>> There's something wrong here. In America, sympathy toward animals is
>> more highly developed than sympathy toward human beings.
>
>make that 'towards animals and extraterrestrials'; (remember when some
>were troubled with a potentially flawed galileo launch spewing
>radioactivity into the atmosphere?)
>
>see below
>
>les (animal-lovin veggie-eatin ex-huntin tree-huggin star-gazin
> galileo-data-usin but-granola-hatin) schaffer
<snip>
>Science Headlines
>Thursday March 2 3:24 AM ET
>
>Galileo Spacecraft May Be Crashed
>
>TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - A NASA spacecraft exploring Jupiter and its moons
>may be deliberately crashed to avoid any chance that it could strike
>and contaminate the moon Europa, where scientists believe simple life
>forms may exist.
>
>Galileo, launched in 1989, has traveled 500 million miles to study the
>giant planet.
>
>A member of the Galileo imaging team says NASA are considering
>crashing the spacecraft into Jupiter or one of its icy moons in 2002
>because it might still contain microbes from Earth.
>
>``It was never put into quarantine or cleaned up before it left the
>Earth, though I can't imagine any bugs would be alive on it after all
>the radiation it's been exposed to,'' Kitt Peak astronomer Michael
>Belton said Wednesday.
>
>``Just to be sure, they want to get rid of it and make sure it doesn't
>go into Europa, where we have a possible habitat of some kind of
>extraterrestrial life.''
>
>Scientists suspect that Europa has an ocean beneath its ice shell that
>might contain simple life forms.
If only Americans were capable of extending at least the same degree of concern that they exhibit toward animals & extraterrestrials to American prisoners! Mike Davis writes in _Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster_ (NY: Metropolitan Books, 1998):
***** 9. The Gulag Rim
You touch the fence and you die.
Official at Calipatria State Prison (1994)
...The bad future of Southern California rises, with little melodrama, in the middle distance between the skeleton of last year's cotton crop and the aerial bombing range in the Chocolate Mountains. From a mile away, the slate-gray structures resemble warehouses or perhaps a factory. An unassuming road sign announces "Calipatria State Prison." This is the outer rim of Los Angeles's ecology of fear....
Calipatria, which opened in 1993, is a "level 4," maximum security prison that currently houses 10 percent of California's convicted murderers, 1,200 men. Yet the guard booth at the main gate is unmanned, as are 10 of its 12 perimeter gun towers....As Daniel Paramo, the prison's energetic public relations officer, explains, "The warden doesn't trust the human-error factor in the gun towers; he puts his faith, instead, in Southern California Edison."[94]
Paramo is standing in front of an ominous 13-foot electric fence, sandwiched between two ordinary chain-link fences. Each of the 15 individual strands of wire bristles with 5,000 volts of Parker Dam power -- about 10 times the recognized lethal dosage. The electrical contractors guarantee instantaneous death. (An admiring guard in the background mutters: "Year, toast....")
The original bill authorizing the high-voltage "escape-proof" fence sailed through the legislature with barely a murmur. Cost-conscious politicians had few scruples about an electric bill that saved $2 million in labor costs each year. And when the warden quietly threw the main switch in November 1993, there was general satisfaction that the correction system was moving ahead, with little controversy, toward its high-tech future. "But," Paramo adds ruefully, "we had neglected to factor the animal-rights people into the equation."
The prison is just east of the Salton Sea -- a major wintering habitat for waterfowl -- and the gently purring high-voltage fence immediately became an erotic beacon to passing birds. Local bird-watchers soon found out about the body count ("a gull, two owls, a finch and a scissor-tailed flycatcher" and alerted the Audubon Society. By January, Calipatria's "death fence" was an international environmental scandal. When a CNN crew pulled into the prison parking lot, the Department of Corrections threw in the towel and hired an ornithologist to help them redesign the fence.
The result is the world's only birdproof, ecologically responsible death fence. Paramo had some difficulty maintaining a straight face as he points out $150,000 in innovations: "a warning wire for curious rodents, anti-perching deflectors for wildfowl, and tiny passageways for burrowing owls." Calipatria has also built an attractive pond for visiting geese and ducks.
[94] All statistics double-checked with Department of Corrections, "Institutional Population Characteristics" (Sacramento, August 1994).
(Davis 411-13) *****
Meanwhile, prison overcrowding and "double celling" (= putting two inmates into a one-man cell) fueled a wave of inmate violence and suicide, and civil liberties advocates denounced "double celling" as "cruel and unusual punishment," but a federal judge upheld its constitutionality (Davis 413).
In America, the lives of birds are more precious than the lives of prisoners.
Yoshie