Category Archives: culture

Human Gene-Splicing

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Some scientists have successfully spliced some genes into a human embryo to correct a mutation that causes heart disease, proving the possibilities open to us and our health (and potentially eliminating health coverage provision as a Progressive-Democrat tool of welfare entrapment [/snark]).

Experts noted that the newly successful process could cure more than 10,000 genetic diseases, including some types of cancer and early-onset Alzheimer’s, sickle cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis.

“We have to be very delicate with how we use this because it’s very, very powerful,” Alice Benjamin, a clinical nurse specialist said on Fox & Friends.

There is a legitimately strong concern with the ethics of this, concerning both the matter of messing with human genetics and upsetting the “natural order to things.”  Benjamin went on to express the latter concern, but as a matter of caution not of objection.

It’s certainly true that caution is needed and a clearly laid out set of guidelines for getting down into human genetics to correct this or that item needs to be developed, along with a clearly laid out set of sanctions for violating those guidelines.

However, we’ve been messing with nature and upsetting the natural order of things ever since we went pastoral and agrarian and started selectively breeding our food animals and plants, deliberating selecting animal offspring and plant seeds for the favorable characteristics of their parents in order to enhance those characteristics in succeeding generations.

In addition to that caution regarding manipulating human genes, though, we also need to consider the ethics of withholding the ability to correct serious genetic defects and meekly allowing the baby to grow, sort of, with a serious disease, or like Charlie Gard, simply leaving the baby to die.

Genetic manipulation moves much more rapidly than selective breeding, and that’s the basis for caution.  Genetic manipulation as messing with nature or upsetting the natural order is what we’ve been doing for the last 8,000-10,000 years, though.

Brexit and Taxing

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Great Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond has committed to the EU that, if he has anything to do with it, the Brits will remain, post-Brexit, a “socially responsible” nation with a taxing régime that will match the EU’s taxing régime.  In other words, he’ll do his best to prevent Great Britain from attracting business by being a business-friendly, tax competitive nation.  Like Ireland is, with its 15% tax rate.

The Wall Street Journal has characterized Hammond’s commitment to economic disarmament “a mistake for the ages.”  I think the WSJ is mistaken.

Philip Hammond was, and is, a Remainer. His actions here sound like active sabotage to this poor, dumb Colonial.

Republicans and Obamacare

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In a Wall Street Journal editorial about Republican Senators’ timorous attitude toward actual repeal and replace of Obamacare now that what they do matters, the editors had this remark toward the end of their piece:

One vote to watch would repeal ObamaCare with a two-year window to replace it, which is similar to a bill that 51 Senate Republicans voted for in 2015. We’ll see how many have changed their minds.

We’ll see how many have changed their minds.  The rest of that sentence is this: …now that their vote has actual consequences, and they can’t hide behind their virtue signaling.

It’s Murder

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That’s what one of the signs held by a protestor says in the lead image of the Wall Street Journal piece on the soon-to-be-fatal plight of baby Charlie Gard.  The baby suffers from a rare mitochondrial disorder that usually is fatal.  The baby’s doctors insisted this case can only be fatal, and a British court (and a European Union court!  Is there any stronger argument for the Brits taking themselves out of the EU?)—because in Great Britain Government gets the final word on babies, not parents—agreed and agreed with the doctors’ further demand that baby Charlie be taken off life support to die.

But.

An American doctor has treated babies with this mitochondrial disease, and he has had some success with his treatment.  He indicated he had a 10% chance of helping Charlie.

However.

Charlie Gard’s parents’ legal fight to keep him on a ventilator and take him abroad for experimental therapy, against the opinion of his doctors, ended Monday when they dropped the case, saying his muscular damage was worse than feared and the treatment wouldn’t help.

Charlie’s parents struggled for months (months!) to get their baby out of gaol so they could take him somewhere to get treatment, however long-shot.  Now the doctors claiming to treat him and the court that said “No further effort to treat is allowed” must explain the impact those months of interference and delay had on baby Charlie’s chances.

This is what Brits can look forward to, now that their government and its death panels have asserted their absolute control over the fate of British children.  The sign isn’t far wrong.

The Coming Campaign

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The Progressive-Democratic Party is rolling out a new plan of campaign for the 2018 elections.  It’s a populist one, but what interests me is this.  The Republicans have run, for the last several election cycles, on “take back our country.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), in endorsing her party’s new campaign plan, said

This is one step that Democrats are offering to take back our government[.]

What an instructive, illuminating difference.