The Power of Indefinable Words

(Editor's Note:  Since it's now being claimed the states and cities won't open things back up until they know we're "safe" from this coronavirus I thought it was a good time to reintroduce this eleven year old article dealing with pesticide safety to our current leftist and media driven hysteria "we're doomed" crisis of the moment.  

Bare with me regarding the pesticide part, but the pesticide part will lay groundwork for this coronavirus issue.  Because some things just don't change, only the names change. RK)

By Rich Kozlovich Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Words are powerful tools, especially when those words can't properly be defined and evoke a tremendous emotional response. Safe is one such word. Everyone wants their families to be safe. Everyone wants safe products. Well, what exactly does that mean? Does it mean that there can be no margin for error? Does that mean that there must be a total amelioration of all pain? Does that mean that nothing must ever go wrong?

Approximately 50,000 people die (*It is claimed that this number has dropped significantly over the last 10 years, although it is still high.  The actual number seems to be in question. ) every year on America’s highways. Is driving safe? Every year people die from accidental electrocution. Is electricity safe? Every year a great many children drown. Is swimming safe?

Is it possible to show that any product is safe? NO! You can only prove something is unsafe, otherwise you are asking someone to prove a negative, a factual impossibility. We can only prove what things do, not what they don’t do. It is like asking someone to prove that they aren’t cheating on their spouse. You can only prove that someone is cheating. You cannot in any way prove that someone isn’t cheating.

Yet we are being required to show that pesticides are safe before we use them. This irrational, unscientific demand is made over and over again, and done so without protest. Worse yet it is done with support from many in and around industry. Why? Because safe is one of those difficult to define words that can unite people in a cause that makes them feel all warm and fuzzy all over, not mention the feeling of moral superiority. After all, who is going to support un-safe products and practices? 

These issues surrounding DDT demonstrate such unintended consequences of such emotional causes. Even after all the evidence has shown that most of what Rachel Carson said was either speculation or inaccurate.  She went so far off to the extent she deliberately misrepresenting the facts.  Even after everything she predicted turned out to be wrong; even after all the pain and suffering that has been, and is still being caused by the ban on DDT; people will not properly connect the ban with the disasters banning DDT caused.

There are those who will still defend the ban with fallacious arguments and demand more bans and more restrictions in the name of safety...especially "because it's for the children".  They simply refuse to admit they were wrong, in spite of all the pain and suffering, and mostly to the children. 

Why? 

It isn’t simply a matter of pride either. This refusal to admit that which should be obvious to the most casual observer is being driven by a misanthropic neo-pagan psuedo-religous philosophy called environmentalism. Call it an “organic” philosophy, call it a “green” philosophy, it doesn’t matter; the goal is to eliminate products that allow more people to live longer, healthier lives; and they do it with fallacious health claims about pesticides.

Thomas Sowell, in his book, Economic Facts and Fallacies, defined logical fallacies in the following manner.

“Fallacies are not simply crazy ideas. They are usually both plausible and logical – but with something missing. Their plausibility gains them political support. Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing of ignored factors likely to lead to “unintended consequences,” a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters. Another phrase often heard in the wake of these disasters is, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time."

That is why it pays to look deeper into things that look good on the surface at the moment.   What's
 underneath the surface is what matters.

Let’s take the Fallacy of composition.  It goes like this; DDT is found in birds. DDT killed the birds. Let’s ban DDT. Since DDT was a pesticide, and it was found in birds that died, all pesticides must kill birds; let’s ban all pesticides. Pesticides are chemicals and pesticides were found in dead birds so chemicals must kill birds; let’s ban all chemicals.

At one point the pest control industry is so hot to be green and yet we didn't seem to have a clue as to what “going green” was going to mean to society as a whole. GO GREEN! GO GREEN! was the cry, but where does this leading? The activists never seem to have to explain their motives or ultimate goals. We need to look beneath the surface and ask: What are thier goals? Let us have no doubts that the elimination of pesticides is one of them.

Actually it should be immaterial to intelligent, insightful, compassionate people whether they explain their goals or not. We should be able to see what their motives and goals are by the devastation they have wrought in the rest of the world!  We now know that environmentalism isn’t safe. Tell me; do you think that environmentalism should be banned?  

We absolutely know we will lose between sixty and eighty thousand people in America from seasonal flu.  Certainly that's not safe do you think?  Why don't we shut the country down every year then?  Now we're expected to prove the nation is safe from this coronavirus.  Well, it isn't, and it never will be.  There will be cases of this coronavirus forever now, just as there are cases of every flu that's ever attacked America.  We need to recognize that and we need to get over it, because that's the way life works.  Period!

Whether it's pesticides or public health, the lies, the logical fallacies and hysteria reresent the consistent binding pattern for all these leftist outcries.  We have to overcome that!  We win battle of facts. We always have.  They win the battle of emotion.  They always have.  To win the war we need to win the battle of facts and the battle of emotion. 

What's most disturbing is the very real dichotomy regarding what these corrupt and incompetent  government officials interpretation of "safe"  They arresting people for trying to open their businesses, or even walking around their neighborhoods, because that's not safe.  Highly dubious claim at best!  Yet they're allowing barbarian insurrectionists to run rampant throughout the nation robbing, murdering, and burning down our nation's cities.

Not only are many of them not doing anything to stop it, many of them in point of fact are encouraging them to continue on.  Even protecting them by not permitting the police to do their job of protecting society, which includes property.  And virtually every one of those officials are Democrats.

In conclusion:  We now know Democrats are not safe, what do you think should be done about that?

Cartoon of the Day

Some Thoughts About Being Safe

Dennis Prager May 19, 2020

In a recent “Fireside Chat,” my weekly talk show on the PragerU platform, I commented on society’s increasing fixation on being “safe.” The following is a condensed version of what I said:
 We have a meme up at PragerU: “‘Until it’s safe’ means ‘never.’“

The pursuit of “safe” over virtually all other considerations i life-suppressing. This is true for your own individual life, and it is true for the life of a society.

I always give the following example: I have been taking visitors to Israel for decades, and for all those decades, people have called my radio show to say, “Dennis, I would so love to visit Israel, but I’m just going to wait until it’s safe.” And I’ve always told these people, “Then you’ll never go.” And sure enough, I’ve gone there over 20 times, and they never went.

I have never led my life on the basis of “until it’s safe.” I do not take ridiculous risks. I wear a seatbelt whenever I’m in a car because the chances are overwhelming that in a bad accident, a seatbelt can save my life. But I get into the car, which is not 100 percent safe...........To Read More....

My Take - This insistence on everything being safe is one of the constants in leftist arguments.  In this case it's a variation of the Precautionary Principle: if something isn't proven safe it can't be used.   There's only one problem with that. Nothing is safe!  Everything is unsafe at some level, and you can't prove things are safe, you can only prove things are unsafe.  It's called proving a negative, and it's impossible.

As an example.

Ask a room full of people if they're married, and to put their hands up if they are, and keep them up.  Then ask them if they're cheating on their spouse.  Every one of those hands will go down...at least in a normal crowd of people.  Then say to them:  I don't believe you! Prove to me you aren't cheating!  They can't. You can only prove what people are doing, not what they're not doing. 

Nuclear Reactor Realities

by DuPree Moore

Editor's Note:  Another blast from the past. I review the posts that are being hit daily and for some reason there have been a number of them from 2009. This is one of them. I had forgotten this post by Mr. Moore and how informative it was. With all the 'clean' energy claptrap being spewed out by those who should know better I think this really is as pertinent today as it was three years ago. Please enjoy! RK

From 1968 to 1973, I was an engineering officer aboard U. S. nuclear submarines. The chief engineer would routinely sneak back into the engineering spaces and trip some piece of equipment off the line. These were not computer simulations. The equipment really would be in an emergency condition. We would be sitting in the reactor control room, and suddenly alarms would go off. We would have to figure out what had happened, and recover from it. The equipment is designed to survive such accidents. After many decades of operation under those conditions, the Navy has had zero deaths from nuclear power. You are more likely to drown in your bathtub than to die from operating a nuclear reactor.

A coal-fired electric power generating plant uses 120 railroad cars full of coal every day. A nuclear plant uses one semi truckload of nuclear fuel rods every few years. All the spent fuel from every nuclear reactor in the United States could be stored on one football field, a pile nine feet tall. Recycle it as the French do, and the pile shrinks to three inches. In 500 years it will be less toxic than coal ash.

It is preposterous to talk about nuclear waste remaining toxic for tens of thousands of years. It is preposterous to talk about tens of thousands of deaths from a nuclear accident. Those analyses are based upon a laughable error. If one person eats 200 aspirin, he will die. These people figure that if 200 people eat one aspirin each, there will be one death. If two million people are exposed to a dose rate of one aspirin per person, there will be 20,000 deaths. In fact one aspirin is beneficial, and low levels of radiation are beneficial. Geographical areas with higher background radiation have lower levels of cancer.

Chernobyl proved just how safe nuclear power is. There was no containment vessel. All radiation was released to the environment. There were less than 200 deaths, all among on-site personnel. An exhaustive international inquiry under the UN found no documented health damage beyond the immediate vicinity (except for a slight increase in thyroid cancer among children, which can be completely prevented by taking inexpensive iodine supplements in the event of a nuclear accident).

The area around Chernobyl has been declared a radioactive dead zone at radiation levels about the same as downtown Warsaw, Poland, and five times lower than Grand Central Station in New York City. Plants and animals flourish in the region, showing no ill effects. It is stark raving mad.

Three-Mile Island nuclear accident caused zero deaths, zero injuries, and zero radiation release to the environment. And it was not a close call. It might have been a close call from having much more extensive equipment damage, but the worst possible accident would still have been kept entirely within the containment vessel. There would have been zero deaths, zero injuries, and zero radiation released to the environment. If terrorists flew an airplane into a nuclear reactor, it would not rupture the containment vessel.

During the 1970's there was an anti-nuclear campaign, similar to the global warming campaign today. It was based on grossly inaccurate information, but it prevailed politically to impose onerous regulations which killed nuclear power as a source of electricity. I have seen a comparison of two nuclear power plants in the United States which began construction at about the same time. One finished up before the new regulations went into effect. It came in on budget, and generates to this day the cheapest, safest, and cleanest electricity on this planet. The second reactor ran afoul of the new regulations. It ran into massive cost overruns, and never was completed.

Lawrence Solomon was part of the anti-nuclear campaign during the 1970's. Today he has done some excellent research disproving the global warming theory, especially disproving the assertions of a scientific consensus about it; but to this day he is wrong about nuclear power. To this day he says, "Nuclear reactors run flat-out 24/7", and cannot be adjusted to match power demand. He is simply wrong. The reactor remains critical 24/7, but a reactor can be critical at zero power. The power output automatically matches the power demand. I have personally operated nuclear reactors, and I know for a fact what I am talking about. That is the kind of misinformation which has destroyed nuclear power, the greatest scientific advance in the history of the world.

How Can Pesticides Be Safe?

Dr. Steve Savage Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Many people may find it difficult to imagine how a pesticide could ever be safe. To understand how that is possible, it is helpful to make the comparison with something more familiar: electricity. It is hard to envision modern life without electricity. As much as we enjoy and need this source of energy, it involves some hazards. Electricity can, and sometimes does, cause injury or death. 

Yet overall, we think of using electricity as a reasonably safe aspect of our lives. Safety can’t be precisely defined. What we perceive as safe is something where the benefits more than offset the minimal risks. We can enjoy electricity’s benefits with little risk through two main strategies: 1) using low-hazard forms of electricity and 2) keeping ourselves from being exposed to hazardous forms of electricity......To Read More......


How Can Pesticides Be Safe?

Many people may find it difficult to imagine how a pesticide could ever be safe. To understand how that is possible, it is helpful to make the comparison with something more familiar: electricity.

It is hard to envision modern life without electricity. As much as we enjoy and need this source of energy, it involves some hazards. Electricity can, and sometimes does, cause injury or death.  Yet overall, we think of using electricity as a reasonably safe aspect of our lives.

Safety can’t be precisely defined. What we perceive as safe is something where the benefits more than offset the minimal risks. We can enjoy electricity’s benefits with little risk through two main strategies: 1) using low-hazard forms of electricity and 2) keeping ourselves from being exposed to hazardous forms of electricity.

The Low-Hazard Approach

Increasingly, we power the devices central to our lifestyles with forms of electricity that are practically non-hazardous. The prime examples would be our cell phones, Bluetooth devices, or portable music players that run on low-voltage, direct current electricity which is nearly incapable of causing us harm.  That same, low-hazard approach plays an important role in pesticide safety.

In the middle of the last century, a number of the early pesticides in use were chemicals that were quite toxic to mammals, and thus to humans. The U.S. began to seriously address the issue with the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. Soon, the truly dangerous pesticides were removed from the market or their use was greatly restricted.

Since then, billions of dollars have been spent on the discovery, testing and regulatory review of new, far less toxic pesticide options. In the charts below, I’ve examined the toxicity of crop protection materials that have been used through looking at historical U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data on Washington State apples and California pesticide reporting data from all crops in 2013. In these charts, the toxicity is based on feeding studies with rats or mice, which is used as an indicator of potential toxicity to humans. Other measures of toxicity have similar trends.

The EPA has four toxicity categories to classify the acute hazards of pesticide products. For use in apple orchards, the data show that pesticides from EPA Category I, Highly Toxic, were never more than 10% of the total pesticides used, and that their use has steadily declined. These would be pesticides as toxic as the nicotine that is sold for e-cigarettes. Only 0.2% of the pesticides applied to California crops in 2013 were in this category.

EPA Category II, Moderately Toxic, includes materials with toxicity in the same range as the capsaicin in hot peppers or the caffeine in coffee – familiar and even sought-after natural chemicals in our diets. That category represents very limited use on apples today, and only 18% of what growers applied in California apple orchards in 2013.

The pesticide use category that has grown is termed Slightly Toxic (EPA Category III). Toxicity for crop protection materials in this category is in the same range as the citric acid in a lemon or the vanillin in a vanilla bean.

The largest category of pesticides applied to apples and other crops today is Practically Non-Toxic for mammalian consumption (EPA Category IV). Comparing this to our use of electricity, we can see that low hazard is a major strategy through which we minimize pesticide risk.

To understand how something that is designed to kill or otherwise control a pest could be non-hazardous, consider the example of chocolate which has a flavor ingredient that we humans love but which can be toxic to our pet dogs. Chemicals can have different effects on different species. Scientists use the terms specificity and mode of action to describe how chemicals have their specific effects. With modern pesticides, the mode of action is normally the inhibition of some specific enzyme that is important to the viability of the pest. If the enzyme is inhibited by the pesticide, the pest might stop eating, stop growing and/or die.

That enzyme often isn’t one that even exists in humans and other animals ourselves or in other groups of organisms unlike the pest. A modern insecticide usually only affects enzymes that are found in insects or even a few kinds of insects. A modern herbicide might only inhibit an enzyme that is needed for the growth of plants. A modern fungicide inhibits an enzyme in a pathway of enzymes that is found in certain fungi. While all of these products should still be handled with a reasonable degree of caution, they are, like the electricity that powers our cell phones, low hazard and thus low risk. We can feel safe about their use.

Limiting Exposure Risk When There Is a Hazard

We still need the more hazardous forms of electricity (such as the 120 volt alternating current) for needs like lighting, heat, air conditioning etc. To minimize risk, we’ve developed safe guards such as systems of insulated wiring, childproof plugs, circuit breakers and GFCI outlets to keep us from being exposed to that hazard. Where we need 220 volt service, we have even more ways to avoid exposure. To be connected to the grid we need the extremely hazardous, high-voltage electricity coming to us from wherever it is generated. The high-power transmission lines are designed to make it unlikely that anyone will be exposed to that extremely hazardous form of electricity.

Some pesticides that we need to manage certain pests represent a possible hazard to mammals, like humans, or sometimes to other non-target organisms like birds, fish amphibians or aquatic invertebrates. The safe use of these pesticides is all about limiting exposure. For all pesticides used in agriculture, anyone who is directly involved in the mixing or application of the chemical must follow specific requirements regarding protective clothing and equipment. For low-hazard materials, that might just be gloves, closed shoes and a dust mask. For something that could be a significant human hazard, those restrictions would include a respirator and a protective whole-body TYVEC™ suit.

Restrictions can also dictate how soon after an application anyone can re-enter a treated field (re-entry interval or REI). For low-hazard pesticides, that time period can be a few hours or less. For more hazardous pesticides, the REI can be a number of days. For pesticides that are hazardous to fish or other aquatic organisms, restrictions mandate how close applicators can apply them to waterways. Similarly, for pesticides that are hazardous to bees or other pollinators, restrictions control when applicators can apply them relative to bloom times and/or times of the day when bees and other pollinators are working.

For all pesticides, the EPA conducts an extensive risk assessment and uses that information to set up a detailed set of restrictions designed to prevent the existence of any residues of concern to consumers by the time the crop is harvested. The details of this system are discussed in another post titled, Do I Need to be Concerned about Pesticide Residues on and in My Food?

The moral of this story: just like electricity, pesticides can be used in a way that meets our need for clean, productive farming while giving us a comfortable and functional level of safety.

What does electricity have in common with pesticides?

Steve Savage | Genetic Literacy Project

Many people may find it difficult to imagine how a pesticide could ever be safe. To understand how that is possible, it is helpful to make the comparison with something more familiar: electricity. It is hard to envision modern life without electricity. As much as we enjoy and need this source of energy, it involves some hazards......To Read More....

Nuclear Reactor Realities

by DuPree Moore

Editor's Note - Another blast from the past. I review the posts that are being hit daily and for some reason there have been a number of them from 2009. This is one of them. I had forgotten this post by Mr. Moore and how informative it was. With all the 'clean' energy claptrap being spewed out by those who should know better I think this really is as pertinent today as it was three years ago. Please enjoy! RK

From 1968 to 1973, I was an engineering officer aboard U. S. nuclear submarines. The chief engineer would routinely sneak back into the engineering spaces and trip some piece of equipment off the line. These were not computer simulations. The equipment really would be in an emergency condition. We would be sitting in the reactor control room, and suddenly alarms would go off. We would have to figure out what had happened, and recover from it. The equipment is designed to survive such accidents. After many decades of operation under those conditions, the Navy has had zero deaths from nuclear power. You are more likely to drown in your bathtub than to die from operating a nuclear reactor.

A coal-fired electric power generating plant uses 120 railroad cars full of coal every day. A nuclear plant uses one semi truckload of nuclear fuel rods every few years. All the spent fuel from every nuclear reactor in the United States could be stored on one football field, a pile nine feet tall. Recycle it as the French do, and the pile shrinks to three inches. In 500 years it will be less toxic than coal ash.

It is preposterous to talk about nuclear waste remaining toxic for tens of thousands of years. It is preposterous to talk about tens of thousands of deaths from a nuclear accident. Those analyses are based upon a laughable error. If one person eats 200 aspirin, he will die. These people figure that if 200 people eat one aspirin each, there will be one death. If two million people are exposed to a dose rate of one aspirin per person, there will be 20,000 deaths. In fact one aspirin is beneficial, and low levels of radiation are beneficial. Geographical areas with higher background radiation have lower levels of cancer.

Chernobyl proved just how safe nuclear power is. There was no containment vessel. All radiation was released to the environment. There were less than 200 deaths, all among on-site personnel. An exhaustive international inquiry under the UN found no documented health damage beyond the immediate vicinity (except for a slight increase in thyroid cancer among children, which can be completely prevented by taking inexpensive iodine supplements in the event of a nuclear accident). The area around Chernobyl has been declared a radioactive dead zone at radiation levels about the same as downtown Warsaw, Poland, and five times lower than Grand Central Station in New York City. Plants and animals flourish in the region, showing no ill effects. It is stark raving mad.

Three-Mile Island nuclear accident caused zero deaths, zero injuries, and zero radiation release to the environment. And it was not a close call. It might have been a close call from having much more extensive equipment damage, but the worst possible accident would still have been kept entirely within the containment vessel. There would have been zero deaths, zero injuries, and zero radiation released to the environment. If terrorists flew an airplane into a nuclear reactor, it would not rupture the containment vessel.

During the 1970's there was an anti-nuclear campaign, similar to the global warming campaign today. It was based on grossly inaccurate information, but it prevailed politically to impose onerous regulations which killed nuclear power as a source of electricity. I have seen a comparison of two nuclear power plants in the United States which began construction at about the same time. One finished up before the new regulations went into effect. It came in on budget, and generates to this day the cheapest, safest, and cleanest electricity on this planet. The second reactor ran afoul of the new regulations. It ran into massive cost overruns, and never was completed.

Lawrence Solomon was part of the anti-nuclear campaign during the 1970's. Today he has done some excellent research disproving the global warming theory, especially disproving the assertions of a scientific consensus about it; but to this day he is wrong about nuclear power. To this day he says, "Nuclear reactors run flat-out 24/7", and cannot be adjusted to match power demand. He is simply wrong. The reactor remains critical 24/7, but a reactor can be critical at zero power. The power output automatically matches the power demand. I have personally operated nuclear reactors, and I know for a fact what I am talking about. That is the kind of misinformation which has destroyed nuclear power, the greatest scientific advance in the history of the world.

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