Speak of the devil

What ensues when we speak of the devil has long been expected. Problem with the devil: Qur’an: he speaks to you from where you do not recognize him.

I find a gloss for that obvious: he speaks through our friends and most of all through our own internal conversation, which most people have not learned to suspect is a pack of lies, in spite of ancient warnings about the self. (Actually, like the most skilled lies, it is mixed with a kind of truth, which helps it hide more effectively.)

So on LENR Forum, IH Fanboy has been writing a series of posts that continue his Rossi Good IH Bad theme. IHFB is remarkable. Before the trial, he was expecting that IH would unfortunately kick Rossi’s ass because of all the Rossi “mistakes” — or we could just say “lies.” Juries don’t like lies. It’s a simple story to communicate. if there is probative evidence.

Chaiken told a story of deception, but evidence for lying on the part of Darden et al was thin, almost entirely Rossi Says or vague implications.

And in the other direction, there was so much evidence that Jones Day probably pointed to too much, in the pleadings, the Judge was confused and impatient.

So now IHFB wrote:

JedRothwell wrote:

I assume I.H. finally decided this IP is worthless, which I am sure is the case. It was definitely not worth the risk that a rouge jury would award Rossi $267 million.

I doubt that this was a major consideration. The law was actually clear, once all the facts were clear. Rossi’s lawsuit should properly have been totally dismissed. It survived because of massive fog created by Rossi counsel, such that the Judge relied on errors (including her own).

Eventually, this blog will show this, organized with expert legal opinion. Rossi was going to lose on his claims. The only real question was the countersuit. As woodworker has pointed out, this was less certain. In theory, there could be a “rouge” (or rogue) jury; my guess is that the jury instructions would have made that very unlikely, but if that failed, it would have taken an appeal, that’s all. As I said, the law was clear.

So they thought the IP had value all the way to the point of agreeing to settle? IH settled because the totality of the evidence did not weigh in their favor.

The IP actually has a value. The reason is that the upside is so large, on the order of a trillion dollars. IH decided that the probability of this being realizable was so low that they were no longer going to put any money into it, and if they already owned a License, why not keep it as a hedge?

Rossi had not requested return of the License in the lawsuit. Rossi’s alleged offers, we find out from Lewan, may never have been communicated to IH in any formal way, only mentioned on blogs. They were posturing, meaningless. Nobody called him on it at the time, certainly not Lewan.

I assess the circumstantial evidence as indicating that those prior informal offers were not known to IH counsel, or the final settlement would likely have been different. IH might have recovered their legal expenses, but called a refund of license fees. Rossi would have bought back the reactors.

IH had concluded “useless” long before the case was filed, but left the door open. Maybe Rossi would pull a wabbit out of the hat. The Rossi claims that Woodford invested because of his IP were false.

(IHFB continually attempts to prove the opposite by misquoting what Lamacraft wrote, and since this has been pointed out so many times, shall I assume that IHFB is deliberately lying? I don’t. I think he is massively deluded, that’s all. He is like many other internet trolls, his basic theme is “I’m right and you are wrong,” and he will continue with this for a very long time, and persistently until he vanishes or conversation opportunities themselves disappear.)

Quote [Jed Rothwell]

I assume here that the version of the settlement published by Rossi is the real thing. That’s questionable.

And you really think that none of the other parties would have wanted to correct the public record by now?

The announcement is defective. The information I have, as of a few days ago, is that the text may be authentic, but a party has not signed. This is typical for Rossi: announce something as a done deal that isn’t yet a done deal. However, I consider it highly likely that the draft released without attribution by Lewan is authentic, and likely to be signed eventually.

Seems Abd was pursuing your train of thought as well. All I can hear is crickets. The fact that you and Abd question its veracity betray your true feelings about it.

Planet Rossi is filled with people who believe they can read minds. They are able to infer an entire universe from silence. I have actually affirmed, loosely, the veracity of the draft. However, there is another silence: there is no confirmation that it has been approved and that the text is accurate. I can infer that it’s likely accurate. Yet I must also point out the other side, lack of confirmation, which is simple fact, until there is confirmation.

What feelings are “betrayed” by pointing out obvious truth?

Planet Rossi — and other fanatics — infer what they want to believe from the thinnest of evidence and even a total lack of evidence. Want to know what I feel? Ask!

We know a little of how Dewey Weaver feels. He wrote:

Ele – As you may know, Rossi’s attorney proposed a walkaway moments before testimony was to begin. I presume that TD accepted to eliminate risk and to keep any further capital from flowing to law firms.

Rossi clearly wanted out for several obvious reasons. I’m personally disappointed that we did not see this through but completely understand and accept the decision.

I don’t see you anywhere near the finish line either – the one on your planet doesn’t count.

So he is “personally disappointed.”

I wasn’t, I’ve described the mood in the courtroom as the in-court joint motion was decided. That motion completely gave up any possibility of further legal action to collect on alleged torts. It did not return the license. I was happy to see this, it was a huge relief on all sides. I’ve written that Darden’s mood was “philosophical” or “pensive.” I read that as a combination of relief and a level of disappointment or acceptance of loss. After all, he had personally lost millions of dollars, gaining only experience.

(But experience can be extraordinarily valuable, and this is how successful people frame losses, they take responsibility and chalk it up to experience, and move on.)

The settlement agreement disappointed me, only in that it allowed Rossi to crow to his fans that he’d won what he really wanted all along. But his fans are mostly irrelevant to reality, in mercato veritas.

At this point, there is so much public evidence that anyone who is fooled by Rossi deserves loss. That is not the situation that existed, my opinion, before Rossi filed suit. While there were lots of reasons to be suspicious, even highly suspicious, there were also reasons in the other direction. Those have generally been demolished for anyone who cares to become familiar with available evidence.

Effectively, IH crushed the tests. Not to a level of absolute certainty, but to the point where no sane reason to believe Rossi was left, and it became, and remains, completely clear: Rossi lies, he cannot be trusted, and where there is some truth in what he says, it is often designed to be deceptive.

Consider this possible scenario. IH looks at Rossi’s behavior, as shown by Lewan and on JONP, and decides to change their mind. Because the settlement has not been signed by all parties, it is not irrevocable. So they formally revoke their consent and walk away. They could do this legally, until the point that all have signed.

The situation would remain that all claims were dismissed with prejudice. That would, however, allow them to later enforce the License Agreement against some new violation.

However, I don’t expect it, and why not?

Because they stand behind their promises. That’s what the case record shows.

(And they still have a possible hedge through Ampenergo.)

There are various cost-benefit analyses being presented on LENR Forum, purporting to show that “Rossi won.” They are generally defective because they simply balance extreme values without including probabilities.

Darden had a few minutes to decide in court. Even though I and the other observer were asked to leave the courtroom, I knew what was happening, and said so, as my analysis, (in the presence of Darden and his son) and that is when Darden said, “smart man,” which was a brilliant way of affirming my analysis without violating confidentiality (since “smart men” can make mistakes). As can be seen on ECW, evidence is twisted and presented in misleading ways. This one was fun because the evidence was my report, but disregarding entirely my own understanding of what I’d witnessed, and translating it, completely incorrectly, into what the writer wanted to prove.

The settlement agreement does not require confidentiality, except with regard to the Secret Fuel Formula and what was disclosed under the Protective Order. So it is possible that much more information will become public. Until the settlement agreement is fully signed, however, I’d expect substantial reserve; Rossi’s disclosure of it was probably not advised by his attorneys. What was the rush?

Update

Naturally, discussion continued on LF. As usual, more and more flabber. People who know little asserting what they think they know with great confidence. Maybe even a sock puppet, making a remarkable claim that could actually imply being a sock puppet.

There is standard pseudoskeptical garbage, normally not worth reply, such as this sarcastic comment.

(it misrepresents the scientific position, the conclusions of researchers who actually know the field, instead, ridiculing the position of some ignorant “believers” — and even a few scientists who ought to know better but don’t.)

Woodworker, an actual lawyer, took apart kevmolenr@gmail.com’s argument; Kev just came off a ban, and continues to troll with blatantly wrong-headed argument, not at all shy to directly contradict actual lawyers with his nutso legal analyses. (To me, one may ignorantly troll, it is possible to be a “sincere troll,” by being in reckless disregard of what one is saying, provoking time-wasting responses. This is different from mere inquiry.)

Not going to trial proves nothing as to the charges, either way. However, IH spent a year putting up evidence of fraudulent representation, and I spent a year collecting and presenting all the case documents, with analyses, and so Kev’s demand “put up or shut up” was trolling.

kevmolenr@gmail.com wrote:

If the evidence submitted under oath to the docket was proof of fraud then those investigators would be locking up Rossi today, their work already having been done for them. But that isn’t the case. Every day that goes by is another day we can say we have legal proof that Rossi is not a fraud.

Kev actually makes completely stupid arguments on both sides. Woodworker dismantles this one.

To add to what he wrote, I was discussing the settlement with a lawyer and pointed out that Lukacs may have warned Rossi of the possibility of a criminal prosecution for perjury (since there is apparently admissible evidence published in Rossi v. Darden that I think would convince a jury that Rossi had lied under oath). The lawyer thought not, and said something like “Do you know how many perjury convictions there are in the U.S.?” Damn lawyers! Always bringing up pesky facts. Apparently not many, compared to the number of offenses. I still think that a sensible lawyer would point to the risk. It isn’t zero, and my argument was that Lukacs would not accuse Rossi of lying, but only that it could look that way.

(The two examples I have in mind are the “Johnson Matthey” denial and then the heat exchanger story. And, yes, I’m fully aware of Rossi’s claims about JM, but they ignore the bulk of the evidence and focus only on the plausible deniability that he created. He intended to deceive them by leading them to continue to think that JM was the real customer, behind the JMC/JMP shell.)

Jed Rothwell pointed to a John Cleese video that refers to the Dunning Kruger effect. Absolutely worth the one minute it takes to watch. Rends came up a couple of notches in my opinion by approving of that video.

Alan Fletcher

[Reference to Fletcher was a minor part of this post update, but he has responded, so I’m creating an “AF” anchor here.]

(Just as Alan Fletcher gets a pile of points for agreeing to test the Prominent pumps. I’m still worried a bit about him, because he has continued with other face-palm stupidities. Ah well, nothing is purely anything.)

Alan Fletcher wrote:

Well, they declared in the contract that they had the money to pay him the $90M, so NOT having it was a breach.

In their investment letter they said they’d have to raise it quickly — at just the time they said it was not the GPT.

(Not quite the same thing legally).

But yes, he sued them anyway … so if they don’t have it right now they’ll have to pay it as they get it in (That for Darden and Vaughn individually).

Alan doesn’t point to actual evidence. The “contract,” i.e., the License Agreement, didn’t say what he claims. Such a statement would be rare. By the way, is it so hard to write “89” instead of “90”?

Without context, the reference to an “investment” letter is meaningless.

There was no breach from not having $89 million lying about ready to pay when the Agreement was signed. They paid $1.5 million to secure the agreement. That could be considered a deposit, though it was actually full payment for the Plant. This is common in, say, purchase agreements. You pay a deposit, and if you then don’t make further payments as promised, you might lose the deposit, or there might be other consequences. Failure to pay is common in business, so agreements normally contemplate it and provide for what happens then. The License Agreement didn’t do this, as to the $89 million.

Standard contract law: failure to pay is not evidence of fraudulent intent. If the payment is due — and Rossi’s evidence for that was flagrantly defective, legally — it’s a simple breach and complicating a simple breach with claims of fraud are disallowed.

Where did the $1.5 million come from? Apparently, discovery found that half of it came from Cherokee. That was almost certainly a personal loan to Darden, and it was almost certainly repaid, because Cherokee ended up with no ownership interest in Industrial Heat (contrary to some common claims). Then, to raise the $10 million payment needed for the IP transfer and delivery of the Plant, they created a stock issue for investment in IH, and raised $11.5 million immediately, and the full issue was for $20 million. And they secured, by 2014, long before any $89 million was due, another $200 million commitment from Woodford.

Had there been a legitimate need for $89 million to pay Rossi, they had it lined up.

Chaiken, in his opening statement for Rossi, claimed that IH turned on Rossi as soon as the Woodford $50 million investment cleared (which was in May of 2015). Something else happened around then, though. It was early in July 2015 that Rossi refused to allow Murray to visit the Plant. In his pleadings on this, he claimed that Murray was a spy. Indeed. What was Rossi hiding?

At that point, relations did fall apart between Rossi and IH. The attorneys were arguing by December. Rossi’s oft-repeated claims that IH only complained when it was time to pay (i.e., end of March, 2016, per Rossi’s demand) were just more Rossi Lies.

Rossi now says that he decided he wanted out of the agreement when he found that IH was dealing with his “competitors.” That’s possible. When would that have been? Probably in the middle of 2015.

However, nothing he says can be trusted, so often has he lied and misled.

I don’t expect anyone to believe this just because I say so. The task ahead is to organize the case documents for ready access, so that others can see what I’ve seen, without spending a year reading documents. All who are interested in supporting public knowledge are welcome to assist in this process, and if I err, correction is welcome, both here and as published elsewhere.

Author: Abd ulRahman Lomax

See http://coldfusioncommunity.net/biography-abd-ul-rahman-lomax/

10 thoughts on “Speak of the devil”

  1. I am a bit disappointed you waste your time over at LENR forum. There is no information to be gained there is my pov. It’s a way to spend your time fighting windmills. Maybe there is a way to spend it more productively?

    1. If you are disappointed, you must expect something better. Thanks. But windmills are so attractive! Meanwhile, any specific suggestions other than “Don’t do that”?

      I gain information from many sources. I don’t think of LENR Forum as a reliable information source. However, there are people who write there who are reliable, and there is also a lot of drek. Some of the drek reflects common memes. Just yesterday, there is more crap about Cherokee; on the fact it’s flat-out wrong: evidence that is not understood is presented as proof of Something Bad. So … yes, someone is wrong in the internet, hold dinner. So … tell me, what’s for dinner?

      1. So what? There is so many wrong stuff or there… Do u get paid to fix everything that’s wrong about Cherokee (registered trademark) on the web or is it just your hobby?

        1. Tell me first who you are and what your interest is.

          You are claiming “wrong stuff.” What wrong stuff? Your comments are useless. From my point of view, you are a piece of flotsam. Surprise me, show me otherwise.

          No, I am not paid to fix stuff about Cherokee. I have not discussed Cherokee with anyone associated with the company. You could call it a hobby, but it’s more like a small detail in a much larger and more significant activity. Hobby? Life work? There is a difference?

          These comments will disappear. They may be recovered on request.

  2. It’s a bit like Rossi: it’s easy to dismiss him because of blatant errors, but that’s not conclusive. Maybe he has something. We aren’t going to spend $10 million on Shanahan, are we? But if we find something valuable in the pile, maybe it will make a difference somewhere, at least some possible artifact might either be found or experimentally ruled out. In general, I’ve found, genuine skeptics want to see this work done.

    The issue with Shanahan and CCS/ATER is a lack of careful examination of what are the limits of his ideas. But the people they apply to, in the best position to do that examination, have (Marwan et al) dismisses his ideas without proper consideration. Marwan et al is full of mistakes and does not even try to quantitatively limit Shanahan’s ideas. So in this matter at the moment Shanahan has contributed more than Marwan et al. A shame when Marwan et al are those who should be interested because CCS/ATER is a potential explanation for some subset of the anomalies they view as important.

    1. THH, for this analysis to be meaningful, it must become specific. I can communicate directly with the scientists involved in Marwan et al. I’m not going to do so until there is something very clear to communicate. At this point, it is far too fuzzy.

  3. It did not return the license. I was happy to see this, it was a huge relief on all sides.
    The draft settlement Mats published, I believe, did return the license. It cancelled all obligations, asked for all patents to be assigned only to Rossi, etc. Of course that was from Rossi so what was the actual settlement I don’t know.

    Logical for Rossi to get back the license. Why? It has no intrinsic worth, but its PR worth for Rossi is much higher than its worth to IH. So in a sensible world Rossi would end up with it. While I greatly regret Rossi being free to continue his schemes there is enough out there now to make big mistakes, like IH, no longer likely.

    1. The “It” was what was revealed in court, I think. The “settlement agreement” that we have seen was negotiated over the next few days. It may have been that the private agreement in court, not made a part of the record, returned the license. What I saw in court, though, was palpable relief on all sides.

      Yes, I agree about “sensible,” from a certain point of view.

      People who have over $10 million to invest and willing to commit to much more, under some circumstances, are not likely to take such a risk in the future. IH already explored that mine field, not necessary to do it again. They survived, and even came out ahead, with some analyses (that is, their boldness probably enabled the much larger Woodford investment. Many IH investigations came up bust (i.e., no commercial value found). That’s predictable for LENR, with the state of the art. The biggest money being spent right now will have no commercial implications, it will, at best, open the door for increased pure research funding. (So it makes helium. So what, what is helium worth? Does that help to design devices with higher COP or self-sustaining? No? … Right, no. It may contribute to the development of better theory, which may then help with more efficient devices. Maybe. In the long term, perhaps.)

      For the future, I assume that big money for anything LENR will insist on bulletproof agreements and fully independent testing, no jokes or compromises.

      IH made their choice knowing the risk, my opinion. They were not naive, they *spent* that money to find out what could not otherwise be determined. They may have saved many smaller investors much loss.

      Rossi’s reasons for deciding he didn’t want to work with IH any more spell it out completely. What he considered intolerable was only intolerable within a megalomaniacal world-view. The “right of first refusal” could not harm Rossi in the least, that only protected IH to a degree. In the absence of any actual sales this was only some theoretical situation, meaningless if no other sales were being made. Same with future technology. Rossi had tons of protection against an unfair IH demand regarding future technology, all he had to do was show successful technology transfer for the basic E-Cat, and that the GPT had expired was a detail IH was clearly willing to set aside, if they could just learn to make working devices that passed independent testing.

      So if Rossi technology is real, Rossi’s paranoia totally shot him in the foot. Which is sad to contemplate. However, there is plenty of reason to think that his insanity is not confined to his paranoia of big corporations and competition. We are returned to noticing that there are no full independent confirmations of the Rossi Effect. Lugano was punk, damaged by bull-headed stupidity, and Parkhomov’s work is (1) not a Rossi confirmation merely because he says so, and (2) itself unconfirmed; what has been seen can easily fall under the file-drawer effect — with many failures and no coherent pattern of success, basically nothing clearly learned.

      (There is a resemblance to the general LENR field, but there is much there that does represent learning, with correlations not only with ash (PdD -> helium and heat) but also with conditions (such as improved results from specific Pd processing, correlation with loading, with current density, and similar factors, and then a host of smaller and less clearly confirmed correlations with, say, radiation, X-rays, tritium. There is no doubt that there are weaknesses in the field, but it’s not “nothing.”)

      And, of course, THH, you are going to help examine all this here, right? We really need to take a far more careful look at Shanahan, even though some in the field are kicking and screaming about that. “Oh, no, not Shanahan again? Can’t I just have a root canal operation instead?”

      No root canal. Nobody need participate if they don’t want to. My goal is that Shanahan’s ideas are fully and carefully considered and the evidence for and against them is presented and organized. The existing discussions don’t do that, and the Marwan et al rebuttal is not conclusive, or, more accurately, flaws in it can be identified. Everyone makes mistakes, or fails to be completely accurate on every point. “Random CCS” sets off Shanahan, and I don’t wonder, it must be infuriating. But …I would also ascribe that to Shanahan’s lack of good communications skills. We can assist him, right?

      (I’ve tried before, he’s never been particularly cooperative, but you might have better luck. It’s a bit like Rossi: it’s easy to dismiss him because of blatant errors, but that’s not conclusive. Maybe he has something. We aren’t going to spend $10 million on Shanahan, are we? But if we find something valuable in the pile, maybe it will make a difference somewhere, at least some possible artifact might either be found or experimentally ruled out. In general, I’ve found, genuine skeptics want to see this work done. I’ve found a lot of support for testing heat/helium with increased precision. And that is how science can move forward, through the development of genuine skepticism and genuine scientific investigation that isn’t so quick to set out to proclaim belief in this or that, including “established physics.” I would never suggest tossing out established physics, that would just be dumb. Rather, there might be room for some tweaks here or there. Maybe. If we believe it’s impossible, we would never see them.

      (The collection of effects called LENR are not contradictory to existing physics until a mechanism is shown to be actually happening where existing physics would predict otherwise. It’s long been well-known that it is impossible to determine that an unknown mechanism is impossible — unless it is first identified and specified enough to actually make the calculations and predictions, and that has never been possible with “cold fusion,” since it’s a mystery, and that is why I keep repeating that. The first question should be “what happens,” not “how” it happens. Aw, Planet Rossi is going nuts right now over the collection of contradictions called QX, as reflected in the Gullstrong paper, combined with Rossi rationalizations.)

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