THE PARANOIA ANTIDOTE

Given all the frantic efforts by so much of the media, and by so many folks with agendas, to freak you out with fear, I think you should look upon To The Point as The Paranoia Antidote.

In addition to this week’s article on how Iran’s nuclear threat may be of benefit to Israel (Shouldn’t the Palestinians Be Terrified of Iran?), let’s take three examples.

The first concerns the liberal paranoia of global warming, or more precisely man-made global warming, as in, it’s all our fault. It’s hilarious, of course, that COP-11, the assemblage of eco-goofballs attending the UN conference on “climate change” are freezing their tushes in Montreal this week in record cold while whining about the earth burning up.

But just last month, the prestigious science journal Nature disclosed that volcanic eruptions, such as Mount Agung in Indonesia in 1963, El Chichon in Mexico in 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, cool the earth and lower sea levels. This has counter-acted rising sea levels due to thermal expansion of sea water and melting glaciers caused by “global warming.”

The research showed that erupting volcanoes eject sulfate gases high into the stratosphere where they convert into sulfate aerosols, forming stratospheric clouds which reflect the Sun’s radiation back into space and away from the Earth. If you recall reading Solar Warming in To The Point in September, a light bulb just went on in your head.

Solar Warming described how to duplicate the earth-cooling effect of volcanic sulfate aerosols by having the world’s airlines use high-sulfur jet fuel at cruise (stratospheric) altitude.

The Nature article provides indirect evidence that the Sun is responsible for “global warming,” not George Bush, and direct evidence that the solution to our planet heating up proposed by Solar Warming will be effective.

Then again, with the record cold winter we are now enduring, “global warming” sounds like a great idea.

Our second example concerns conservative paranoia over the phony terrorist threat of “EMP.” The Drudge Report this week carried an entire chapter on this “threat” from the book War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take To Prevail In The War For The Free World.

The book is edited by my friend Frank Gaffney, and I encourage you to read it. Nine of the ten steps are well thought-out and are critical components in the war on Jihadism. Why in the world Frank – for whom, I want to emphasize, I have the highest regard – would include the red herring of EMP is a mystery.

Step Six: The Mega Threat: EMP Attack was written by Curt Weldon and Roscoe Bartlett, who are good-guy Congressmen but no scientists (nor are their ghost-writing staffers). A great example is the mention of the US Military’s “Starfish” test of EMP in 1962, which “extinguished streetlights in Honolulu, tripped circuit breakers, triggered burglar alarms, and damaged a telecommunications relay facility.”

What Weldon and Bartlett fail to mention is that Starfish was a hydrogen fusion 1.45 megaton bomb, and that it takes a bomb this size to generate EMP effects. Yet they use this example to claim that a small fission atomic device 100 times smaller in yield, such as Al Qaeda terrorists or Iran could someday have, would do “catastrophic damage” to the entire US.

It is utter and complete nonsense, as originally discussed in The EMP Annoyance last June. It’s a cry of nuclear wolf which discredits the other vital steps that really do need to be taken against Jihadism.  (Note:  Another analysis of why an EMP terrorist attack makes no sense can be found here.)

Our third example is the current paranoia over torture – specifically the torture of terrorists to extract information from them regarding planned terrorist acts. For most people, according to a recent AP poll, this is not a problem: screw the terrorists, literally. Yet here’s Johnny “Temper Tantrum” McCain trying to ram an anti-torture bill down the Senate’s throat, and every newspaper in Europe screeching about the “CIA secret torture prison” flap.

All of this can be avoided – all brutalizing torture can be avoided – with the techniques described in three To The Point articles:

D3 Terrorists (July 2005).

How To Get A Terrorist To Sing Like A Canary Without Torture (January 2005).

Interrogating Osama (October 2001). This last one was written in white heat a month after September 11. Yet the technique described has been validated by subsequent research on how MRI brain scans can act as a lie detector.

Of the three, the easiest, quickest, and most benign is the TFM – tryptophan-free meals – method described in the “Canary” piece. I’m still all in favor of what is suggested we do to Jihadis after the interrogation described in “Osama.” Pig Grease Graves, folks.

So – whenever you get tired of boogeyman salesmen pushing their paranoia, here’s where to come for relief. And if there’s a boogeyman that we haven’t put back in the closest, let me know, and I’ll see what we can do.