Is The Island of Dr. Moreau a Reality?

In 1896, H. G. Wells wrote the novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau about a shipwrecked man rescued by a passing boat who is left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, who creates sentient beings from animals via vivisection. 100 years later it was made into a movie. 10 years later, it's become a reality.  This man obviously possessed an amazing sense of things to come, because almost 120 years later, it is certain that the island in Wells imagination, if it doesn't exist already, will exist in the near future.

In 2009, reuters asked the following questions in an article entitled, Scientists want debate on animals with human genes.

"A mouse that can speak? A monkey with Down's Syndrome? Dogs with human hands or feet? British scientists want to know if such experiments are acceptable, or if they go too far in the name of medical research.

Two years later, The Academy of Medical Sciences is calling for an international regulatory commission to oversee the creations they call Animals Containing Human Material (ACHM). Included within the ACHM classification are non-human primates (NHP). In other words, human-hybrids.

This report claims that "such approaches are long established" and that "thousands of different ACHM been used in biomedical research."  Furthermore, they claim, ACHM are used to study human biological functions or disease that cannot be accurately modeled; where experiments using humans are considered infeasible or considered unethical; and where modification of an animal's body makes it more closely represent that of a human."  The report concludes that the majority of ACHM research does not pose ethical or regulatory difficulties, but identifies 3 areas that will need careful oversight in future:

• Modification of an animal’s brain which might lead to human-like cognition;
• Changing an animal so it has human appearance or characteristics (e.g. skin, facial or limb features, speech); and the
• Development of human-derived sperm or eggs in an animal (especially if fertilization may occur).

The day after this study was published,  the Daily Mail reported on two of the tens of thousands of laboratories around the world conducting these types of experiments in secret.

"Scientists in British labs have created over 150 human-animal hybrid embryos in the past three years, which has caused concern that led to a call for major oversight from the Academy of Medical Sciences over animals containing human materials (ACHM).

Justifying these experiments with "cures for everything" is at the very least, disingenuous, when not only hasn't there been cures for anything in the last century, the rate of disease has increased 4000%. More than likely, the reason has much more to do with engineering the super soldier.

DARPA has millions of dollars allocated toward editing the DNA of our soldiers on the battlefield. From Darpa’s Lab-Grown Blood to turning humans into batteries to bullet-proof skin created using "goat's milk packed with spider-silk proteins, according to news reports. Their hope is that they can eventually replace the keratin in human skin -- which makes it tough -- with the spider-silk proteins."  Well, it just so happens that scientists are discovering a plausible explanation for the clinical and microscopic findings in Morgellons disease is connected to the hyper production of keratin.  Could it be that Morgellons is the result of the pentagon's endeavor to make human skin bullet-proof? Can you imagine what will happen should they re-engineer human skin  using genes from goats and spiders?  Why not? In 2010, DARPA invested over $6 million in order to create “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

From Timenolonger:

Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous who authored Brave New World, first used this word: Transhumanism. Huxley was a member of the British Eugenics Society, eugenics being the foundation of Transhumanism.

Eugenics is a science dedicated to a Darwinist philosophy applied to humanity, that the strong should thrive and evolve, while the weak are culled and eradicated.

Eugenics rests on a necessity of there being superior and inferior genetic pools in the human population. It might be very socially unacceptable to speak publicly of there being some races, ethnic or cultural groups who are inferior to the rest, yet in secrecy this is exactly what elite Eugenicists believe.

The public is guided to love the idea of Transhumanism by being persuaded that it is not a goal attached to race or ethnicity, but simply a means of bettering all of humanity. This is quite untrue.

Elite Transhumanists have no desire to “evolve” all humankind, their goal is one which seeks to advance only their own bloodlines and to leave the rest in disadvantage to them so that these unfortunate ones have no choice but to become their slaves, their lab animals and their labor force.

“The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore… they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation.” - Julian Huxley

The elite, as they are wrongly called, are blood relations of one another, descending from the hybrid tyrants who ruled in result of this same Transhumanist philosophy pre-flood.

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Can the Death Penalty Ever Be Justified as Public Policy?

In evaluating whether Maryland's criminal death penalty should be replaced with life without parole, one must be guided by the answers to two basic questions:

· Is the death penalty a just punishment for murder?

· Is the death penalty an effective deterrent to murder?

Most of us would point to the execution of John Thanos, here in our state, as an example of a "just" application of the death penalty. Thanos murdered three teenagers, at random, by shooting them point-blank. He expressed no remorse, even declaring in court that he wished he could bring his innocent victims back to life to kill them again. In the end, he demanded to be executed and was. Most Marylanders felt, basically, that "hanging was too good" for John Thanos.

Did this one relatively humane execution balance out a violent murder -- much less three violent murders? Can any execution really be said to "even the ledger" for the taking of another's unique life?

Contrast that with the case of Kirk Bloodsworth, also in Maryland, who was convicted and sentenced to death for rape and murder in 1985. Eight years later, DNA evidence proved his innocence and he was released. In Illinois, 12 people have been executed since 1977. But over that same time, 18 death-row inmates have been released after evidence proved they were innocent.

These examples prompt a deeper question. Notwithstanding the executions of the rightly convicted, can the death penalty ever be justified as public policy when it inherently necessitates the occasional taking of wrongly convicted, innocent life? In Maryland, since 1978, we have executed five people and set one convicted man free when his innocence was discovered. Are any of us willing to sacrifice a member of our own family -- wrongly convicted, sentenced and executed -- in order to secure the execution of five rightly convicted murders? And even if we were, could that public policy be called "just"? I do not believe it can.

But what about the deterrent value of the death penalty? Does the use of the death penalty -- while rarely, if ever, "just" -- save more innocent lives than it takes? The evidence indicates that it does not.

In 2005, the murder rate was 46 percent higher in states that had the death penalty than in states without it -- although they had been about the same in 1990. And while the murder rate has gone down across the board since 1990, it declined by 56 percent in states without the death penalty but only 38 percent in states that have it. It would appear that the death penalty is not a deterrent, but possibly an accelerant, to murder.

And what of the tremendous cost of pursuing capital punishment? In 2002, Judge Dale Cathell of the Maryland Court of Appeals wrote that, according to his research, processing and imprisoning a death penalty defendant "costs $400,000 over and above . . . a prisoner serving a life sentence." Given that 56 people have been sentenced to death in Maryland since 1978, our state has spent about $22.4 million more than the cost of life imprisonment. That's nearly $4.5 million "extra" for each of the five executions carried out. And so long as every American is presumed innocent until proven guilty, the cost of due process will not go down.

If, however, we were to replace the death penalty with life without parole, that $22.4 million could pay for 500 additional police officers or provide drug treatment for 10,000 of our addicted neighbors. Unlike the death penalty, these are investments that save lives and prevent violent crime. If we knew we could spare a member of our family from becoming a victim of violent crime by making this policy change, would we do it?

And if the death penalty as applied is inherently unjust and lacks a deterrent value, we are left to ask whether the value to society of partial retribution outweighs the cost of maintaining capital punishment. While I am mindful of and sensitive to the closure (and in some cases the comfort) that the death penalty brings to the unfathomable pain of families that have lost loved ones to violent crime, I believe that it does not.

Human dignity is the concept that leads brave individuals to sacrifice their lives for the lives of strangers. Human dignity is the universal truth that is the basis of ethics. Human dignity is the fundamental belief on which the laws of this state and this republic are founded. And absent a deterrent value, the damage done to the concept of human dignity by our conscious communal use of the death penalty is greater than the benefit of even a justly drawn retribution.

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