If a situation doesn't pass the smell test it's perfectly logical to start with the basics. Asking a few foundational questions doesn't automatically jump to the level of tin foil hats, UFO's and fluoride water poisoning as they would have you believe.
It's an old trick played by politicians and the media. Shut down curious minds by going straight to DEFCON 1.
If I question where a trillion dollars in Obama stimulus spending went they call me a racist. If I note that Sandra Fluke doesn't need $300 a month for birth control pills I obviously hate all women. If I show the numbers that prove ethanol is a net polluter I'm not only a Nazi baby killer but I'm branded a neanderthal that should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
There is no middle ground.
Funny, isn't it, how everything has to be one extreme or the other with no real middle ground, and the other extreme is called "moderate", as if the line down the middle was painted by Karl Marx himself.
Of course "real" science is only the machination of Big whatever, manifested through the expenditure of billions of dollars fleeced from the poor consumer for the purpose of buying extensive research to prove their products are actually harmless when they are really the evil gene bending chemicals designed by Grays in orbital labs to turn humans into the galactic slave race in collusion with the reptilian aliens who damaged Apollo 13 to try to keep us from discovering their base on the back side of the moon because we kept going, even after their telekenetic powers got the bullet to go through JFK. It's likely on the interwebs somewhere.
(yes, the preceding paragraph was sarcasm, even in Virginia)
But asking rational questions, calculating the energy balance (in vs out) of a gallon of Ethanol from tillage to tailpipe, asking how
little Hg or Pb do we actually need to be 'safe', and pointing out that if there are no reservoirs, the desert will be desert without the water to irrigate it, well, that's just because we are "haters" and "racists" and "homophobes" and such who hate the earth and want polluted air and water and don't care about living things.
(>
sound of someone dragging a tone arm/needle across an LP<)
All that hooey aside, if there is no indication of
unusual wrongdoing, why not release the information and quell the theories. Just nip it in the bud. The truth should work just fine.
What we are seeing is not unlike the spontaneous explosion of some fellow shouting "Allahu Akbar" in a crowd of schoolchildren, and being told "terrorism has been ruled out as police search for a motive..."
