Jones Beene wrote:
The term "suppression" can cover a lot of ground . . .
This is an important point. If you define it loosely enough, just about every idea has been suppressed. A few thin-skinned researchers consider it "suppression" when people has hard questions about their papers or express doubts, or when I insist that papers at LENR-CANR be converted to a particular Acrobat format.
As far as I know, oil companies have played no role in the suppression of cold fusion. It appears to be entirely a petty academic squabble. Powerful theorists opposed it because they think it violates theory, and journal editors hopped on the bandwagon because attacking weak & vulnerable people is fun and it gives you political advantages.
I probably would not know if oil companies and other powerful interests had helped suppress cold fusion, but I might've heard rumors to that effect.
(many feel that Bush himself is/was little more than a puppet in this contrived War, the lies of WMD and that Dick Cheney is the evil genius).
I think that Bush is his own man, and I am sure that Colin Powell and others within the administration sincerely believed the WMD were real. Heck, he had me fooled for a while! If I had known more about the aluminum tubes that were supposedly part of centrifuges, and the opinions of actual centrifuge experts at Los Alamos, I would have know that was baloney and I would have been more suspicious of the other claims. I regret that I did not fact check these things more carefully before the war. I believe that is the responsibility of a technically literate citizen.
Needless to say, Powell and the other administration officials were grossly irresponsible for not listening to U.S. experts in centrifuges! Perhaps at some point, a refusal to listen crosses the line from callous irresponsibility to outright suppression. The apocryphal story about Catholic church experts who refused to look through Galileo's telescope is an example. The actual example of the Scientific American editors who refuse to read papers about cold fusion is real suppression.
... and why not? OPEC supplies the perfect model for this kind of nefarious activity .... and in fact, many insiders assert that OPEC itself was actually the invention of the 'trust mentality' fostered by Standard Oil. IOW ... the tradition of Esso did not just inspire OPEC but it was them (the Esso heirs and offspring) who actually *drew up the blueprint* for OPEC, and presented it to the Arabs in great detail through ARAMCO.
If they did draw up a blueprint it was for convenience only, to save a few months of work by corporate finance and legal wonks. All businessmen always collude, when they can get away with it. They do that is naturally, the way birds fly and fish swim. You can clip the wings and stop them with antitrust legislation, but they will always try to circumvent it. Businessmen in collusion always betray one another as well. A 19th-century businessman said, "price-fixing lasts roughly as long as it takes the first man to leave the meeting to run to the telegraph office and underbid the others."
U.S. antitrust legislation has no authority over OPEC, needless to say. There is no such thing as an international law to prevent this kind of thing as far as I know. I am sure there is no law in Saudi Arabia or Venezuela that prohibits colluding internationally, so these companies are perfectly within their rights.
- Jed
