Friday, April 10, 2009
Last Sunday, NBC Dateline exposed the Hydro Assist Fuel Cell, sold by
Dennis Lee, as a scam. It seemed like such a simple idea: powered by the
alternator, the HAFC decomposes water into hydrogen and oxygen and adds a
whiff of hydrogen into the combustion mixture, supposedly extending the
mileage you get. There are two small problems: it takes more energy to
decompose water than you get from combustion of the hydrogen, and Dennis
Lee is notorious for his scams. The hydrogen fuel scam has been fooling the
scientifically ignorant, including George W. Bush and former congressman
Robert Walker, for at least 40 years. This time, however, Lee was up
against tough Dateline investigators aided by the indefatigable Eric Krieg
of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, and a cameo
appearance by Bob Park. Lee got clobbered. I think.
In July of 1997, I was invited to go with an NBC Dateline camera crew to
cover a demonstration of a perpetual motion machine in Hackensack, NJ. You
don't get a chance to do that everyday. "Put one in your home and you will
never have to pay another electric bill," an ad in the Wall Street Journal
said. But Lee doesn't sell perpetual motion machines; he sells dealerships
for perpetual motion machines. The machine turned out to be the Gamgee Zero-
motor, invented in 1880 by John Gamgee who managed to sell it to the Navy;
it didn't work then either http://bobpark.org/WN97/wn071897.html . The
idea is to use a liquid that boils at room temperature to drive a piston,
thereby extracting energy from the ambient. Gamgee tried ammonia, but only
confirmed the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Lee solved that by using
carbon dioxide, which is liquid only under pressure. Thus the machine
actually ran on compressed carbon dioxide; not quite perpetually, but long
enough for a demonstration. NBC decided it was too technical for the
Dateline audience and it was never used. Two years later, I was a
consultant for ABC Good Morning America at a Lee demonstration in Columbus,
Ohio. He now had a perpetual-motion machine that used permanent magnets
(the 1870 Paine machine). By the time he got to Spokane in 2002 it
was “the principle of counter rotation.” Only the scam was perpetual.
I was hired as a consultant by the Atty. Gen. of the state of Washington to
prepare an affidavit on Lee's scams. Based on my affidavit, a state court
granted a summary judgment barring Lee from doing business in Washington.
In 2003, I did the same for the Atty. Gen. of Maine. Lee is also barred
from doing business in Kentucky. That leaves 47 states to go before he
moves to Canada. Each state is willing to let him screw people somewhere
else. I hear the Federal Trade Commission may be interested, but Lee is
not Bernie Madoff. Robbing retired couples who hope to extend their meager
retirement income doesn't put Lee in a Manhattan penthouse, but he may be,
well, perpetual.
Demographic experts warn that population decline in Russia could have
serious economic consequences. It's the same growth-is-good bull shit that
always comes from the Chamber of Commerce. Russia's neighbors, Norway,
Finland and Sweden, have the highest standards of living in the world and
small populations. Afghanistan, on the other hand, which is not exactly a
tourist Mecca, has a fertility rate above 7, the highest in the world.
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