Moving right along...

"Stemagen, a private company set up by an unnamed investor and a top fertility doctor, said its scientists used cloning technology to make five early-stage embryos from donated human eggs and skin cells from two men."

From the useful and interesting Religious Intelligence.org

Dr Peter Saunders, General Secretary of Christian Medical Fellowship commented: “Researchers in Japan and the USA have now produced embryonic-like stem cells from human skin cells and accordingly many scientists now regard using animal-human hybrids for stem cell research as a scientific blind alley. As well as being unethical they are simply unnecessary.

“This cynical decision, made in haste whilst parliament is in the midst of debating this very matter, will simply add to the growing international reputation of Britain as a pariah state and the HFEA as an unregulated quango making ill-considered reflex politically correct judgements.” Meanwhile the pro-life group SPUC hit out at news that that the Stemagen Corporation of California has cloned human embryos.

Paul Danon said: “Whatever the truth may be of the claim, it’s appalling that scientists are competing in a race in which ethics and human lives are the first casualties.”

Would you feel OK putting your life in this man's hands?

Ok,

so he's nuts then.

I guess you'd have to be.

Well, yes Steve, but it's the "ounce of sense" part we're having trouble with...

Steve-the-formerly-evil-Trad on "Life Teen" and related enthusiasms.

Anyone with an ounce of sense in their head should know that one can’t make something they hold sacred appear “cool” in order to penetrate pop culture and the follies of youth without subverting the very transcendence of what they are trying to draw people to. Worship is supposed to bring the faithful “up”, to elevate them above the mundane, daily realities they face. Reverence is found in silence, in music that is ordered in such a way that it both humbles and lifts the spirit, in a non-vernacular language, in incense and ceremony, in prayers of supplication, etc. Sublimation, not simplification, is the key.

Jungle music worth bopping to

Thanks John,
After a day of yelling at (and paying) British Telecom, I needed the lift.

Warren again

In the notification process, the recipient of a human rights complaint need not be told who the complainant is, or what he is alleging. The recipient is just left to guess for a while, as the bureaucratic machinery of quasi-legal “justice” proceeds at its glacial pace. Truth and rumours become hard to distinguish in this kafkaesque environment.

...

Though appalled, I am not myself surprised by the nature of the cases now being brought before Canada's “human rights” commissions, with a view to extinguishing free speech in Canada. I have seen this coming for decades, and have argued all along it would come to this. My only surprise is that it took more than three decades for the ideology behind “multiculturalism” and collective “human rights” to bear this kind of fruit.

Thoughtcrime of the day ~ Material advancements have not been good for humanity

Because it seems clear that human beings are incapable of avoiding being corrupted by material comforts. As Steyn (may he be forever in print) put it, we seem more willing, every time, to trade the higher things for the lower, the primary for the secondary.

I know that some things are wonderfully better than they used to be: the new miracles of surgery, public attitudes to the disabled, the health and well-being of children, intelligent concern for the environment, the massive strides in science and technology.

Yes, there are material blessings and benefits innumerable which were unknown in our youth.

But much has deteriorated. The United Kingdom has begun to look more like a Third World country, shabby, littered, ugly, run down, without purpose or direction, misruled by a typical Third World government, corrupt, incompetent and undemocratic.

George MacDonald Fraser, OBE

Why do I always miss the good ones?

(I discovered Alice Thomas Ellis about two weeks after she died too. Michael Wharton too.)

George MacDonald Fraser, OBE (2 April 1925 – 2 January 2008) was a British author of both historical novels and non-fiction books, as well as several screenplays.

I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.

My forebears from the Highlands of Scotland were a fairly primitive, treacherous, blood-thirsty bunch and, as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, would have been none the worse for washing. Fine, let them be so depicted, if any film maker feels like it; better that than insulting, inaccurate drivel like Braveheart.

The philosophy of political correctness is now firmly entrenched over here, too, and at its core is a refusal to look the truth squarely in the face, unpalatable as it may be.

Political correctness is about denial, usually in the weasel circumlocutory jargon which distorts and evades and seldom stands up to honest analysis.

It comes in many guises, some of them so effective that the PC can be difficult to detect. The silly euphemisms, apparently harmless, but forever dripping to wear away common sense - the naivete of the phrase "a caring force for the future" on Remembrance poppy trays, which suggests that the army is some kind of peace corps, when in fact its true function is killing.

The continual attempt to soften and sanitise the harsh realities of life in the name of liberalism, in an effort to suppress truths unwelcome to the PC mind; the social engineering which plays down Christianity, demanding equal status for alien religions.

The selective distortions of history, so beloved by New Labour, denigrating Britain's past with such propaganda as hopelessly unbalanced accounts of the slave trade, laying all the blame on the white races, but carefully censoring the truth that not a slave could have come out of Africa without the active assistance of black slavers, and that the trade was only finally suppressed by the Royal Navy virtually single-handed.

Catholic Bishops of Engalnd and Wales Respond to Latin Mass Requests

H/T to Fr. Z

Speaking of internal organs,

you can have mine over my dead...

Oh.

* ~ * ~ *

Melanie Philips and John Smeaton talking about utilitarianism, one of my favourite subjects.


Philips in the Daily Mail:

In recent years, ‘brain stem death’ has been increasingly questioned as we realise how little we know about the brain.

Doctors are discovering that, among patients in a persistent vegetative state whose brains are presumed to have stopped functioning, there is in fact a large amount of brain activity. The implications for what patients presumed to be ‘brain dead’ might be experiencing are simply unknowable.

More and more experts have been expressing increasing concern about brain stem death and organ donation. Three doctors wrote in a medical journal last year that declaring patients dead for the purposes of harvesting their organs was in effect a fiction, and that prospective organ donors were not being told the truth.

And a professor of philosophy and expert in medical ethics, Michael Potts, has drawn the horrifying conclusion: ‘Since the patient is not truly dead until his or her organs are removed, it is the process of organ donation itself that causes the donor’s death.’

In Britain, however, the medical establishment backs organ donation and the proposed opt-out scheme. This is because the British Medical Association and the medical royal colleges long ago lost their own ethical plot.

Renouncing the core medical precept, ‘First do no harm’, they have come to believe instead in the amoral doctrine that the end justifies the means.

As a result, from abortion, embryo research and cloning to starving and dehydrating ‘dispensable’ patients to death, respect for human life has been replaced by the belief that individual lives are merely instrumental to the creation of the happiness of the greatest number.

This way lies the most alarming infringement of human rights and a descent into tyranny.

A system the public believes embodies the highest form of altruism rests instead on deception and unlawful killing. Far from being forced into an automatic/opt- out donation system, people should finally be told the truth.

and on SPUC's new blog:

Many arguments for an opt-out system are utilitarian, where the goal is just to obtain a better outcome i.e. a greater number of organs donated. The worst situation would be where people's deaths could actually be hastened because their organs were needed for someone else. There is already pressure for this. The International Forum on Transplant Ethics proposed that lethal injections be given to people who are long-term unconscious, in so-called persistent, or permanent, vegetative state, and for whom life has been deemed unworthy of living. It is argued that such injections could produce better-quality organs than if the person died naturally. While the donor would be dead when the organs were taken, the death would nevertheless have been caused to enable their removal. Even if the patient had given consent, medics would be involved in hastening his or her demise.

Waaay better than it sounds

Stuffed braised lambs hearts.

For a paltry £1.17 you can get four lambs hearts from the Forum market in Chester. You make a stuffing from

four slices of white bread
two oz. sausage meat
two cloves garlic
three chopped mushrooms
minced apple
chopped Basil and Marjoram
1 egg
splash of red wine
dash olive oil

Cook the sausage meat and let cool a couple of minutes. Mix it all together into a paste and let stand for ten minutes.

Meanwhile, you learn a little anatomy and do a little open heart surgery.

From each heart, trim off some of the fat from the outside, and slice off the remainder of the thing that looks like medical waste (aorta). Inside you will see there are two main chambers, a big one and a little one. Slice down the bit of meat that separates them, making one big chamber.

Stuff with the stuffing and hold it together at the top with two toothpicks.

Place the four hearts in a dutch oven.

Pour over top a braising sauce made of:

One tin plum tomahhtoes
half cup red wine
tbs brown sugar
S&P to taste

slice a medium onion into quarters and place in the dutch oven.

Place in a medium oven for about an hour.

It really is better than you think.