From the European Union — not exactly a bastion of sound decision-making on a whole range of issues — comes the novel idea of banning or blocking searches for dangerous words such as “bomb.” EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini says that he intends to explore with the private sector how to “prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism.”

I think this is a brilliant idea. Why didn’t anyone think of it before? It’s so simple. But I don’t think it goes far enough. Why not ban the actual words themselves instead? That would be much more effective. Then people not only couldn’t search for things like bombs or killing, they wouldn’t be able to write about them either — and eventually, they wouldn’t even be able to think about them, because the concepts themselves wouldn’t exist!

Double-plus good, don’t you think?