JedRothwell #conspiracy lenr-forum.com

A "conspiracy" is defined at "a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful." The opposition to cold fusion has always been public. It is published in the leading journals, and headed up by plasma fusion researchers, the DoE, Scientific American and other mainstream organizations. They do not hide their activity. On the contrary, they brag about how they destroyed the research and fired the researchers.

Conspiracy is sometimes defined as an "organized" action. The opposition to cold fusion is not organized as far as I know. So it is not a conspiracy. It is academic politics, which are rampant in all fields of academia.

You have to understand that compared to other professions such as programming or engineering, ethical standards in academia are in the gutter. I have worked with many different kinds of people in my life, in the U.S. and in Japan. I have only encountered one group more corrupt than academic scientists: the mafia members who ran Las Vegas hotels where I used to install computer equipment.

In academic politics, anything goes. Tactics such as character assassination, threats of deportation, pulling strings to cut funding or cancel meetings, using the government to harass opponents and demand personal correspondence and tax returns, stealing ideas during peer-review, publishing fake data, and sabotaging experiments are widespread in academia. They are as common as fleas on an alley cat. I assume Robert Park and others were so quick to accuse Fleischmann and Pons of being frauds and criminals because they know that such people are common in academia.

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Confused?

So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

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