WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF NPR UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: NPR downplays actual human sacrifice.

I get the feeling every now and then that academics and journalists place a low value on human life, thinking of it as no more precious than a commodity to be depleted and replenished as necessary.

That is certainly the impression I get this week from reading National Public Radio’s astonishingly gentle take on Aztecan human sacrifice. That is not hyperbole. The publicly funded newsgroup indeed published an article this week downplaying the Aztecs’ practice of mass human slaughter.

The NPR report, titled “500 Years Later, The Spanish Conquest Of Mexico Is Still Being Debated,” centers on efforts by the director of the urban archaeology program at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, Raul Barrera Rodríguez, to excavate Aztecan ruins.

Exit quote: “‘When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated in 1487 the Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days. That is 21,000 sacrifices per day. I am not even mad about this — I am impressed. They didn’t even kill that many people at Auschwitz on the average day.’ As many reasons as the invading colonialists have to be ashamed, that they wiped a genocidal death cult off the planet is not one of them.”