Quake, tsunamis only kill 220
Monday, December 27, 2004 Posted: 9:57 PM EST
(0257 GMT)
Palo Alto, CA (AP) -- Stanford University
professor Dr. Lawrence Whitman outlined his Law of Relative Human
Value for the media today and demonstrated how, when applied to
the weekend disaster in the Indian Ocean, less than 250 real lives
were lost in the tragedy.
Whitman, Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Stanford, is the
chief postulator of the Law of Relative Human Value, which attempts
to assign the actual human toll in terms of values of lives lost
to disasters, both natural and man-made.
"The Law basically states that all men are not created equal
and that human tolls of tragedies should be adjusted accordingly,"
said Whitman, speaking at a noon press conference.
"If we assign a value of 1 to the worth of an upper middle-class
white male's life, we can then use a complicated formula to determine
the valuations of all other races' and socio-economic statuses'
lives.
"While no value of life can be worth more than 1.0, we have
found that it is possible to assign negative valuations to lives,
as in the case of Islamic terrorists and Hare Krishnas. Typical
valuations include .6 for blacks, as the U.S. Constitution originally
defined slaves as 3/5ths of a person. Mexicans, on the other hand,
are valued more in areas where there are fewer to mow lawns and
do other menial labor, so that, say for instance, in Michigan,
a Mexican might be worth .7, but in the Southwest, where they
illegally cross the border in droves and are readily available,
a value of .3 might be assigned. Jews are typically worth about
.9, whereas the American Indian, content with a life of drinking
"firewater" on the reservation and living a jobless
existence thanks to generous government handouts, are typically
only worth about .25, unless they run one of the more popular
Indian casinos, then they might be worth something in the range
of .4 to .45.
"Asians, on the other hand, are very difficult to assign
values to. For example, wealthy Japanese who are productive members
of society are worth upwards of .95, but the downtrodden Asians,
such as the Vietnamese boat people, are maybe only worth .15,
unless they are particularly good at manicures.
"Keep in mind, however, that these are only values assigned
to Asians living in America. In Asia and the Indian Subcontinent,
values are much, much lower. This partly a function of massive
populations, such as in China and India, as well as the fact that
they all look the same, making them, for all intents and purposes,
interchangeable. I mean, lets face it, you kill a thousand Chinamen
and twelve seconds later, you've got another thousand--indistiguishable
from the first group--replacing them.
"The most recent figures for the tsunami distaster affecting
Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and the rest of those vaguely-similar
countries have placed the death toll at at least 22,000. By applying
the Law of Relative Human Value and 'crunching the numbers', so
to say, we've come up with a value of roughly .01 for each dead
brown person. Thus, in real terms, the death toll actually only
stands at about 220 lives lost.
"And while this would definitely be a tragedy here in the
United States if--let's say--a passenger jet carrying 220 middle-class
white people crashed, it's hardly the kind of thing that's all
that important when it happens halfway around the world. Based
on this data, I implore the United States and other countries
to rescind there offers of aid to the so-called 'stricken' countries."
Workers load coffins into a C-130 cargo plane capable of holding
100 "real" dead each
in Phuket, Thailand.
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"That aid money could be better spent killing brown people
the proper way," said Whitman, "like we are in Iraq."
Copyright 2004 The
Associated
Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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