Hey, did you guys read the news this morning? We’re basically living inside Thunderdome! “Report: D.C., Baltimore among most dangerous cities” shouts the headline on WTOP this morning — the story opens by informing us that we should all be locking up our wallets and never leaving the house ever again: “The list…lists D.C. as the fourth most unsafe city with more than half a million people.” Egads! Of course, once you get past the lede and actually look at the study, there is good cause to not start preparing for martial law quite yet. The District actually finished as the 22nd “most dangerous” city on the list (PDF). We also thought that we’d quote this reaction from Houston Mayor Annise D. Parker in full, since it does a nice job of condensing all the issues with these rankings that we’ve read so far this morning: “These rankings represent a gross misuse of FBI data…Everyone with the slightest knowledge of this issue knows the rankings are not credible, but the publication persists with them, presumably because rankings are popular and sell books. Unfortunately, they also do real harm to the reputation and economy of the cities that come out on the losing end, often through no fault of their own.” Good, now we can all feel safe enough to go out and do the other thing that the media is telling us to do ad nauseam this week!