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Hair!

The picture is of Giambologna's Rape of a Sabine Woman. It embodied notions of the virility and strength of the early Romans, before they rose to the full evil of Empire. The notion that the order and relative freedom that the Empire afforded to those who made peace with it, and its methods, were wrong, and that the republic was only briefly morally worthwhile, may neither have appealed to the sculptor, nor any reader of mine.

It seems somehow appropriate that a show once associated by the comedy left and right with shocking nakedness and the breakdown of morals should be the title of this post. I just discovered a link on Mark Shea's site to the Daily Yomiuri.

The Abortion industry--and there is one--seems finally, desperately, to have discovered a use for embryonic stem cells that they can attach to their crude materialism. They can be, a practitioner speculates, made to cure baldness.

Just step back and think about that for a minute. As with cosmetic surgery, women who go under the chemical cosh and the surgical tools are being told that they are made free, and that the corporation that harvests life can then use embryoes to make men look virile.

So this is what post-Christian decadence looks like. By the way, before anyone writes in, I am aware that there are scientific hints that embryonic stem cells could add a little to individual lives and alleviate a degree of suffering. Frankly, however, it is wrong to kill humans in order for others to consume them.

I cannot release myself from what seems to me to be that logical truth; now, at the end of the west, are there really those who are demanding that we participate in some sort of technological vampirism?

Words fail me.

UPDATE: Berenike has pointed me towards a THES Article that you can read here. In it, an expert in regenerative medicine bemoans the obsession with embryonic stem cells and explains why he is leaving the country to work on adult stem cells and cord stem cells.

Meanwhile, news of the bright future available to us is here, here and here. Don't worry, you can't stop them. They know best, as the bourgeois of the earth will tell you endlessly.

Comments

Martin Meenagh said…
The excellent Berenike has sent two links, and her post has got tangled up in the internet. The first is to this individual in Brussels. whose blog is a great find;

http://superdolly.blogspot.com/

and the second to this article, in which a specialist says ' you would hardly know that adult stem cells exist', from one of Times Education Supplements;

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=404027&c=1
7:35 am
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