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.

Soft, Cuddly Fuel*

I have advocated on more than one occasion** that killing and burning animals is an environmentally responsible way to produce energy. It appears that the city of Stockholm has recently begun enacting my plan to save the Earth. While it is upsetting to me that the Swedish beat us to the punch on this one, it is gratifying that my ideas are finally gaining the recognition that they deserve from the international community. Efforts like this demonstrate that there are simple, common sense ways for people to work toward a better world for our children. And terrify them.

*Sorry, Melissa.
**Exactly one occasion

Hook-Up Culture: The Rise of an Unspeakably Terrifying New Evil That Will Murder Your Children and Lead Us All to Complete Destruction

Do you remember the good old days? The way it used to be, when milk cost a nickel at the corner grocery store, knee socks were the at the height of fashion, and all the happy, white children crowded around the ice cream truck on hot summer afternoons? Well, my friend, those days are dead, and America is free falling in a cable-cut elevator into the fuming mouth of Lucifer. The reason, you ask? Barack Obama. But more importantly, teenage sex.

That's right, they laughed at Oprah* when she broke the news about rainbow parties, and they laughed when desperate parents tried to protect their daughters by making them attend purity balls (which are not, by the way, at all creepy, and do not have even the faintest oedipal overtones). But new studies** prove conclusively*** that teenage promiscuity is back in a big way, and it's hear to kill your children. Again.

If you don't believe me, just turn on your TV. Scantily clad women appear in every kind of advertisement, homosexual characters are increasingly common on sitcoms and reality shows, and celebrity party girls are the new role models for young girls. You don't need me to tell you, but it follows logically from your discomfort with our changing culture that all young women are in danger of becoming extremely dirty whores. The carefree days of "going steady" and "shotgun weddings" are gone, replaced by the new, so-called "hook-up culture." Dating is a thing of the past, and romance has been replaced by a depraved culture of partner switching, group sex, and drug-crazed experimentation with bestiality. "Sexual education" in schools teaches our children that using condoms will protect them from the emotional trauma of premarital sex, and that contracting sexually transmitted diseases is a hilarious bonding activity and rite of passage for all teenagers.

No one argues that these things are happening****. "But what can be done?" you ask. First, we must ban rap music, the satanic soundtrack to our new American horror movie. Then, we must pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to prevent Dan Savage and his army of sodomites from normalizing their deviant practices and influencing our youth. Accomplishing these things will buy us enough time to implement the permanent solution: building a time machine and transporting the entire United States back to 1952, before the erosion of our modesty and decency began. Once there, we can use our modern nuclear technology to destroy the Soviet Union and pass laws which will prevent the '60s from happening. Once we can rest assured that hook-up culture is just a distant memory from the future, we can finally start reliving our fond memories of the Andy Griffith Show childhood.


*After they believed every single titillating detail, took reactionary precautions at school and at home, and forced all of their children to read a best-selling book with an incredibly low Amazon customer review rating.
**Opinion pieces on Fox News.
***State with emphasis.
****Except communist haters of freedom, democracy, and God. And some statisticians and health care workers.

Dynamite TV

If you are male college student, then lately you might be saying to yourself, "Where is all the free beer? And what about the hilarious sexual adventures with 26-year-old freshman women with fake tans, fake boobs, and short skirts? My television promised me these things, and it really hurts to be lied to by the plastic object that raised me." Well, reader, some people would argue that your expectations are comically naive (and sexist), and that apparently you've been so successfully brainwashed by Van Wilder and Road Trip that you can no longer distinguish reality from the twisted fantasy world being used by rich people in Los Angeles used to sell you cologne and diet soda. These same people would probably also suggest to you that the zany, hilarious, alcohol-fueled hijinks that you remember from high school are actually figments of your underfunctioning imagination, and that your formative years probably looked a lot more like Napoleon Dynamite than American Pie.

But not me. No sir, you don't get the massive traffic I have on my blog by insulting your readership, and so I'm here to tell you that your expectations are totally legitimate, and that real problem is not you, but Reality. And I don't mean Reality like on Fox. I mean Reality like the one where people in high school are 16-18 year-old kids, where the underdog gets beat by 45 points, and where someone getting accidentally hit in the balls isn't funny.

Alright, so maybe that's still funny, but the point is that Reality sucks. In real life, everything is anticlimactic, drama is mostly imaginary (and devoid of tension-heightening music), and effective product placement is difficult because there aren't that many cameras. Your friends in Reality have uneventful relationships, they have boring jobs, and, unlike your other, cooler friends from the TV, very few of them have spray tans and surgically enhanced facial features.

Reality contains a lot of weird, ugly people with unflattering clothes and complicated, 3-dimensional personalities, most of whom are not particularly photogenic. In fact, many of these "real" people are only entertaining if you interact with them for extended periods of time. To make matters worse, most people outside of your television will become offended if you yell at them and attempt to switch channels whenever they say something that you disagree with or find boring, and so long-term interaction may actually become a requirement for dealing with them.

So what can be done about this, you ask? The simplest solution is to just live in your TV. But before you run out to Best Buy and purchase five plasma screens large enough to completely cover the walls and ceiling in your living room, you might want to check your bank account to make sure that you have the $50,000 required to complete this insanely awesome project that will permanently transform your life for the better.

Unfortunately, most of you (or the, at most, one person who reads this), do not have this kind of money, and so you will have to rely on the budget-friendly alternative: smash the glass on the front of your CRT monitor and climb inside.* This is probably going to hurt, so you're going to want to get good and wasted before you start, and you might want to turn the volume down so you don't hurt your ears. I'm not an electrical engineer,** so I can't be certain what happens when you drunkenly force your head into a television that is turned on, and I'm not lawyer,*** so I don't know if your next of kin should sue me or Panasonic. But there's one thing you can be sure of when you're jamming your face through a cracked piece of glass into a box full of cathode ray tubes and high voltage capacitors: it has to be better than Reality.

*Your TV might not be large enough to fit your entire body inside, but don't worry, your head is all you need.
**Probably.
***Definitely.

Self Confidence

Are you self-confident? Of course you are. As a reader of this blog, and a person who accepts my opinions as gospel, you can rest assured that, should you ever need a quick answer to one of the deep mysteries of life, you can simply reach into your gut and violently regurgitate a few mangled fragments of cultural criticism stolen from the Internet and drunkenly mashed into my keyboard to the sound of Pat Robertson waving his pitchfork and screaming for the head of Hugo Chavez on a plate. But I'm off topic.

What I was planning to say was that even the most self-confident of us sometimes find occasion to doubt ourselves. Strange questions about the relationship between large numbers of small chemical reactions and human consciousness, your bizarre failure to reach infinity despite counting continuously all weekend, and the popularity of Ryan Seacrest may continue to haunt you, and you may occasionally become lost while reading my overly long and convoluted sentences, rendering my advice confusing and leaving you up the creek.

In these times of need, you might turn to the television for guidance. This will usually work, but what if there's just a "Charmed" marathon and a bunch of Lifetime movies on? What then, you poor bastard? Do you just pound down a bunch of Jagerbombs, load up your Colt .45, and slog through 27 hours of 9/11 conspiracy videos on youtube until you finally collapse in the puddle of tears and vomit covering your desk and floor? Maybe.

Or maybe there's a better option. But probably not. Cheers.

Go Green

With our civilization's impending death from choking on its own waste looming, we all need to make a special effort to pitch in and reverse course. "But how can I do this?" a nonexistent but rhetorically useful reader asks. While regular readers (who, again, only exist for their rhetorical value) might expect me to offer a simple solution, I'm afraid that guns and whiskey can't solve this one, at least not entirely. On the contrary, there are many things that all of us can do to help out, but we need to act fast if we are going to save our planet. Feel free to mix and match from the following list:

1. Buy appliances. You should already know this from watching TV, but your inefficient washing machine, microwave, blender, curling iron, electric-powered back scratcher, coal-fired nose hair trimmer, etc. are killing the planet. If you care about the environment, you must immediately throw all your possessions in the trash (or local stream, pond, or bird sanctuary), and upgrade to the latest energy star models. But why stop there? You can save the planet even harder by purchasing efficient appliances that you don't own yet. It doesn't matter that you don't need them or don't even understand their functions. We all have to make sacrifices.
2. Wear earth tones. Nothing says "I love the environment" like a huge walk-in closet full of brown, beige, olive, green, charcoal, walnut, forest, slate, chocolate, harvest, sand, and tan colored fur coats.
3. Heat your house by burning old garbage. This may be dangerous, and is almost certainly illegal, but styrofoam burns very hot, and since I consume several metric tons annually, it makes sense to get everything I can out of my investment. You can use the fire to power your water heater, but I recommend venting the smoke directly into your living room to limit heat transfer losses and maximize efficiency.
   
4. Drive a hybrid gas/electric bicycle. It will get much better mileage than your standard 6-cylinder gas-powered bicycle.
5. Kill animals. I know that you've probably been brainwashed by the public school system, PBS, and the "conservationist" lobby, but it's simple math, people. Fewer mouths to feed means more food for the rest of us, and less land devoted to "natural habitats" means more space for shopping malls and firing ranges. Plus, burning the carcasses (see #3) can provide useful energy.

This list is incomplete, but I will be adding to it in a series of installments. Also, keep an eye out for my tips on what you can do to fix the economy. And remember, guns and whiskey may solve political problems, but only a worldwide orgy of vicious consumerism can save our planet.