Bob Cook <[email protected]> wrote: IMHO you seem to select those folks who you want to believe, and distrust > those that seem to support Rossi’s comments. >
It may seem so to you, but you are wrong. I have met with and worked with many people who worked with Rossi -- or tried to work with him. People from the Navy, NASA and elsewhere, and also venture capitalists. I know a lot about their interactions. I am not free to describe everything I know, but I believe what they told me, and based on this information, I do not trust Rossi and I think he is incompetent. This is not what I "want to believe." It is a conclusion I reached carefully after many years and dozens of conversations, e-mails, formal reports, proposals and so on. Frankly, I resent it when you claim this is what I "want" to believe, and when others here say I am jumping to conclusions based on thin evidence. Why the hell would I "want" to conclude that I.H. wasted $11 million?!? Schadenfreude? Do you think I want to see the last, best hope for funding cold fusion destroyed? After devoting years of my life to this effort, do you think I "want" to see millions of dollars wasted? You have no idea what I know or who I have talked to. You have no basis for making these assertions. Furthermore, if you know me, you will know that I am very careful about judging people or experiments, and I bend over backwards to give people the benefit of the doubt. I do not jump to conclusion. But I also do not deny overwhelming evidence from dozens of people describing Rossi's behavior. I spent three days at a conference talking informally with the people from NASA who Rossi almost killed. I know what happened, in detail. I know about the financial support they were offering him. That incident alone proves that Rossi is grossly irresponsible, incompetent, a loose cannon, and either crazy or criminal. You need to get a grip and think about what he did: He seriously endangered people's lives. He got angry and denied it when they showed him the pipe was clogged and there was high pressure steam leaking out of the welded joints. He and everyone in the room evacuated when it became apparent there was no safety valve. They later opened the reactor and proved it had been on the verge of an explosion. He *refused* to do the test again properly! When they told him they could not pay him millions of dollars as discussed, because he would not do a test, he became infuriated and he threw them out. Rossi has done this sort of thing time after time, not just with this group but with others. This is only one example out of many. Based on this incident alone, he has no credibility and nothing he says can be believed. The people at I.H., on the other hand, have loads of credibility. If they say the 1-year test produced no excess heat, and Rossi says it produced 50 times input, I believe them. I have abundant, well-grounded reasons for believing them. It is not a conclusion that I jumped to the day the lawsuit was announced. - Jed
