This is just too funny to pass up. On LENR Forum, Zeus46 wrote:
I used to know an old doctor, now dead, who actually met and treated Papp for [redacted]. He said Papp was a flaming nut case (not his words– he said [redacted]).
Some interesting bits and pieces from California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act:
“CMIA prohibits a health care provider, health care service plan, or contractor from disclosing medical information regarding a patient, enrollee, or subscriber without first obtaining an authorization, except as specified.”
Note: I have redacted the medical information. (Not entirely, a doctor who treats someone and calls him a “flaming nut case,” would probably be violating HIPPA and CMIA, and repeating this could still be a violation.) I’m not a California resident, but just to make the point. CMIA prohibits any person from releasing private medical information, not only the providers listed. There are sources warning the media, for example, about publishing such information without permission. I’m reminded of the physician who accessed the medical information, particularly death certificate information, for Atkins, the cardiologist who developed the Atkins Diet, and then released it for political purposes (and it was misleading).
Zeus46 went on to quote many relevant regulations and issues. Without doing extensive legal research myself, it looks like, on the face, the regulations set up sanctions for physicians, in particular, but also some other individuals or entities, for disclosing information similar to what maryyugo has posted.
It is possible that the original disclosure by Papp’s doctor was not a violation of regulations at the time, but this does not excuse maryyugo from the present violation. It is obvious to me that Zeus46 knows the real-life identity of maryyugo, it is not difficult to find, since he outed himself years ago, but continued using the “anonymous” identity. The real person, I’d give it more than 99% probability, is a physician licensed in California.
It appears that “Mary” is so eager to present classic debunkery, and so eager to prove it with “evidence,” that he completely ignores legal risk from his profession.
Zeus46 did not actually reveal that maryyugo is a physician, so he did not violate LENR Forum rules against outing or doxxing.
Update
I had assumed, as did others, that the CMIA rules applied to health care providers. They do, but they also apply to everyone. From LENR Forum:
I’m surprised you can put your clothes on by yourself in the morning. You can, can’t you? PS: dead people can’t sue for damages nor can anyone on the behalf. Not to mention that I am not releasing any of Papp’s sordid records because I never saw any. I am not even reporting facts about Papp! I am simply reporting an anecdote about what someone told me. Hear say. Also you seem to have lost track and wandered into the wrong thread. Anyway sue me. Give it a try. I am terrified.
FWIW, Abd’s comment on this related not to anyone suing you (ridiculous) but to professional disciplinary action for which no doubt the rules are different. However, I have no idea what is your profession, nor any of the details here, so what he suggested remains for me highly speculative.
I would assume that Zeus46 knows Mary Yugo’s identity. It is trivial to find. I have confirmed the identity and “Mary” has revealed, at various times, personal history that matches that of the identified person. One will see people, in various fora, calling Mary by the real name. Mary denies it, but the real person could trivially torpedo this, if different.
I was concerned that the comment here might not be from Mary, but could be a troll. This has definitely happened in the past. So I checked. The information I have as admin here is consistent with the known identification; more than that I will not say. Absent necessity, I will respect user rights.
Mary Yugo is a licensed physician living in California. He has a history of debunking (and has done real investigation, qualifying him as a skeptic in some cases). However, he is also highly opinionated and knee-jerk contemptuous of others who might be pointing something out that he does not understand, and this sequence shows it.
The risk is low, but Mary has not understood the risk. I do not know how CMIA is enforced, there might be no precedent, but the situation Mary describes is of a physician treating Papp revealing what would now be illegal to reveal (I don’t know about then). According to Mary, that physician is deceased, but CMIA also prohibits any person from revealing such information. And any person may file a report. If there are no provable actual damages, the potential fine is limited to $2500.
Mary claims it’s “hearsay.” Yes, it is. Hearsay about medical information, and it is contrary to CMIA regulations to repeat that. Theoretically, to anyone. So far, the walls don’t have ears, and in a case like this, my guess is that the courts would rule that CMIA does not trump ordinary freedom of private speech. But this was not private speech.
It was also unnecessary and irrelevant in context. Mary is a gossip.
There are resemblances, to be sure, between Papp and Rossi. And as to what is involved here, an alleged physician’s diagnosis, that merely demonstrates what was already known: Papp was not necessarily, himself, a reliable witness, and from the submarine incident, may have been capable of staging an elaborate fraud. The diagnosis, however, does not show that the Papp engines did not work, and from what I’ve seen, there is sufficient evidence that they did, in fact, work, to keep this affair in the realm of mystery. Mallove wrote an extensive article on this, and I consider some of his expressed opinions there unfortunate and not yet supported by reliable evidence, but … there are some things that we may never know. Or maybe the “Papp effect” will be confirmed in some way. What I have seen in this line is quite unconvincing.
We also know, then, that Rossi is an unreliable witness and is capable of arranging an elaborate fraud (the fake customer!). We know that Rossi was accused of various frauds in Italy; the ultimate disposition of all that remains a bit unclear to me. Rossi has claimed that all charges were dismissed and all fines refunded, but I have not seen that conclusion from any independent investigator. However, all that does not demonstrate that there is no Rossi Effect.
One statement that IH has made has raised concern for me. From the joint stipulation, IH introduces their “Statement of the Case” with:
Plaintiffs claim to have invented a technology called the “E-Cat” capable of violating the law of conservation of energy by producing far more energy than it consumes.
First of all, the plaintiffs do not claim that the E-Cat is capable of “violating the law of conservation of energy,” and the concept of “consuming” energy is scientifically defective. What is referred to is input energy, and, yes, it is claimed that the E-Cat generates more heat than could be produced by input energy. However, this does not violate conservation of energy if there is a fuel.
As a trivial example, it takes energy to detonate a stick of dynamite, but there is no violation of energy conservation just because the explosion releases far more heat than is generated by the blasting cap that triggers it. Energy “input” must include the potential energy of all system components.
Rossi did not originally provide any theoretical basis for his claims, but he was generally working with LENR, so the general claim would be that there is a nuclear transformation releasing the energy.
If the Industrial Heat investors did not think this possible, without violating conservation of energy, they had no business investing in such a claim. It sometimes occurs that skeptics dismiss LENR as involving “perpetual motion machines.” It would not be that. The energy available from a nuclear fuel is limited. It is not “free energy.” It would not be “perpetual.”
That introductory comment was just plain wrong, because Rossi doesn’t make that claim, and a working Rossi device would not violate conservation of energy. Conservation of energy is an aspect of the first law of thermodynamics, and the IH experts have pointed to violations, but that was in the testing, as to the behavior of steam, not about the claimed effect itself, which would presumably be nuclear in origin. Have the attorneys misunderstood?
If possible, this should be corrected. LENR should not be on trial in Florida.
On the Papp/Rossi comparison, I should mention that Bob Rohner is a friend of mine. I have a high regard for his mechanical skills (and he did graduate with a summa cum laude in mechanical engineering) and his probity. Before I knew Bob I had discounted the Papp story as simply a fraud, but it was tested on a dynamometer that Bob owned and knew was correctly calibrated. Bob also has a twisted crankshaft that attests to the torque the engine produced. Since Bob designed the last engine (mechanical bits) and made it to Papp’s specification, I don’t see a way that Bob could have been fooled as to whether that power was actually there. Bob is still trying to find out why it worked, on his own money – he’s totally convinced it was real and so I am, too.
Most of what Papp published was however lies. Calculations show that there just isn’t enough energy available in the gas to run the engine for more than a few minutes, and Bob saw it running for around 2 weeks solid. There’s a bit of assumption in there that it continued to run overnight when he wasn’t there, but even if you specify that Papp got up early in the morning to start it before Bob arrived that’s still a minimum of 8 hours at a time.
The gas can’t be fusing – that’s a pretty obvious lie. There is however enough fission energy in the Thorium in the system, and the puzzle is how that was released and converted. If we can solve that it may lead to a functioning Papp process and a compact fission system of around 70kW power output. Bob has been running tests based on Papp’s private notes and has been finding that Papp’s observations were in fact correct. Though there’s no guarantee that Bob will find the answer, he’s still in the workshop at the age of 73 and trying to find it.
It seems to me that Roser was actually trying to cut Papp out of the profits, and that in return Papp baulked and didn’t deliver the secrets. Much the same idea that Rossi is trying to project, in fact, except that Papp did have a secret sauce. He never let anyone see him preparing the gas, and only engines charged with gas prepared by Papp ever worked, even though he’d published how it was done. About a week before he died, Papp released all his prepared gas from the bottles and the working engine at that time, and since then that engine has not worked, even though Jimmy Sabori had Papp’s original gas-mixing apparatus and the instructions, and the engine that had been seen to run.
It appears that Papp didn’t have a solid control of the variables. One obvious example is the explosion that Feynman witnessed (and precipitated). Another is Bob’s note that if the engine didn’t start in 4 revolutions it wasn’t going to.
Of course, with Papp there has been a lot of speculation and a lot of people trying to follow what the patents say and thus replicate it. The patents are however a mixture of lies and misleading statements (thus not valid anyway) with some obviously-wrong physics. Following what RossiSays will lead you down a similar garden-path and something that doesn’t work.
Neither Rossi’s claims nor Papp’s however violate CoE – there is a fuel specified that is burnt to produce the output power.
Once we know that someone will lie with words, we can suspect that they may also lie by presenting misleading “demonstrations,” or even facts that mislead when seen out of context. Yet nobody always lies, people only lie when they choose to. Further, if someone is insane, they might not even be lying when they say something clearly wrong. They may believe it, or may want to believe it so strongly that they lose connection with reality. We may never know the full truth. Indeed, my own epistemological stand is that we never actually know the full truth about anything, except I routinely accept that we know our own experience even if we misunderstand it.
As to Papp, we have much less information than we do about Rossi. Unless someone finds the magic protocol, maybe there are special words to be incanted over the engine — and I’m only half-joking — we may never know, and since, from reasonable Bayesian priors, a working Papp engine is unlikely, it is unlikely we will ever know.
With Rossi, we do know that he has lied and faked demonstrations. That is enough to allow anyone skeptical to disregard Rossi’s claims unless independently verified. Until the Rossi-IH split (when IH finally formally confronted Rossi’s fantasies or lies about the GPT — or from the Rossi point of view finally showed that they really did not trust his claims), IH support was prima-facie (and rebuttable) evidence that Rossi had something real, because presumably they would have done due diligence. The facts have shown that they probably knew the risk and went ahead anyway, being willing to risk major losses (roughly $20 million) in hopes of generating deeper knowledge, that could penetrate the possibility of a deliberate creation of a “con artist” appearance.
While the possibility of some reality to the Rossi effect still exists, because of the “insanity” possibility, the probability has declined to near zero. Anyone who thinks otherwise is free to invest, that’s the way the world works. Rossi, however, may be prevented from propagating some of his lies, and investors who invest now will have a far deeper vision of the reality, through the case filings, than was possible before.
I have updated this, including commentary connecting Papp with Rossi and then regretting the IH introduction to the Statement of their Case.
He’s not a patient, you idiot. He’s dead.
Of course we know he’s dead, why would you think otherwise? However, Zeus46 claimed that the restrictions continue to apply after the death of the patient. Until you farted here, I hadn’t checked that. But because a stopped clock is right twice a day, and you might still, in spite of your condition, know more than a stopped clock, I looked.
It appears that the protections apply up to 50 years after the patient’s death. It also appears that it applies to any recipient of what would be private health information, which includes non-physicians, so that you may be — wink, wink, nod, nod — a physician is actually irrelevant. See this page that was cited by Zeus46: What you don’t know about California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act might hurt you!
The law appears to allow any individual to file a report of HIPAA violation, and then the agency pursues it. Maybe you should read the LENR forum post a little more carefully.
I see that you ranted and raved on LF. Zeus46 responded to you in the Playground, because those posts were off-topic in the original thread.
Responding to that, you wrote:
Essentially, MY, you are proving that you are not reading and not paying attention, just reacting. There is no suggestion of a “suit for damages.” Anyone can file a complaint, it need not be the person, and it is not necessary that the target of the complaint be a provider to the person. It is not necessary that there be any actual damages. The revelation of personal health information is the offense. Of course, you might be lying, but … you do know that it’s possible for a governmental agency to trace who you are, right? You might simply be revealing what you read somewhere (this wasn’t news to me), but you could still be violating HIPAA.
From Zeus46’s post. Everything else has checked out, so I’m not checking this:
“Any person or entity who knowingly and willfully obtains, discloses, or uses medical information in violation of CMIA shall be liable for an administrative fine not to exceed $2,500 per violation.”
And whether you are trembling or not is totally irrelevant. I posted this here because it’s funny, and if you have no sense of humor, that’s your loss, not mine. I recommend that you delete the comment before someone does report it, or maybe $2500 is peanuts to you and your right to say whatever damn fool thing comes into your mind is more important. On the other hand, piss me off enough and I might just be motivated enough to file a complaint. You aren’t there yet, but it might not take much more. For a time, the comment will be visible in google cache, but the sooner it’s gone, the sooner that will disappear.