EQF,

"And I believe that I now understand what the politics are which are controlling this particular situation. But I do not want to discuss what is taking place here in public."

As usual, you bring up a topic, do not provide the specific mechanism Shan uses in prediction, then claim you do not want to discuss how this illustrates your main point.

Water level in wells is not an obscure measurement.
The level and chemistry of water in wells has been monitored in many places for decades. The use of wells for detecting strain has been largely supplanted by borehole instruments such as Don describes here from time to time. They are orders of magnitude more sensitive, yet still only provide tantalizing hints about ground deformation, not clear warning of coming quakes.

Just this Thursday, I watched a talk by a post-doc at Harvard who was studying the level of dozens of water wells at the time of a couple of M6.5 events in Iceland. The data did not warn of the coming quakes, they revealed the response of the ground to the strain of the earthquakes.

I encourage you to post facts not innuendo.

John