A recent whiparound of Internet news sites has revealed some rather mind-numbing results.

It is important to note that I went looking for the news; it didn�t just find me. I went looking for news, which should have been a red flag right away that I would go away feeling worse about the world and its future than I did going in.

Just to give you an idea, a man in England stabbed his wife to death. As he was committing this unspeakable act, he was uttering the phrase made popular by Anne Robinson on TV�s Weakest Link: �You are the weakest link, goodbye.� As if that�s not bad enough, the entire murder, including the overused catch phrase, was preserved forever on the voice-activated recorder in the man�s pocket.

Then we hear about the woman in India who has �adopted� a pet monkey and begun breastfeeding it alongside her own baby. First of all, eew, eew, eew! Second of all, what in the world would possess you to do that?!? Seriously, eew, eew, eew!

Then there�s the guy in Canada with the panty fetish who seized a rather unique opportunity. He frequented the Open Houses given by realtors and managed to steal women�s briefs from their own dresser drawers.

And this is only one day�s worth of stories. How stupid can people possibly be? And even when they stake a claim on the most original way to murder someone or make obscene phone calls to women while fondling the panties you stole from their house, they almost always cause their own comeuppance.

After they�re arrested, the media circus ensues. It always ends in something along the lines of one of those trailer park interviews after a tornado in Alabama. You know what I�m talking about. We have the standard issue overweight female in curlers and a polka-dot muumuu who offers some pearl of wisdom along the lines of: �I�m just glad we made it out alive. Cousin Taresha was in the kitchen with her fourteen kittens for the weekly bathing ritual and I was trying to fry an egg in the microwave when all of the sudden we heard it: a low, rumbling sound, kind of like when Uncle Billy Bob has had one too many beers and is more than a little bit soused.�

She will invariably go on to mention how scared she was as she hovered over her eleven inbred children in the bathtub while the top was ripped off their double wide trailer and the garden gnomes were flung from the Astro-Turf way into the next county.

Why do the �respectable� news organizations stoop this low all the time? I really don�t understand this. We see this first thing in the morning during Good Morning, America, then again throughout the day on cable. Invariably it will make the national evening news, and by the time 10:30 rolls around, it will be looped several times on The Tonight Show.

Anyway, this has all just been an extremely long way of getting around to the point of this editorial, which, if you can read (and if you�ve gotten this far, that�s probably a likelihood), you know is that I don�t care what stupid people think.

For example, the Weakest Link murderer offered this pearl of wisdom at his trial last month: �At the end of the day, I have killed her because�[she] talked about me like I was some worthless dog."

I�m sorry you feel bad, dude, but you�re not the first person to get walked on in a relationship. If you�re dissatisfied, get out. Don�t kill her because she treats you poorly. That would be stupid, and we don�t care what stupid people think. They�re stupid, and that negates their credibility.

It�s a safe bet that the woman who shares her breast with her newborn and a baby monkey was too ashamed/embarrassed to comment, but a local schoolteacher summed up the situation by restating the obvious: �It�s like she believes it is her own child.�

Yeah, except for the fact that it�s really, really fuzzy. Having never been to India, I don�t know whether the babies in that country are excessively hairy, but common sense would dictate that they are not. It�s not like Robin Williams started the procreation over there. There is no excuse for that level of hairiness.

But fear not, ye disenchanted masses. We can still have faith in law enforcement officials to serve and protect us in our time of need. Det. Stu Morse demonstrated his competent use of math skills in the Pantygate scandal:

�So far we've recovered over 200 pairs of panties and bras and things like that, so if you average two or three items taken from each place, you're looking at between 50 and 100 victims.�

Not to question your credibility (after all, you are a police officer), but let me run this by you. Two hundred divided by two would be one hundred victims. Two hundred divided by three would be sixty-six victims and change. I don�t know where you get this �100 victims� theory. Is a command of basic math skills not considered a must for these people? We put our lives in their hands on a daily basis, and they can�t even divide!

Now if you�ll excuse me, I have to go lie down and rest now. Later I am scheduled to continue plotting my escape from this horrible, horrible place.