Astroturfing Cold Fusion: Making the Promise Seem Real

I've been watching the Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) world for the last few months waiting for something tangible as far as real commercial products go but, to date, there's nothing of consequence to report.

Sure, Leonardo, Defkalion and Brillouin have made all made announcements but as far as anything proven to actually work it's still "jam tomorrow".

Now, before all of you LENR boosters start getting all wound up, yes, I will agree that there has been a lot of interesting theorizing and some intriguing laboratory experiments concerning Low Energy Nuclear reactions and, if the reports are to be believed, the latter provide evidence that LENR is a real phenomena (albeit one that appears to defy the known laws of physics).

But the real question is "how real?" Is LENR real enough to provide continuous and significant "over unity" performance (that is, producing more power than is put into the system)? So far, not that I'm aware of.

Alright boosters, sure, there are claims that various setups have run for weeks or even months but it seems that these demonstrations are few and far between. If useful LENR is indeed real where's the nearest test bed I can go and actually see?

But when it comes to the much anticipated commercialization of LENR, it's interesting that there's a certain amount of what appears to be "astroturfing" going on in what we hope is the lull before the world changes.

If you haven't come across this term before, "astroturfing",it's defined by the Encyclopedia Galact-, er, Wikipedia as:

... a form of advocacy in support of a political, organizational, or corporate agenda, designed to give the appearance of a "grassroots" movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political or commercial entity as an independent public reaction ... The term is a derivation of AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to look like natural grass.

So, to artificially raise the visibility of a product or service you might do things such as set up multiple Web sites with lots of similar articles (a practice also called "farming") or you can pay bloggers to carry your articles. Either way, you're trying to increase the perceived reality and value of whatever you're trying to promote.

I first noticed what looked like astroturfing in the LENR world a few weeks ago when I was trying to figure out which blogs were covering the Rossi E-Cat system, arguably the best known of the power generation systems claimed to operate using an LENR process.

I originally wrote about the E-Cat and its Italian inventor, Andrea Rossi, back in October last year, just before his big demonstration in Bologna that left us all wondering what was the point of the the event (unfortunately, the whole thing looked more like a stage-managed PR circus than a real demonstration because it produced no test results -- at least none that were made public).

Anyway, over the last few weeks I'd been tracking down articles and references to Rossi and his E-Cat system and I started to make a list of the sites involved. By the time I'd dug my way through a number of these sites (see my list at the end of this posting) I suspected that I was seeing some articles over and over again.

I then found a site called "New Electrics" that offered an article titled "So How Do Economists Think Free Energy Will Roll Out?" dated March 21, 2012. The article summary read:

"This is the first in a series of guest posts written by Paul Bennett, PhD Student in Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia. Each post will deal with a question pertaining to Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat technology"

As I knew I'd seen this article before, I did a quick survey using the following Google search:

https://www.google.com/search?q="Paul Bennett, PhD Student in Economics

at George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia"

... and found that same article on nine sites:

www.e-catworld.com
ecatnow.com
newelectrics.blogspot.com
cold-fusion.us
coldfusionblog.net
www.finanzaonline.com
mentrenkonline.info
it-it.facebook.com
22passi.blogspot.com

This article appears to have first been published in September last year but it turns up dated at various times right up to this March (this underlines one of the big red flags for anything published online; if it has no date, or, as in this case, no definitive date, you should immediately doubt the motives of the content).

Since then I've run similar search on chunks of text found in other postings on various blogs and found similar results, for example:

It seems that since Andrea Rossi has been working with the Siemans turbine that has allowed efficient production of electricity at low steam

... gets 74 hits . Note that the misspelling of "Siemans" occurs in all of the results implying that the article was simply placed online with no editorial oversight.

As is typical of astroturfed content, these articles are written with a faux objectivity, are poorly written, and convey little useful insight or detail while providing lots of positive spin about Rossi and the E-Cat system.

All of this sure looks a lot like astroturfing to me but, so far, I have no evidence as to who might be behind it and what their motives might be.

Thus, I leave you, dear reader, to draw your own conclusions.

Sites and Blogs Carrying Rossi/E-Cat Related Stories

Site: http://rossifocardifusion.com/

Tag: "Rossi Cold Fusion & LENR / News about Andrea Rossi and Focardi Cold fusion E-cat invention!"

Site: http://energycatalyzer3.com/

Tag: "Cold Fusion News about Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi E-Cat (Energy Catalyzer)"

Site: http://nickelpower.org

Tag: "Exploring the technical, economic and social ramifications of Andrea Rossi's e-cat Cold Fusion reactor."

Owner: Bruce Fast

Site: http://ecat-news.com/

Tag: "Consolidated News Service"