All the Halloween movies of the past decade “got nothin'” on the scary stuff the media threw at Americans over the last ten years. Hardly a week went by without some new scare being reported on to frighten the masses into throwing out their veggies, wearing masks, or thinking their hard drive was going to turn into a cyber pit bull and put a dozen stitches into their iPod. Herewith, a dozen of the most bogus:

12. Y2K

Jan 1, 2000. The decade began with a whopper. Computers were not going to be able to know how to register the year 2000 and systems as large as the Pentagon’s and as small as your cell phone were going to freak out and party like it was 1900. Of course, nothing happened. Everybody’s computers were fine and the new millennium began much like the last one, except this time we don’t have the very real fears of polio and the black plague to destroy our lives.

11. Tuberculosis Plane Guy

Spring 2007, Andrew Speaker, 31 from Atlanta gets on a plane while he has TB. He flies to Paris then on the Athens, from there to the Greek Islands to get married, then panicked that he might die if he doesn’t get help right away he flies to Prague, then into Canada (because he was worried he had been put on the no-fly list for the USA) and drives to the border at Chaplain, NY where he’s stopped for security reasons but when he looked fine, border patrol let him in the States. ABC was all over the story worried that everybody on the plane and might die from tuberculosis thanks to Speaker. Nobody got sick. Speaker never really got sick. The people sitting next to Speaker on the plane never got sick. For two weeks the stories were all about the dangers of flying with sick people. Perhaps a real threat, but in this case everybody, including Dianne Sawyer who wore a mask for her interview with Speaker, was fine.

10. Killer Tomatoes

Summer 2008. No tomatoes to be found at your favorite burger place. Salsa on suspension. Waiters and waitresses across the Land of the Free are forced to explain to their patrons that their favorite BLT would have no T. Two-hundred or so cases of people who got sick because of a salmonella-strain called Saintpaul. That was the alleged culprit here. American farmers lost millions while TV viewers were kept glued to the set to find the latest on the sequel to one of Americas great horror movies, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes II. Come to find out it wasn’t tomatoes after-all–it was peppers. Doh! Hit the back-up button here and hope nobody notices. Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers complained, but when it was explained to him that he was not blamed for this, he hit the back-up button as well and went to In N’ Out Burger and ordered extra tomatoes (animal style).

9. Killer Spinach

Summer 2006. I could add peanuts and strawberries to this list of scares, but we are sticking with the salad family here. Spinach from California had E-Coli from manure. 200 more people got sick but the story lasted for weeks. Oh, this was the good spinach too, the ORGANIC stuff. Carefully grown in the fields with sun streaming beams of natural energy, butterflies gently passing over to supply aromatic circulation and natural fertilizer made of….made of….well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? If you’re going to use cow manure you may want to make sure the cows were organic too, but the cows didn’t read the directive about their dung.

8. Mad Cow Disease

Winter 2003. Since we’re talking cows, might as well take care of this here. Technically it’s bovine spongiform encephalopathy (why didn’t the Bush administration make the media say this instead of “mad cow”?). This was a bigger problem in Great Britain than it was here where they destroyed 4.4 million cows as a precaution. But, when the first US case was discovered Japan stopped buying our beef for two years. It cost the US cattle industry millions. How many cases of mad cow were discovered in the USA? Three. That’s cows, not people. Zero people in the USA got mad cow. Oh, and by the way, it wasn’t mentioned much by the media, but you only get mad cow from eating the brain or spinal cord of an infected animal. As a public service here, we suggest you stay away from those parts. Besides, I’m guessing the spinal cord is not as tasty as the fillet.

7. West Nile Virus

Early 2001. Those pesky mosquitoes. We could spray them all with pesticide and take care of this, but environmentalists don’t like that, and we don’t want to hurt their feelings. As a result 287 people died in the USA after West Nile hit them. $200 million dollars was spent on health care to try to stop the West Nile virus in the US. The media worked overtime to create West Nile hysteria. Tons of stories all over the place on this issue but rarely was it mentioned that West Nile really won’t hurt you unless you’re already very old and very sick. Flea was happy to hear he was not the problem here, just mosquitoes.

6. Killer Bees

Early 2002. Queen bees from Africa started mating with local bees in the Southwest of the United States and the result was not sweeter tasting honey. The bees got bad and they got mean. The venom of a “killer” bee is no worse than any other bee, but they travel in packs and attack their victims with a vengeance. Although, there is no record of anybody in the USA actually being killed by killer bees, still they carry the killer tag. They also have PR people. The Florida African Bee Action Plan released a statement blasting the media for creating “panic and anxiety.” In Brazil they have a strain of ASSASSIN Africanized Killer Queen Bees, so things could be worse.

5. Swine Flu

Early 2009. H1N1. While the government worked hard to tell us pigs were not the problem, they certainly were when this first hit in 1918. Pigs and people got sick at the same time and that was a pretty good indication that the pigs were the problem. So, they called it pig flu back then, not H1N1. Some estimates say 100 million people were killed thanks to pig flu back then, so this stuff can be nastier than pigs like Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot combined. This time a lot of people got sick, and it created a panic, but for the most part H1N1 and its various strains of H1N2, H2N3, H3N1, H3N2 and RHCP (Flea had no comment this time), didn’t kill anybody that the normal flu wouldn’t already have killed. A lot of people got scared, got their shots, the government was not prepared (see: Government Run Health Care Brilliance!); but this was no worse than any normal year with the flu. Lots of news stories were done about H1N1 so the moral of the story is; bees have better PR people than pigs.

4. Radon Gas

Early 2000, and much of the 1990’s. Call 1-800-RADON!, screamed the billboards. The EPA told us that radon gas was “a health hazard in your home.” They even ran TV commercials showing kids playing in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood that turned to skeletons because of radon gas in their homes. I don’t think they ever really found radon gas that could kill in anybody’s home, but the scare worked. Home Depot and Lowe’s have sold tons of those little detectors for $19.99. The New York Times did an article about how granite countertops in your home were a source of radon gas. As far as we can tell no one has died from granite countertops unless there was a case where a fork lift operator in a warehouse made a tragic mistake.

3. Asbestos Insulation

Throughout 2000. This has actually been an issue for decades, but we are still paying the price today. This was once a beloved fireproof material turned supposed carcinogen. Virtually every building in America has some of this stuff in it, and it will kill our children, so it has to be removed, right? In the early 90’s Science magazine declared this “crisis” grossly exaggerated and declared that removing it from buildings probably caused more harm than leaving in there. Still, hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps billions, have been spent in the 20 years to remove asbestos from public buildings. It costs 100 times more to remove the asbestos insulation than it did to install it in the first place. Now, you don’t want to go out and spread the dust from your brake pads on your cereal in the morning, but the connection between deaths caused by asbestos insulation in buildings has still not been made.

2. SARS

Winter 2002. Severe acute respiratory syndrome. This story first broke in November, and by June 2003 it was not to be heard of again. 774 people died worldwide because of SARS, again, mainly the very elderly and the already sick. How many died in the USA? Zero. 8 people in the US had the disease, but they contracted it overseas. Still, the visuals of people in China with the masks on are still very real. There were a lot of people here in America who wore the masks whenever they went out in public during the SARS Scare 2002! (I’m hearing the music in my head and seeing the moving graphic on the evening news). The Chinese have it right though, they never touch. They bow and nod. No handshaking going on there. Not sure if this is about the same time that the Howie Mandell fist bump started, but I think the timing is close.

1. Global Warming!

Began sometime after the global cooling threat stopped. This is the granddaddy of all faux threats. This threat works, except the planet is actually cooling. This threat also makes brilliant scientific minds like Bill Clinton say things like, “global warming could make some places colder.” Then you had the e-mails from scientists trying to cover-up the fraud and the other “scientists” who trashed their data because their hard drives were full in their old offices. What scientist trashes their data because they say they didn’t have room to store it? Have the scientists never been to Costco? You can get an external hard drive that can hold 750 gigs of data for under a hundred bucks ($60.00 with the coupon). Buy one or two of those and you could save all those temps from the Dark Ages that you worked your entire life to find (did the Visigoths carry thermometers in their sheaths?). You only trash the data if you don’t want the data to get out there and if it does not support your theories. Did Einstein trash his Theory of Relativity data because there was no room in the bureau drawer because it was already filled with his hair care products? Besides, since the planet is now cooling, maybe we can just say Al Gore fixed this, give him another Peace Prize, or something, and we can get back to driving SUV’s.

As we look to the new decade and beyond, be prepared. The media will be there to scare the pants off you so that you will anxiously TiVo the next newscast. 60 Minutes once called Al Gore the PR man for the planet, and a prophet. Perhaps they just want to keep viewers scared to help ratings, or perhaps they believe whatever leftists say because that’s what they do, or both. Either way, expect your intelligence to be insulted early and often and expect the scares to continue and get more pronounced as ratings continue to fall. BTW, you want to hear a real threat? Dozens of people were killed last decade from TVs that fell on them because they were not properly attached to the wall or the stand they were on. TVs That Kill, Tonight at 11!