Risk Management

As I am sure you are all aware, most of us will die from poisoned Halloween candy, West Nile virus, gunshot wounds incurred during home invasions, or in explosions on commercial aircraft.* There is a well-known scientific (or media, or something) correlation between how rare or frightening something is, and how likely it is to kill you.

The same logic obviously applies to the risks that our children face. While you waste your time worrying about your children bullying/getting bullied, rotting their brains with TV and Harry Potter books, and suffering from borderline malnutrition from eating only chicken nuggets and school cafeteria pizza, the real dangers are lurking, hidden from the public eye on the front page of the New York Times. Did you know, for example, that your son or daughter will almost certainly** be attending a "pharm party" this weekend, where he/she will randomly ingest large quantities of randomly selected pills stolen from other parents' medicine cabinets or purchased on the street from dangerous minorities? Yeah.

So what to do about this, you ask? The answer, while surprisingly simple, requires a very high level of commitment: avoid absolutely anything unfamiliar or unusual at all times. Thinking of riding your bike to work? Forget it. Leaving the safety of your car will expose you to the environment, which could potentially include escaped research monkeys infected with hepatitis C. Thinking of becoming a vegetarian? Well, my hippie friend, what happens when you're diagnosed with a rare form of cancer linked to underconsumption of pelican meat? Want to learn how to play the violin? We'll see how talented you are when a freak structural flaw causes your new instrument to explode on that A#, lodging a 9-inch splinter in your carotid artery.

The list goes on, but the point remains the same: keep your ass on the couch with a cold Budweiser in your hand and your favorite NBA team on the TV, or risk certain and spectacular death at the hands of something you're not creative enough to imagine.

*Or heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic lower respiratory disease, accidents, diabetes, Alzheimer's, influenza or pneumonia, in that order of probability (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/deaths.htm)
**Maybe

Unclogging the Tubes

It has recently come to my attention that the Internet contains an semi-infinite volume of indescribably offensive and disgusting material. Prior to this revelation, my homepage was set to www.foxnews.com, and the bulk of my internet browsing was done by simply clicking on links. Because I do not have a keyboard (as stated before, I post to this blog and read other websites mostly by using voice and text recognition software; written language is for the poor and/or French), I had never before run across a site called "Google," which I discovered in a totally incomprehensible story here. This web page seems innocuous enough, presenting you with only a box in which to type. When you type something and hit enter, this "Google" will give you a list of websites with content related to your "query."

However, upon further investigation, I discovered that Google will always return closely matched results, with no moral or ethical intervention, no matter how vile your search. For example, typing "anarchism" results in several "informational" pages, including one from something called "Wikipedia,"* as well as several collections of "essays" on anarchism. Nowhere on the results page is a warning about the evil, corrosive nature of the anarchist agenda, which seeks to destroy our God-given social order in favor of drug-crazed cannibalism and folk music.

Similar searches for things like "democrat" turn up predictably horrific results. Apparently, the United States government has lost control of one of our main media outlets, and can no longer prevent dangerous subversives, including communists and liberal community organizers, from spreading dangerous lies and propaganda. Feminists, homosexuals, vegetarians, and nudists can now sow their seeds of cultural destruction across the U.S. and the world, corrupting our children and leading our women astray.

As usual, the solution is simple and violent. We must appoint a council of morally upstanding citizens to form a Ministry of Truth, which will oversee and regulate all Internet traffic, including and especially Google results. This commission will have the power to define proper moral standards for all web pages, and it will be entrusted with a specialized branch of the U.S. military to aid in enforcement of whatever penalties it sees fit to institute. These "secret police" will swear allegiance only to the Ministry, the Bible, and Pat Robertson, and they will operate extrajudicially, as we cannot trust our Godless secular government to effectively regulate such an organization.

Once the Ministry of Truth has been established, we can begin the long process of unclogging the tangled mess of tubes which make up the Internet, and we can start imprisoning/executing the subversive deviants who wish to treat it as a socialist soapbox from which they can belch their disgusting pornographic leftism all over us. After we remove all of this offensive garbage, the Internet will contain only good, valuable, morally responsible content. Like Joel Osteen's blog.

*Wikipedia is apparently a site run by violent anarchists and established for the purposes of historical revisionism, slander, and the promotion of sexual deviance.