Fear as Fact
The Precautionary Principle versus Critical Thinking
By Carl Bussjaeger, 1/13/2003

A potential danger to human health - which has been appallingly clear to the properly-informed for decades - has been largely ignored by the United States government.

A suggestively large percentage of adult deaths in recent years, a fraction far too high to be mere coincidence, has involved recent intake of the hazardous chemical substance dihydrogen monoxide.

Scientists have been aware for many years that dihydrogen oxide may pose extreme risks even in moderate amounts. Elevated dihydrogen monoxide levels in the bloodstream have been categorically linked to electrolyte imbalances that can cause death. In larger quantities, it can completely block oxygen uptake necessary for life.

At low temperatures, even a small quantity of this oxide, a powerful solvent which the less-astute might think safe, can actually result in gross physical trauma. Likewise at elevated temperatures, painful or life-threatening burns can result.

Despite this clear threat, it can be shown that the oxide was imbibed within mere hours of almost every adult death in the country. Horribly worse still, helpless children are permitted to consume this toxic chemical. As with adults, innocent children are exposed to the oxide, only to die within hours.

Yet this substance is virtually unregulated. A vast industry has sprung up to distribute the vile fluid across the entire nation. It can be purchased without the presentation of any form of identification or license. Guileless children are duped into peddling this stuff with its presence masked by sugar and citrus adulterants, making it appear desirable to still other small children.

Unregulated, indeed. Most existing "laws" regarding this terrible substance do no more than guarantee its purity. The actual trafficking and consumption of dihydrogen oxide is not restricted in the least.

Libertarians will try to tell you that there have been no scientific studies detailing the physical cause and effect between casual - or recreational - use of dihydrogen oxide and physical harm. This may or may not be true. But when the symptoms and havoc wreaked by excessive abuse are so very clear, and when empirical and anecdotal evidence make the nearly 100% correlation between dihydrogen oxide abuse and death abundantly lucid, can we afford to wait for some ivory tower intellectual to conduct yet another inconclusive study? Will we allow profit-grubbing capitalists to continue foisting this poison on our children simply because some self-centered fool with no sense of society just wants his own fix?

Please, contact your Congressman, your Senators, especially your city and county councils. Demand that they do something for the children. Protect your children, and mine, from pushers who would pump this liquid poison down their throats. Demand legislation to ban the distribution, possession, and use of dihydrogen oxide. Beg your courts to imprison these sick oxide-lords forever.

Do it for the children.

Put an end to drinking water.

Reality Check

If you're smart enough to have found this website, you're probably giggling to yourself by now. I hope. <g>

But just in case (I get visitors from all over): dihydrogen oxide = H2O = water. And everything I wrote about the dangers of water is true. Drinking too much can throw off your electrolyte balance, you can drown in a pool, slip on a patch of ice, and be burned by steam.

And the correlation between drinking water and death is also true. But then, so is the correlation between breathing and death: Everyone who drinks water or breathes oxygen will die eventually. Of old age, accidents, murder, whatever. If they didn't use air and water, they wouldn't live long enough to die of anything else, those substances being necessary to human life.

Duh!

Shall we ban oxygen? Or just require a license for its use?

Silly questions, eh? But these are exactly the sort of unreasoned responses that some "environmentalists," product safety NAZIs, and ill-informed- but-well-meaning busybodies demand for all sorts of things.

DDT was banned because its abuse could lead to poisoning critters which weren't the intended target. Never mind that it held insect borne diseases like malaria in check. And now America is faced with mosquito-carried West Nile virus.

What you're seeing is the "precautionary principle" at work; the theory that if something might be bad sometimes, it's best to fix it now, without waiting for little things like scientific studies to determine if it really is bad, or if the options might even be lethally worse.

This is the same fear-based "just in case" non-thinking that is currently causing blasted fools and innocent people to receive smallpox vaccinations known to have unpleasant, and occasionally dangerous, side-effects to protect them from an attack with an extinct disease by a country that no one has shown to even possess the stuff, much less a delivery system that wouldn't kill them, too. ( It's telling that the US Idiot-in-Chief stepped up to get one of the first of these dangerously pointless treatments, assuming they didn't prick him with saline solution.)

Getting to the point

In America, it looks as though people haven't been taught how to evaluate anything. Since critical thinking is tough (and once learned, might - heavens forfend! - be applied to little things like, say... government policies, it isn't in the best interest of government to teach critical thinking and the scientific method in government schools. Instead, we end up with drones who have been taught that what they feel is more important than what they think.

So they start with fear of a possible (not necessarily potential, mind you) hazard, take that fear as fact, and never bother to test the idea.

• Fear of forest fire fires leads to total fire suppression, to the point where the forests are clogged with flammable brush feeding fires that can no longer be suppressed.
• Fear of "damaging the environment leads to a ban on roads and logging that also add to fire danger. (Ever notice how rarely the EPA or Forest Service cite beavers for altering their streams without a permit, or deer and other game for building paths through the woods?)
• Fear of "Internet predators" (in all these years, I've never encountered one myself), leads to expensive legislation and questionable law enforcement actions to stop crimes that never occurred.
• The fear of "what if my innocuous neighbor is a secret terrorist/criminal" led to anonymous snitch hotlines.
• The fear of potential terror acts by supposed sleeper cells who might use ordinary bank accounts and other above-board services led to warrantless domestic spying on citizens, as authorized by the USA PATRIOT and Homeland Security Acts.
• The fear that if a gun were lost or stolen, and if it were sold to a criminal somewhere else, and if it were then used to commit a crime, and if a child were hurt, has led to gun bans that have rendered honest people helpless target for many more criminals.
• The fear that some doctor - professionally trained - might prescribe a particular drug for a child has led to an expensive and risky process of testing drugs on children when the manufacturer never even intended the drug to be used on children, delaying new medicines that much longer, and pricing them out of the reach of some who do need them.
• And so on, and so forth.

The point arrives

Stop taking fear for fact.

Not only does that course cause you to do things dangerous to yourself and others, it causes you to waste resources and ignore real solutions.

Next time some busybody tells you that a scary problem exists, and demands draconian solutions, try this: Ask questions.

• How do you know? - How did you determine that this is a problem? How did you establish that this course of action will fix it? How do you know something else won't fix it?
• Why does this require attention? - Can we take action without making it (or something else) worse? Is there already a mechanism in place to address this?
• What are the facts? - Pretty pictures are nice, but I want to see the source data. And has anyone else verified your facts independently?
• Who says so? - Who is he? What are his credentials? Do he have any proprietary interest in doing things this way?

So much for the basic critical thinking portion of the class. I'm still going to keep this simple for the .gov visitors, but perhaps you folks with a little scientific training noticed something about those questions (maybe some old journalism students did, too). Properly applied, those questions amount to the scientific method.

All I'm asking that you do is apply the scientific method to problems before demanding that the rest of us are forced into a wild goose chase for the wrong solution to the wrong problem. You don't have to be a "scientist" yourself, but you can at least insist that the forms are followed:

Observe: How was the supposed problem discovered? What did they see? Where are the facts?

Hypothesize: Be imaginative. Think up various explanations and solutions to what was found.

Test: Look for ways, not only to prove the idea, but to disprove it. Make sure your explanation is correct, and that something else doesn't do a better job of explaining it. If it doesn't work, go back to hypothesize and pick another idea to test.

Verify: Once you find something that seems to work, try again. Better yet, get someone else to try. The idea is too make sure your proof wasn't a fluke, or that haven't missed some other little fact that can cause different results under different circumstances.

You don't have to be a chemical engineer, research biologist, or theoretical physicist to use this process. In fact, it's very much what a good cook goes through when developing a new recipe for the world's greatest chili.

And if you aren't in a position to personally apply the process to an issue like the spotted owl versus logging companies, you can check to see if the folks on each side of the problem applied the scientific method to their own proposed solutions.

Or if any of them are acting out of unreasoned fear, possibly at your expense.

Think about it.

Critically.