Human Rights Law

Tuesday Afternoon

By blueness

An' Up Through The Ground Come A Bubblin' Crude
Russian scientists in Pisces mini-submarines have descended to the bottom of Siberia's Lake Baikal, the world's deepest lake, containing an estimated 20 percent of the planet's fresh water. According to this piece, "expedition leaders have denied media reports that they will be searching for oil and gas." Likewise denied are reports that scientists aboard the subs were stunned to find drilling platforms already embedded in the lake floor, as well as a Wal-Mart, a McDonalds, and a Starbucks. Meanwhile, the US has estimated that if every single drop of recoverable oil could be sucked out of the Arctic Circle, the world could run on petroleum for an additional three years. Whoopee.

Bottoms Up
Neither man nor nature cooperated when Bomb McCain decided to descend onto an oil-drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico to trumpet his new incarnation as born-again oilman. First Hurricane Dolly roared in with 100 mph winds, then an oil tanker collided with a barge, befouling the region with hundreds of thousands of gallons of heavy fuel oil. McCain's donning of the mantle of Jed Clampett has, however, stuffed his mattress with millions of dollars donated by Clampett's brethren in the oil and gas racket. Finally, interesting piece from DHinMI, which examines the notion that presidential contenders most often fret about "peaking too soon," but that the problem with the ill-starred McCain campaign, for Democrats, may be that it "hits bottom" too soon.  

Pie In The Sky
Clots of Christian cultists will ululate outside gas stations to petition God to lower fuel prices. In a NION exclusive, God has replied that if these people had voted for Al Gore, instead of George II, or John Kerry, instead of George II, their prayers would not have been necessary. God next quoted Kenneth Patchen: "The question is not: do we believe in God? but rather: does God believe in us? And the answer is: only an unbeliever could have created our image of God; and only a false God could be satisfied with it."
And The Healing Has Begun
In post-Christian France people are instinctively returning to old ways. Latest evidence: the penchant of French men and women for engaging in sexual congress at the site of a WWI memorial. Prior to the invasion of Christianity, European peoples not only ritually engaged in sex to ensure crop fertility, but also as a means of healing land damaged physically or psychically. Police officials describe the increasing incidence of sex acts at the memorial as "vandalism," "desecration," and "perversion." Wrong. That describes WWI. That describes this. Not sex.

The Tippling Of The Shrew
A tiny Malaysian tree shrew seems to exist on an alcohol-soaked diet that leaves the odds of any one shrew going to sleep drunk on any one night at around 36 percent. "Drunk," that is, by human standards--the shrew itself doesn't seem to become intoxicated at all. These shrews apparently possess some means to break down alcohol before they begin laughing too loudly, inappropriately groping other shrews, driving out of the tree, or posting obscenities on the internet. Scientists say this is not surprising, as the shrews have had about 55 million years of evolution to adapt to the booze they extract from the flower buds of the bertam palm. The shrew's diet has been described as "100 percent beer." Said one impressed researcher: "There are other animals that do drink alcohol but not on a continuous basis. For bats and birds it would be just at the time that the plants are producing fruit. These animals are doing that around the clock and all year round. That's pretty unique." This shrew, about the size of a small rat, is one of us: "a living model for extinct mammals, representing the stock from all extinct and living tree-shrews and primates radiated." They just hold their liquor better.

The Wrongness Of Cell Phones, Reason #56984726.65(b)
The director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute has warned faculty and staff to limit cell phone use or run an increased risk of developing cancer. He bases his warning on early, unpublished data, and says "the heart of my concern is that we shouldn't wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later." He notes that the governments of France, Germany, and India have already issued similar warnings. Scientific American has meanwhile weighed in with a piece titled "Cell Phones--The New Cigarettes?"

Lost In Space
They're baking dirt on Mars.

"That Tree Is My Father"
Beautiful comment from plf515 over on Kos, attached to a diary treating Barack Obama's visit to Yad Vashem:

Yad Vashem is a stunning place with "stunning" meant quite literally.  You leave stunned.

Outside at Yad Vashem is the Avenue of the Righteous.  Here, a tree is planted for each gentile known to have saved Jews in the Holocaust.  There is a sign "Please don't walk on the grass".  Once, when I was there, a man was hugging a tree.  A guard asked him to get off the grass. The man said "That tree is my father".

The man spoke no Hebrew and little English; the guard spoke no Polish and little English.  We managed to piece together the story (Israel is a very multilingual place).  The man's father had had his legs blown off fighting with the Polish resistance. Wanting to still do something, he hid Jews in his attic.

I don't know that this has anything to do with Obama, but I remember it every time I think of Yad Vashem.

Some Assembly Required
"You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering that you could have avoided."
                                                               --Franz Kafka

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on July 29, 2008 (boomark / email).