Welcome back to Calamity News, the only site brave enough to make fun of the Deputy Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services. Do a better job, Carl!

Is living in the United States as dangerous the nightly news portrays? Are our lives at risk by deadly cars, a death cat, pagan pilots, capital bankruptcy, a decline in blogging, pointlessly vigorous exercise, gangs using twitter, internet depression, a lone wolf attacker, missile attacks, sitting down or lack of quality coffee? If so, how did we survive these deadly assaults in the past?

It’s possible that we’ve developed some innate, subconscious defense mechanism to ward off all of this week’s calamities; but that seems like a lot of evolutionary work. It’s more likely that these things aren’t real dangers at all. Sure, if you’re in a gang and other gang members read your status update about meeting with the cops you might have some running to do, but for the vast majority of Americans, this calamity will never affect us.

It’s up to you to filter through the noise and decide what is really important to your health and safety, and what is sensationalistic garbage. Here’s a hint, if it has an exclamation point in the headline, it’s not a real calamity.

Have a safe weekend!