Re: questions of integrity etc. Judging the actions of an individual as honest or dishonest misses the point. First one has to ask to what extent this individual is aware of his words and actions and the impact they might have in the market, shareholders etc. The view from this quarter is that individuals, though they may think that what they say and do at a point in history is the expression of their free will based on certain given facts, are mere puppets tossed around by forces beyond their control. And in our case by market forces. So individuals merely echo the market relations as they perceive them at that point in time; later though they may realize that what they were saying yesterday, is no longer true today. So individuals though tossed around, i.e., saying and doing things that later revise, may realize that they have been fooled by events and are forced to revise their predictions or to realize the folly of their predictions. This is what has happened in the case of Ken Bates and his team. When they were cocky about the met coal market, they were in a state of euphoria and unguarded optimism so they made the first forecast; when the first forecast turned our to be a fluke, they revised down to a second forecast and when that failed too, they gave a third one and when that one did not seem possible, they must have realized that reality was not unfolding as it should. So, if that is the case, the question of character integrity becomes irrelevant and the question should be " what were the underlying causes that made Bates et al hunt for a production target that was never reached?" Posing the question this way we can easily conclude that the man did not have the intellectual capacity or experience to make the right judgement and he was simply a puppet of the circumstances and when he realized that he asked for help. And that is where David Stone comes in to save Bates and his Holy Family, McKnight et al. So we see here that Bates realized after the fact , the near demise of his empire, that not all is well. And too bad for us we are the victims of his idiocy.