Event organizers shield the scene where the Russian contestant Vladimir Ladyzhenskiy died

Many of us have grown awfully tired of hearing the international community deride Americans. Just deriding our own, as many of us do when acting as faithful stewards to protect our beloved motherland from the evils of ignorance and apathy, is tiring enough. The last thing we want to hear is some foreign media outlet calling us stupid, or lazy, or fat, or any of the derogatory remarks we mostly agree to call ourselves – It’s a human thing; the right to call ourselves what we want while outsiders are not allowed to. So when members of the international community (I guess it’s p.c. for “foreigners”) makes our dumbest look somewhat intelligent, well… I guess it gives us a reason to smile, point fingers, and do that taboo name-calling thing, like the way I’m choosing to call Russian Vladimir Ladyzhenskiy and Finland’s own Timo Kaukonen a couple of morons.

The two were the finallists in the World Sauna Championships – an annual contest in Heinola, Finland where contestants endure rising temperatures for as long as possible. In front of a crowd of over 1,000 spectators the two were inside of the 230 degree sauna for 6 minutes when Ladyzhenskiy collapsed. The heated booth, where water is poured onto the stove every thirty seconds for as long as needed to claim a winner, was rushed by event organizers. Kaukonen, despite getting sick, refused to leave the sauna and had to be forcefully removed, whereas Ladyzhenskiy died shortly after. Kaukonen was rushed to the hospital where he was treated for severe burns and was listed in stable condition. 

Hakon Eikesdal, a photographer with the Norwegian daily Dagbladet, said it appeared the two men were bleeding from heat blisters in various parts of their bodies. Oddly enough, in Finland where hanging aboout in sauna’s is one of the country’s favorite pasttimes, sweltering in 230 degree heat is quite common.”I know this is very hard to understand to people outside Finland who are not familiar with the sauna habit,” the event spokesman Ossi Arvela said. “It is not so unusual to have 110 degrees (230 Farenheit) in a sauna. A lot of competitors before have sat in higher temperatures than that.”

Perhaps the best news that has come from this came from Arvela, when he claimed that the contest has been held since 1999, and ”… it will never be held again.”

It was always believed that the earliest of the human genus, Homo habilis (Handy Man) were the first toolmakers. That was until recently when a team of international researchers discovered two ribs of a large hoofed animal that roamed modern Ethiopia nearly 3.5 million years ago.

The evidence came to life when the ribs were studied, revealing slices in the bone, suggesting the use of tools 800,000 years beyond what was previously believed. From the ancestor known as Australeopithecus aferensis, the genus from which the famous “Lucy” came, the bones are believed to have been cut with tools the primates used in skinning the meat. “In this part of the world, at this time period, the only [hominid] species found to this point has been afarensis,” Shannon McPherron said. McPherron, an archaeologist from The Max Plancke Institute, is the co-author of the study that was published yesterday in Nature magazine.

Though it stands as reasonable to believe that tool-use was much older than previously thought simply by the sophistication of what we’ve discovered and marked as being the “oldest tools”. It’s easy to understand tools as originating from rocks being used in their natural state. A rock with a naturally sharp edge would’ve been used to cut, while those with more of a blunt edge would’ve been used to crush objects like bone to get inside to the marrow. As with anything, tools went through stages of evolution, as their function was passed down through generations over millions of years. “We’ll have to find more than these two bones, but if we fill in the record and we find more evidence of this, then we might be looking at a kind of learned behavior that was then shared and passed along in and amongst these groups,” McPherron said.

Though Lucy and her peers might not have been manufacturing tools, it appears they were using them almost a million years before we ever knew.

 I have to thank the person whose bumper sticker asked “Why do we kill people, who kill people, so we can say that killing people is wrong?” for giving me something to wrestle over - can “eye for an eye” justice be considered progressive thought?

Being considerate is a key to being a good human – putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is another way to say it. With regards to Capital Punishment there are a few parties to consider. There’s the victim, the victim’s family, and the perpetrator’s state of being. Unfortunately for the perp’s family, well unless they’re the victims then the consideration they receive is nothing more than an “obituary-esque” line or two at the close of the news bit, with some sort of “We really can’t figure it out. He never hurt anyone in his life.” Often people look at them as if they’re to blame – as if they are somehow guilty for letting the person grow up to commit murder, or at least blamed for letting them out of the house.

Normally the thought process travels a line beginning with the imagery of the act – putting yourself in the shoes of the victim and trying to imagine what they endured. From there, depending on your own personality, the imagery, or consideration can fork. It can either go to the victim’s family members, or to the perpetrator’s state of mind. “Who could do such a thing?” is sometimes the question immediately following the news of the act. Were they sane and if they were then how could they do something so sickening? Can someone be sane and perform such a gruesome act, or does it rely on loss of reason, even if only for a short moment? If this is how your brain works in these moments it is without a doubt that you’ll eventually get to the family members of the victims. If your brain works the other way, and you cannot think to put yourself in the shoes, or mind of the murderer, then there’s that chance that you never will. It is really not so strange to believe that the killer might never be considered but is simply judged. In fact, this is one of those things the person with the “Why do we kill people…” bumper sticker is often so upset about – the lack of consideration we give the perpetrator. Some activists rail against writing off the guilty and putting them to their death without ever taking into consideration their mental state. Though it’s the job of the courts to determine that, yet often the pressure and influence the victim’s family has on the jury, just from sitting in the courtroom, is enough to sway a verdict. Those left to suffer further, hoping their child is in a “better place”, and knowing they’ll never share another moment with them again, hope the murderer does not get a ruling of insanity – they want them dead.

And how could they be blamed when only the torso of their seven year old daughter was found in the woods after being brutally molested? There’s no way to blame them for seeking retribution in the most violent way. The news itself stirs imagery that brings sorrow and disgust to those not even related to the victim. Imagine that being your daughter – pure and smooth one minute, and the next a bruised and bloated chunk of nakedness pulled from beneath the undergrowth. One can’t help but to relive the horror, and hope that it all happened so fast that the girl didn’t know what hit her. Nobody wants to imagine a slow and tortuous death, not at least for someone who most likely was a very innocent person. At 7 years of age, what could they have possibly done to have deserved that fate? The victim’s parents could certainly imagine a slow and tortuous death for the masochistic murderer. When asked if the dead man on the gurney brought on a feeling of relief now that their child’s murderer was gone, the parents often reply with a lame satisfaction in their voices. “At least we know he’ll never be able to do this to anyone else.” They may or may not have closure, but retribution will never be felt. In their eyes, one could see their longing to hear that the brutal killer had to endure the exact scenario their child endured, since it’s hardly fair that the child suffered extreme terror from a lengthy session of excruciating pain – torture and dismemberment, unfathomable pain; while the guilty party now has years to prepare for their fate. They are given the opportunity to finalize things – come to terms with themselves and whether they feel remorse or not, to make peace with their chosen guiding-spirit, to have last meals and final words. He’ll feel a prick of the needle and he’ll fall asleep forever. There is no pain, no horror, save that which comes from the fear of entering the unknown, or forever leaving behind the known.

No one in that scenario is trying to send a message to the public saying ‘killing is wrong’. In fact, the pros and cons we often hear circling the issue of capital punishment comes mostly from those who have only ever been on the outside of the issue. They hear about these things in the news, and like myself we share our opinions. Between both parties murder is in the air, and the victim’s family, more often than not, is frothing at their jowls waiting to take their turn. The reason capital punishment is still carried out in the 21^st century is mainly so the family members of the victim can gain retribution and closure; they need the weight of the heinous imagery that will undoubtedly haunt them for life, lifted from their chests.

There are a few things we have to take into account – receiving a death penalty is often more expensive than life in prison – endless appeals forces the longer term of hanging about on Death Row. Often it amounts to nothing more than life in prison as the average time a Death Row inmate waits for execution is 12 years, and many die waiting. It’s apparent that with over 3,000 inmates awaiting their execution throughout the United States, along with the tens of thousands of murder cases that received lesser sentencing, capital punishment can hardly be seen as a deterrent. Not to mention that with advanced DNA testing, we’ve determined that many on Death Row who we originally thought were guilty were actually innocent. Who knows how many people we’ve put to death who never committed any crime?

Since our courtrooms lack any god to exact the wrongs we deal with in society, we have to take on the role of Judge. We determine whether or not the person is capable of rehabilitation – though often enough if the murderer is of sound mind, enough to be rehabilitated, the act they committed is suddenly inexcusable as it might not be if the person suffered from some clinical mental illness. If the guilty is clueless as to what they’ve done it’s harder to hate the individual, for they lacked control and awareness of what was happening while it was happening. This is where morality comes into play; to kill, or not to kill? The notion of following a commandment as being any valid reasoning behind a verdict is ludicrous, lest the gods come down and make the judgment for us. How moral would it be to allow the family of the victim to suffer, while the guilty goes on in life, perhaps finding life in prison a nightmare, yet knowing the occasional moments of happiness and laughter – something stolen from the victim. How moral is leaving the victim’s family members without any retribution, or closure? For you with the bumper sticker, nobody is saying killing is wrong as much as they’re saying their child, or any loved-one for that matter, was brutally raped and murdered, and now they’re going to hope to find peace by having the guilty put to death, even if it’s a very soft, and painless death.

In the end it boils down to only one thing – is the guilty party of sound mind, and most importantly WAS the guilty party of sound mind when the incident took place? If guilty and of sound mind, maybe the judgment should be left to the family members of the victim at this point. There are those who believe in amnesty, and perhaps it should be their right to refuse playing a part of the eye for an eye form of justice. Only they truly know what it would take to feel closure, because in the end the closure they seek lies along the only moral path. Unfortunately for them, having the killer killed may not even work to bring about any sense of retribution, but it should probably be theirs to determine whether or not killing is wrong.

So, when we ask “Why do we kill people, who kill people, so we can say that killing people is wrong?” the only answer I can come up with is, ‘We don’t', because when passing down a sentence for someone killing another, that thought of killing being wrong is already long gone. What’s left is the question, “How do we make the best of a bad situation?”