parallel wrote:
I care very little about what pieces of parchment he has, I'm more interested in what he does. Apparently a lot more than most on this blog.
Teemu, like you, missed the point of what I wrote. You earlier went on about Rossi not having a theory as if that was essential before making a new discovery. You're bonkers.
Recently, after reading a book about the Garfield assassination, I was struck by the parallels to how President James Garfield received atrocious medical care after he was shot on July 2, 1881 to the current cold fusion dilemma.
It’s all about intellectual arrogance and how destructive that cardinal vice can be.
Garfield would have easily survived the bullet, but died weeks later from infection after being exposed to gross medical malpractice from the best doctors of that time. Most American doctors of that period dismissed the "germ theory" pioneered by non-American scientists, such as British doctor Joseph Lister.
The arrogance of American physicians of that day and their disrespect of the work of foreign scientists resulted in their rejection of modern surgical sterile techniques that had been well-established in Europe.
It was an early edition of the intellectual arrogance and the prejudice of "American exceptionalism," the belief that America and Americans were inherently superior, even divinely exalted.
Because they couldn’t see them, American doctors ridiculed belief in bacteria, comparing it to the silly, contemporary belief in fairies.
Doctors even took pride in their filth, carrying blood, pus, and dirt from one patient to the next. In 1881 American country doctors were still applying hot cow manure to open wounds. The doctors treating Garfield routinely performed surgery in their practices without changing their clothes or washing their hands and held instruments in their teeth for convenience.
Much like the Garfield assassination, arrogance of the critics of Italian and Greek developed Cold Fusion have closed their minds to its possibility.
Our current response to the "fever" and "infection" spreading through the American scientific community is to allow the most ignorant and disingenuous of us to bully the rest of us to inaction and disbelief. The level of scientific sophistication of this reactionary group are applying to the task is on a par with Garfield’s doctors in 1881. You can’t see chemically induced nuclear reactions; therefore it must not be happening. But transmutation of elements is natural and is happening all the time in the world around us, in the same way that bacteria are all pervasive. Therefore, linking nuclear chemical reactions to cold fusion must be a hoax.
The embrace of American exceptionalism in its entrenched scientific community, including academic, corporate, and governmental groups have only grown since Garfield’s time, permeating our general discourse, common opinion, culture and politics. American scientific entitlement and perceived superiority is the red flag being waved and the idea that American science is not bound by either the laws of nature or conciliation with work done in other nations is in full bloom in the American energy development plan.
Dancing to the tune of its energy-billionaire corporate backers, the American science establishment panders to our basest and most selfish instincts, luring us to utterly surrender our energy future to fossil fuels.
As with the arrogant and ignorant doctors in 1881, established science is committing malpractice in the extreme, as primitive, as scientifically offensive, and ultimately as lethal as putting hot cow manure on our open wounds.