How to Spot a Psychopath

Nothing much was going on in the riveting Firepower imbroglio, until yesterday.

Before then, the wife of Firepower former-business-partner Warren Anderson said he attacked her, during an argument about a missing computer (there do indeed seem to be a lot of missing computers in this story...). She hauled Warren into court to face those charges, and then he said he didn't do it. Whoopee.

Now, though, Tim Johnston has said that Firepower - uh, well, the Firepower company that was selling possibly-illegal shares to Australian investors, anyway - never actually owned the intellectual rights to their products. See, it was one of the several other Firepower companies that owned the IP rights. That other company was run by a guy called Trevor Nairn, and Tim says he wouldn't give up the rights.

So, according to Tim, the abovementioned Warren Anderson rounded up some blokes to remonstrate with Mr Nairn, by taking him on one of those stimulating little day-trips that involve one or more large gentlemen with weapons, one unwilling participant, a shovel, and an isolated area.

You may have seen this procedure in a movie.

(If you haven't, allow me to recommend "The Magician"!)

Mr Nairn says that nothing of the sort ever happened.

This is all almost as mystifying to me as Mr Nairn says it is to him, since the Firepower fuel additives, just like the umpteen other such additives hucksters have sold over the years - and including of course the other additives that Tim Johnston himself previously sold in New Zealand - were and are completely worthless.

(Well, either that, or the people selling these things invariably try really really hard to make all of their "supporting evidence" look like a crock of crap. A product that did what their countless products are always said to do would be worth billions of dollars a year, but they never bother to take a lazy week to properly prove their claims and thus uncork the money-fountain.)

Who gives a damn if you've got the world rights to manufacture your placebo? Just make a new one, to a different formula, and go on with your upstanding legitimate business. No grave-digging, real or fictional, required!

Perhaps Johnston is just still trying to keep up the front that he believes his products actually work, and it's all a giant conspiracy by the oil companies and the Freemasons and Jehovah to make him look bad, or something.

It would still, of course, be simplicity itself to hand a couple of packs of Firepower pills - I think whoever's currently sitting on the cardboard box containing Firepower's surviving assets might be persuaded to give 'em up - to one of the dozens, if not hundreds, of organisations in Australia who could see if the claims were true.

I'll hold my breath for that, if you will!