HEART OF DARKNESS – Sometimes I worry I’m not paranoid enough, so I’ve bookmarked TheBlaze.com to make sure I stay on top of all the stuff that should be freaking me out, pissing me off and/or making me hastily prepare for Armageddon.

This week, I read a real eye-opener about a pandemic threatening to wipe out the entire world. Ebola? Nope. Bird flu? You’re getting colder. AIDS? C’mon, man. When it comes to world-ending threats resulting from Man failing to adhere to the Immutable Will of God, AIDS is just so 1980s.

No, the pandemic that has me sterilizing surfaces, repeating the Lord’s Prayer and stockpiling canned goods today is none other than the Pandemic of Internet Porn.

The writers at TheBlaze didn’t sniff out this globe-throttling threat all on their own, of course. For true insight, they have to rely on experts. Naturally, when it comes to the existential threat to humanity presented by sexually-explicit depictions, there is no greater expert than Donna Rice Hughes, president and chief executive officer of Enough is Enough (EIE), an organization presumably dedicated to banning all-you-can-eat buffets and competitive eating events.

As Prof. Hughes persuasively explains, pornography “harms children, women and men and fuels pornography addiction, the breakdown of marriage and sex trafficking.”

Based on my prior reading of academic research that rivals Hughes’ paper in quality and credibility, I’m fairly certain porn also causes pancreatic cancer, was the inspiration behind 9/11 and the real reason the L.A. Rams moved to St. Louis back in ’95, but her paper is oddly silent on those points.

To back up her assertions, Hughes cites what she calls “the first multifaceted, multidisciplinary scholarly review of contemporary pornography since the advent of the internet.” Entitled “The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations,” the review was published by an impressive-sounding organization called The Witherspoon Institute.

What is The Witherspoon Institute, exactly? On its website, Witherspoon is described as “an independent research center that works to enhance public understanding of the moral foundations of free and democratic societies.”

(YNOT Pro Tip: when the term “moral foundations” is found in its mission statement, you just know the organization in question is all about serious science.)

Among other things, the Witherspoon Institute has publicly expressed its staunch opposition to same-sex marriage, embryonic stem cell research, people who fall to the left of Rick Santorum on the political spectrum, sarcasm, the letter ‘X’ and abortion.

At any rate, Witherspoon is generally accepted by people who don’t do a whole lot of critical thinking as a source of spotless and methodologically pure scientific research, but it’s not the only eminently reputable source on which she relies. Hughes also frequently cites herself, and the organization she operates, as authorities on the harms of pornography.

OK, so that’s a little like an attorney citing his own law review articles in court as though they were mandatory authority, but we’ll let that slide. After all, we already know for sure the fine people of Enough is Enough are experts on the harms of pornography, because they told us they are.

Hughes isn’t just a social scientist, by the way. Evidently, she’s a legal scholar, too.

Due to the brilliance of her finely-tuned legal mind, Hughes is able to provide a definition of “obscene materials” without once referencing the Miller Test courts rely on to determine whether material is obscene—unquestionably an impressive feat of legal scholarship.

You see, according to Donna Rice Hughes, Esq., “obscene materials” is defined as “graphic hard-core pornography that focuses on sex and/or sexual violence, including close-ups of sex acts, lewd exhibition of the genitals and deviant activities such as group sex, bestiality, torture, incest and excretory functions.”

OK, so that’s not quite the definition or standard the courts rely on, but we’ve already established the courts are part of the problem here, so it’s safe to ignore case law and precedent and adopt Hughes’ definition as our own.

Having firmly and incontrovertibly established that “hardcore porn” is synonymous with “patently illegal,” Hughes next establishes just how huge the problem of internet porn really is, which she does by citing a series of statistics which must be true, because people reported them on the internet.

On the bright side, this is where the really positive news in Hughes’ paper can be found—at least from the porn industry perspective. You see, apparently, everything we’ve heard about the decline in revenues across the industry is just flat wrong.

For example, in 2006 alone, Hughes tells us, “Worldwide revenue from pornography was $97 billion.”

Wow, that’s one impressive statistic! You know what makes that stat all the more amazing? According to Hughes, online porn now makes $3,000 per second all by itself, without even adding in the other sectors of the adult industry.

Yes, you read that right: The online porn sector is clocking $180,000 per minute, $10,800,000 per hour and $259,200,000per day. Extrapolate that out across the entire year, and you arrive at the sum of $94.6 billion, which is only $2.4 billion less than the entire adult industry made in a year back in 2006, offline and online combined, according to Hughes.

More impressive still? According to the source for the aggregate revenue figure, the adult industry still earns $97 billion a year globally, which means that the online sector’s share of the porn market now sits at 97.52 percent.

Sure, cynics, porn industry apologists, financial analysts and people who can successfully multiply numbers might say it’s unlikely the online sector now accounts for more than 97 percent of global porn industry revenues, but we all know better now, thanks to Hughes and the ceaseless wonders of Faith-Based Math.

Of course, what’s good news for the porn industry necessarily is bad news for everyone else, so let’s not get too excited about the idea of online porn still being a nearly 12-figure sector, annually. It’s rather unseemly to keep sawing at the strings of our collective Apocalypse Fiddle while Rome (and possibly Jerusalem) goes up in flames, after all.

The most important aspect of Hughes’ new article, of course, is that it serves to sound the Porn Warning Alarm. Enough is enough. The time has come to do something about the Great Porn Pandemic.

What can you do, you ask? Well for starters, you can shell out $30 bucks for The Witherspork Spinstertute’s Social Costs of Pornography and educate yourself a bit, you $3,000-per-minute-earning, youth-corrupting, marriage-killing, online-porn-slinging little pervert.

After reading that trustworthy tome, I trust that God will speak to you, as He clearly has to Hughes, and Show You the Way, being the cosmic Peter Frampton lyric He is.

Either that, or He’ll show you how to request a refund from Amazon.