Not that some lives are worth more than others or anything, but at a guess, which story do you think you're more likely to hear?
A:
Nepal Tourist Plane Crash Kills All 18 on BoardA plane carrying foreign tourists slammed into a mountain in bad weather in Nepal on Thursday, killing all 18 people on board.
The Shangri-la Air Twin Otter carrying 13 Germans, three Nepalese crew, a Briton and an American crashed mid-morning just minutes before it was due to land in the city of Pokhara, Nepalese officials said.
The tourists had been booked on the same flight from Jomsom to Pokhara on Wednesday when it was aborted because of bad weather, a German embassy spokeswoman told Reuters in Pokhara, about 85 miles northwest of the capital.
B:
IOL: Landslides, floods kill 65 people in NepalA landslide triggered by heavy monsoon rains swept through a mountainous village in eastern Nepal, killing up to 65 people on Wednesday and pushing the death toll from seasonal floods in south Asia to over 1 000.
Most of the residents of the Nepalese village of Thapra, 200km from Kathmandu, were asleep when the landslide struck early on Wednesday, said Lekhnath Pokhrel of the Natural Calamity Management Centre.
He said helicopters loaded with relief material and rescuers were waiting at a Kathmandu airport for the weather to clear.
More than 25 million people have been displaced or stranded in Nepal, India and Bangladesh since June.
25 million (mostly) brown people, versus 13 Germans, a Briton(?) and an American. Go on, take a wild guess.
The Nome King claims that when the flit hits the shan, stories that would normally not pass the ideological gatekeepers manage to get into the major media. The man is clearly deranged.
Giles (by way of Ghost in the Machine -- you will never escape this cycle) links a story in the Boston Globe about howTargeting minorities is an FBI tradition''Concluding that second-class citizens would have second-class loyalty, the FBI dismissed every black dissident as subversive, every criticism of American policy as un-American,'' [Kenneth] O'Reilly [author of Racial Matters: The Fbi's Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972] continued. ''While Woodrow Wilson defended national self-determination at the Versailles peace conference, his State Department solicited intelligence reports from the FBI on any black American who complained about riots and lynchings.
''While the president promised to bring democracy to the world, black activists reminded him that he had not yet brought democracy to blacks in his own country or to the not-very-white peoples who lived in America's overseas possessions.'' When Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian and head of the all-black National Equal Rights League, pressed Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts to read the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments of the US Constitution into the Treaty of Versailles, ''Hoover, already adept at making himself useful to the incumbent administration, called upon the bureau to monitor `Negro leaders' and their `political stand ... toward the peace treaty and the League of Nations.'
''By the fall of 1919 the FBI had institutionalized surveillance programs aimed at blacks. Bureau field offices across the country covered `the Negro Question' systematically, recruiting `reliable Negroes' as informants in the `various Negro lodges and associations' and having them report on `Negro ministers' and anyone else who preached `social equality' and `equal rights.'
''The informants infiltrated every racial advancement and black nationalist group, from the moderate National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to the immoderate African Blood Brotherhood, hoping to detect `ultra radical activities' or even `liberal activities' ... Hoover concluded that `the Reds have done a vast amount of evil damage by carrying doctrines of race revolt and the poison of Bolshevism to the Negroes.'''
We're abolitionists. We're Communists. We're supporters of Islamic terrorism. And we commit more crimes and get preferential treatment due to quotas. Wow. No wonder we're feared and hated.
Why do we have to commit crimes if we're getting jobs we're not qualified fo-- never mind. There I go using logic again.
To answer your hypothetical last question:
because you can.
I commit crime because its a part of my culture.
obviously.
duh.
Actually it was the gender confused J. Edgar Hoover that liked all that racial profiling or whatever you want to call it. Like all extreme positions it makes sense on some level. After all doesn't the USA while waving the flag and offering apple pie offer it mostly to the dissatisfied, disenfranchised ,dis- whatevers in all those other countries that have governments who we don't like. It makes sense that our enemies (Which must number in the ten of thousands by now. Mostly White and rich is a bad combination.)would try the same tactics on us.
I'm not so convinced that liking to wear clothes associated with the so-called "opposite" sex necessarily means gender confusion is present. Wearing something that makes you feel sexy -- regardless of whether it is gender-coded to your biological sex -- is an erotic activity that may or may not also be about gender dysphoria.
Assuming that it is to go out on a limb that I don't think will support your weight.
Then there's the transphobic, rigidly gender-binary notion that gender dysphoria is somehow going to generate N-number of flaws, psychoses, ruthlessness, emotional instability, desire to kick puppies, etc. C'mon and join us all in the 21st century, where we've established that it's possible not to be heterosexual and/or 100% gendernormative and still just be basically a regular old human being, won't you? The water's lovely, the people are friendly.
Surely with a target like J. Edgar there are plenty of ways to communicate that the person in question was fucked in the head and did a lot of questionable and even awful things without having to invoke kneejerk transphobia. I mean, I'm sorry, but I just don't buy a causal connection between "J. Edgar Hoover liked to wear silky panties and lacy brassieres in private" and "J. Edgar Hoover was a suspicious, ruthless, extreme man whose directives hurt and sometimes destroyed a great many undeserving people."
And neither, if you have the brains G-d gave a guppy, should you.
Hey, you see the FBI (CIA, DOJ, oh I could just go on and on) committing crimes all the time and they have jobs they're not qualified for... O;-*
Hanne- thnx much for the post. Saves me the effort [seeing as I seem to be a bit caustic right now] & you're much more articulate than I.
"Hey, you see the FBI (CIA, DOJ, oh I could just go on and on) committing crimes all the time and they have jobs they're not qualified for..."
Not to mention CEOs COOs CFOs CIOs CTOs CROs CxOs, VP Biz Devs, VP Online Ad Sales, VP Interactive, VP HRs, I could go on and on...
But we all love the current DoJ here. All of us. And I'm not just saying that because they show up in the visitor logs.
(Schtum, the rest of you. My address is a whois search away, and I know ain't none of you motherfuckers gonna help me make bail. Assuming I even got a preliminary hearing in the first pl-- eheh)
Oh, and could the visitor from sephiroth.*mutter*.gov change that name to something that won't keep me up half the night? Thanks, you're swell.
Al, once you're done with Hanne's objections, you wanna explain about the U.S. doing stuff for "dissatisfied, disenfranchised ,dis- whatevers" in other countries?
Gee whiz.. aren't we a sensitive group? I was being sarcastic with the comment about Hoover.
The man was somewhere between a lunatic and a Nazi.
Ashcroft doesn't seem to be very different. I hope everyone here votes in the next presidential election. I'm all for protecting the US of A but George W. and Ashcroft are getting way out of control.
As for the disenfranchised... we are currently trying to get some of those kinds of folks in Iraq to do our dirty work for us. We have also tried this in Cuba. No doubt offering all sorts of aid packages once the appropriate group got in power.
It is always really about getting someone out of power.
Seems to me if one of our enemies offered some group of pissed off militants/supremacists/ fanatics the right sort of pitch they could get someone to try to overthrow the US Gov. Low risk for the enemy state doing the backing but high gain if it succeeds.
A slight clarification... I didn't say the US would give the dis...whatevers the moon and apple pie. I said they would offer it. Big difference.
Er, the gov't locked up a bunch of Japanese citizens because some of them might, possibly be interested in working for the other side. And is doing the same thing with Arabs/Muslims now. And has a history of effed-up behavior towards the black community, again based on little actual evidence of treason.
Then there's the Sacco/Vanzetti thang. Happy Anniversary, by the way.
I doubt any enemy states would bother. We're too quick to lock up anyone who looks suspicious.
And we're not sensitive.
We're five by five.
Wow. Anyone who names a gov't server Sepiroth has a slight chance of being human (or at least human heavy in the hybrid mix).
Well, don't think I'm revealing state secrets, but it was the EPA. So they could claim, "Trees!"
I think this guy, so I worry.
Like most Methodists, my knowledge of Kabbala doesn't even cover spelling the word properly.
Uh, actually I was thinking FF too and made a spelling error. Strange little web we got here.