comments on Lewan’s blog, by Josh G. Most of it is familiar. Looking over that Lewan blog page, we can see the same arguments that have been presented over and over, questions asked as if they have never been asked before, even though they have, and have been answered ad nauseum. (But, there, some of these are asked for the first time, though, to be sure, taken from Rossi’s Complaint as if the claims there were fact.

April 7, 2016, Rossi made his classic claims:

In the press release of IH they write that ” for three years they tried to replicate the Rossi effect, with no avail”: very good, but during those three years Industrial Heat collected about 60 million dollars from Woodford, more millions from other sources, exclusively based on my E-Cats technology. This before making shopping to buy other patents. Now, the cases are two: either they are lying when they say they didn’t replicate, or they made a fraud collecting 60 millions from Woodford, more from others, not to mention Cherokee fund. You had to see Tom Darden and JT Vaughn dance like ballet etoiles around the investors, showing them the E-Cats, and telling them that the E-Cats had been built by them! “Stellar” coherently Darden, in his role of etoile, repeated to the enchanted attandees, ready to spend 50 millions. Now, that my bill arrived, the E-Cat had not been replicated , they say. For three years. Again, I am just answering to a press release of IH.

Woodford invested $50 million U.S., but it appears from court filings that this was planned before the Woodford visit in February, 2016; Woodford actually closed the investment in May, 2016. The investment was obviously never “exclusively” based on Rossi technology, since it was then spent on other approaches, very little on Rossi. Woodford insisted that this money go into IHHI, incorporated in the United Kingdom, where they could watch it closely. At that Woodford visit, it appears that Rossi paid Bass to be “Engineering Director” of the “customer,” and to tell the visitors how well it was going, how happy they were.

“Just answering”? No, he’s presenting what he imagines is a legal argument, his circumstantial argument that IH must be lying,  one that won’t fly in court. IH behavior in this period is quite well documented. It simply does not match the Rossi fantasy, but Rossi has fans who lap it up.

D.T.
October 19, 2016 at 1:24 PM

Dear Andrea:
As you probably have seen, Brillouin has published their demo at the ICCF of Japan: congratulations, you have got another replication of your effect: their reactor is a true copy of your old Hot Cat. After their agreement with Cherokee-IH, they have got from Darden your technology and replicated it. Probably you noticed that since their agreement with IH, Brillouin has just repeated as a parrot every move of you…even the reactor that resambles a pencil.
You must really be ready to invade the world with a strongly competitive, economy scale based product before disclosing your QuarkX. Cherokee-IH-Brillouin will try to copy the QuarkX immediately and will say that their is “original”. Darden has to make his investors bite the toilet papers he filled with IH, that remained an empty box after your departure from Cherokee-IH. They made the money disappear and substituted it with the toilet papers of things that never worked and never will work. Now they, together with Woodford, must convince all the investors of Cherokee and Woodford that IH has a value of IP worth the money that disappeared from IH. They know that they can replicate you in laboratory, but cannot violate your patents in the real market…Beware, Andrea and remember here you have big friends.
From Russia, with love,
D.T.

I’ve written about D.T. posts before. The language is Planet Rossi, including the “toilet papers” and “they made the money disappear.” Rossi made extensive efforts to discover evidence of disclosure of his technology to Brillouin and others, apparently failing — but IH did have the right to sublicense, under the Agreement. D.T. would be correct that the patents cannot be violated in the real market, but … IH holds a license for the Americans, so if Brillouin does develop a product, with Rossi IP, they would legally be required to pay royalties to IH. However, I’ve studied the recent Brillouin press release and this does not resemble Rossi technology, at all, beyond being nickel hydride. It is also less than convincing, the report from SRI was preliminary and not internally approved by SRI for public release.

Also Planet Rossi is the idea that Cherokee invested in Industrial Heat. Apparently, they never did. IH spent roughly $20 million or so, their original investment, attempting to confirm the Rossi claims. That is the money that “disappeared.” IHHI money, some of it, has been spent on other efforts, supporting research, and apparently has not developed commercially useful IP, and that is surely known to the investors. IHHI, from their formal statements filed in the U.K., is in the field for the long term.

Eric
May 5, 2016 at 12:05 PM

[This begins with “INDISPUTABLE FACTS:” and then proceeds to allege as if it were fact what is innuendo, suspicion, and guilt by association (Cherokee was apparently defrauded at one point) with little fact, and to cite evidence that actually contradicts the claims made, a pattern that also is found in the Rossi pleadings in Rossi v. Darden.]

Ing. Michelangelo De Meo
May 21, 2016 at 9:38 AM

[This points to a mention of Cherokee in a story about investment company practices, referring to a case which I have covered elsewhere. In 2016, Cherokee settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the matter of an apparent accounting error, the allocation of costs for complying with new regulations. This was the equivalent of a parking citation in impact on Cherokee, and the settlement made no admission of any wrongdoing, only error (and thus the minor fine). Rossi thanked Ing. De Meo for the “interesting information.”]

There is a lot more, but … enough for today.

Mysteries abound when eyes don’t see

When we fail to observe the world carefully, and without strong prior belief, many mysteries appear, and often questions that support prior belief, i.e., argument from mystery, argument from lack of imagination, or, often, very restricted imagination.

When we have knowledge, these questions often vanish because possible answers become obvious, and where these possible answers have high organizational function, we may choose to accept them, at least until we have even more knowledge (i.e., evidence combined with a broad sense of possibilities).

On LENR Forum, SSC wrote (links added)

THHuxleynew wrote:

SSC seems just to be incapable of imagining uncertainty – and then fits his rationalisation around his lack of imagination. In this case that IH could be confused by Rossi’s setups, and the other independent tests, working when their own – done with much weaker technical resources, we know, Dameron, did not. So I have some sympathy with SSC – lack of imagination is no crime.

Error in general is not a crime, except when it is…. The problem is an imagination that follows established tracks, and particularly, here a track laid down by Rossi, as a major theory behind his lawsuit, but that ignores obvious other possibilities, including some well-established by evidence, rather than the kind of imputation that SSC uses here (which Annesser and Chaiken also use, it’s quite visible in the Murray deposition.)

Dear TTH, it may be that I am lacking in imagination, but in any case I would not speak of “uncertainty” talking about IH…. Please read PLAINTIFFS’ REPLY IN SUPPORT OF THEIR MOTION FOR PARTIAL SUMMARY JUDGMENT (doc 254), where you can find these words:

“Notably, Defendants could not point to a single document in which they notified Plaintiffs of their alleged inability to replicate the technology, whether as a result of their incompetence, faulty equipment, inferior materials, or outright lies. See SOF ¶¶ 31, 33. “

This is citing Rossi’s pleading and the Rossi declaration as evidence, and the claim is presented in a narrowed way that might easily be overlooked. There are two general kinds of evidence in the case: documentary evidence and testimony under oath. Documentary evidence will be subject to interpretation, the claim is often that it “speaks for itself,” but here Rossi is referring to what the documents do not say. Maybe. We’d have to look at all of them to verify this. Meanwhile, the public record contains evidence that IH showed Rossi — in person, not by an email and formally — that their tests were not confirming his claims, and that Rossi was irate.

SSC is writing from what he believes, which is ultimately based on Rossi Says, and what he quotes here shows it. That is not admissible evidence. The question asked assumes a context that was missing, open communication. It ignores timing. It ignores what is completely plain on review of the record: IH strategy for communication with Rossi, it was designed and controlled to “not piss him off.” This is so obvious that Annesser uses it to ask Murray why the visit to the plant by Murray was proposed for July 2015, if it was expected that it would upset Rossi.

It obviously did upset Rossi, so much so that he violated the Term Sheet to deny the visit (by generically denying the right to visit of anyone not already agreed, until the “tests under way were complete,” I think is how he put it, as if Rossi had that right. It was the IH Plant and they had a clear right to visit it at any time.

Rossi counsel is attempting to have it both ways: IH should have told Rossi, in writing, and that they did not has some implied meaning, and then that IH was provocative by scheduling the Murray visit. (As if “provocative” has some legal significance here. Annesser and Chaiken seem to be, to some extent, grandstanding for Planet Rossi.)

(IH had no legal obligation until and unless Rossi himself put in writing that the Doral test was the GPT, and that idea is also missing from the documentary record, as to the contractually required prior consent in writing, and probably did not happen until later in 2015. In fairly short order, IH formally challenged the GPT interpretation, but we can see evidence that IH still hoped to negotiate something with Rossi, some test or way of moving forward that could satisfy the parties.)

There are e-mails and documents where you can read that IH has initially obtained good results from its E-Cat tests.

There are documents that can be read that way. However, I strongly suggest reading the Murray deposition, the whole thing (423 pages!). IH largely abandoned its efforts with Rossi by the middle of 2015, focusing on other technologies. It appears that they allowed the Doral test as a last-ditch opportunity for Rossi to perform in some way. There are many other comments in depositions on this. SSC, like Rossi, focuses on a possible fact: no written notice, but ignores all the rest. That Rossi Partial Motion for Summary Judgment failed. Does SSC know why? He is here citing argument that was not accepted by the court, the only part of this that is admissible testimony is Rossi Says, in the form of the Affidavit cited.

After Rossi had sued them, they began to say that they had never seen excess heat. But this complaint never came officially to Rossi. If at one point they really realized they were not able to replicate the reactor, why did not they even send an email to Rossi to tell him about it?

Nor did the Rossi intention to consider Doral the GPT ever come “officially” to IH. Until that intention was registered in writing, it did not create an enforceable obligation. If IH had decided to push and shove, they would have needed to formally notify Rossi of their inability to make devices that worked reliably, when thoroughly tested. (This is not the same as “never seeing excess heat,” unless we are careful about what “seeing” is. Operating reactors do not in themselves display “excess heat.” It must be inferred from measurements, and what is truly bizarre in the history of Rossi Results is that on occasion the results were directly contrary to plain and simple sensory evidence. Instead, error-prone measurements were used and attempts to confirm them (i.e., with control experiments and independent measures) were resisted strongly.

I decided to look at the material quoted by SSC in detail. I had started to look at the Rossi Motion for Partial Summary Judgment, but had originally abandoned it because the exhibit numbering was highly confusing (which was also noted by Industrial Heat in their Opposition.)

So I did a study, published at RvD: Rossi Partial Motion for Summary Judgement – Replication

It takes about a day to do one of these.

This is what I’ve seen about Planet Rossi. It does not appear that those who comment like SSC have read much of the case. The question of why IH would not inform Rossi in writing of their failure to replicate has a very obvious answer, and it’s answered in the documents (because Annesser asks it in depositions!).

Reading the case takes a lot of time. There are many hundreds of often-confusing documents. But if one wants to have an informed opinion, there is no substitute for becoming informed. What I see on Planet Rossi is the repetition of certain simple memes, often repeated.

I also see this from Rossi himself, which should not be surprising.

If anyone wants to move from imagination and fantasy to reality, and on the questions and claims made by SSC, I’d suggest reading, in particular, this, and this. Or read the whole section on replication in the Rossi Partial Motion for Summary Judgement: those links refer to paragraphs in it, as quoted on the Study page. Read the evidences, don’t just read Rossi’s claims based on them — or my comments or IH objections. Read sworn testimony and attested documents, actual evidence that can be introduced at trial.

And notice how, sometimes, pleadings distort the evidence, in ways that are easy to see. Sometimes they actually lie, it’s that blatant. However, it is not unlawful to lie in a pleading, pleadings are not sworn testimony. It’s a crime to lie in a deposition or in the attestations that are sometimes provided. Notice that the witness in a deposition is sworn. The lawyers aren’t.

If life is a vote, I’ll say that the Eyes Have It.

Update

SSC wrote some more:

Darden has raised funds from investors, so it’s fair to suppose he has spoken well of the E-Cat with them. You may also not give too much credit to document 254, but it is a text presented to the judge and can hardly contain easily disprovable things. In that document you can read this:

“There is no written evidence that, prior to Defendants’ receipt of $50 million in investment funds, Defendants ever told Plaintiffs that they believed Plaintiffs had violated the License Agreement or that the 350-day test taking place in Florida was not the GPT. See SOF ¶ 60”

This lack of understanding of legal process is common on Planet Rossi. (It’s common in general, but here it is used as part of a syllogism, one that can easily be shown as a fallacy by simple counterexample). If SSC reads what is linked from above, he will fund abundant claims made in DE 254 that are not supported by the evidence cited or that are even contradictory to the evidence.

One way to explain DE 254 is that this was Rossi’s last chance to lie in his Motion for Partial Summary Judgment, it would not be contradicted by IH. So he repeated stuff from before, ignoring contrary evidence and response. Just saying it over again. If his goal was to fire up his base, it worked. I don’t think SSC is Rossi, the English is too good. Though it could be an English-speaking puppet.

What is not true: the claim that the Defendants received $50 million. They did not. The $50 million was received by an independent U.K corporation that is not a defendant in Rossi v. Darden, but the distinction — which is legally quite clear — is suppressed in Rossi claims because he is playing on emotions. Here there is an attempt to connect the $50 million with the GPT issue, as if it is somehow relevant. Unfair!!!

What is not true: that IH never told this about the GPT to Rossi. They obviously did, from evidence presented. However, the question is not whether, but when. It was certainly before the end of the test, but IH would not say that to Rossi, for all the obvious reasons, until and unless Rossi claimed the reverse. We don’t know when Rossi first claimed that Doral was the GPT, but there is no evidence of it being mentioned when the move was planned to Florida, and no mention, as far as I’ve seen, until IH and Rossi started communicating through lawyers, and that was clearly before the end of the “test,” easily by about the beginning of December, 2015.

Why would anyone tell him it was not the GPT if he didn’t claim it, and if the context was that Rossi knew the Second Amendment had failed, and the time had expired? IH knew that Rossi knew — because Cassarino forwarded the Rossi mail about it to IH.

What it would have taken to start up a new GPT would have been a written agreement. IH was willing to sign one, the original Second Amendment. That Amendment failed because it required Ampenergo sign-off and Ampenergo refused. But IH could certainly have signed a new Agreement, and would have had no trouble with Ampenergo if AEG rights were respected. So why didn’t Rossi propose that, instead of proposing this cockamamie faux customer? I find the answer to that question distressingly clear. Rossi is crazy, and demands control, doesn’t deal straightforwardly in cooperative enterprises; instead he lies and manipulates. It is crazy rather than merely controlling and selfish, because he is headed for a serious fall, and my guess is that he also dominates his attorneys. They sound like him, except for better English.

As to violations of the License Agreement, and setting aside the various minor alleged violations, SSC would probably be referring to the claim that Rossi may not have disclosed all the necessary IP for replication. We have testimony that IH people complained to Rossi, concerned that they could not replicate. They certainly would not have sued him for failure to disclose unless they first formally claimed the failure, perhaps demanding specific performance. They were not ready to do that, so they didn’t.

Failure to disclose is simply one of the IH stated possibilities: failure to disclose necessaries, or false claims of performance. Annesser is insistent that there are other “logical possibilities.” Maybe the Russians put Darden in a trance so that he couldn’t function to make the fuel properly. After all, if they could steal the fuel from a sealed reactor, why not stealing his mind? Logically possible, hypothetically. Really, we couldn’t make this up.

Read those pleadings and, if you care about Rossi, or about simple honesty and straightforward argument, weep.

Back to the investment, the original IH investment was in 2013 and probably the $20 million issue was completed in fairly short order. The large investment in IHHI came in May, 2015, and was not invested in Rossi technology, i.e., it was not spent, apparently, on attempting to develop E-Cats, more than a little. What of it has been spent already was allocated to diversifying, exploring other LENR possibilities. So what does this have to do with “praising the E-Cat”?

The Woodford rep statement about the Rossi technology as being “core,” besides being often misquoted (including in pleadings and even in a joint stipulation as agreed), is probably, then, a misinterpretation, with the meaning being imputed to make it into something it wasn’t, which has been very common in this case.