December 28, 2000

DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY! LIVING IN DENIAL HAS NEVER FELT SO GOOD!

Such a short year, so many bizarre and frightening events. What pissed me off? Not much, actually, as I've developed a nifty combination of jadedness, apathy and good-old-fashioned denial to drown out my anger. But that's not to say 2000 didn't provide plenty of outrageous, surreal, and downright stupid news. That it did.

The year began with plenty of eeriness direct from the labs of the mad scientists. In January we learned that an American couple had donated $2.3 million to a geneticist in order to clone their 12-year-old border collie. Good investment! This was an omen of more insanity to come from the world of weird science. This year saw a point of no return for genetic manipulation of all sorts, as caution was not only thrown to the wind, but completely removed from the vocabulary of the military-industrial complex that funds these things. Their new motto: "If it can turn a profit, we'll do it!"

Experimentation in the year 2000 included a plan to produce cows that give human milk or medicines in their milk (yum!), chickens that lay eggs that contain vaccines (delicious!), and a plan to genetically alter animals in order to provide lobsters, chickens, sheep, pigs and cattle for your dinner table that are up to 50 per cent bigger than usual. While they're at it, scientist also hope to grow these animals with hearts and kidneys designed for human transplants. Doesn't anybody else see a cheap science fiction horror flick in the making?

But wait, we may not need to rely on the animal kingdom to supply healthy organs for transplants. We now have human cloning! In September the leaders of the Raelian religion announced that they have started work on the world's first human clone. The parents of a 10-month-old girl who was killed in a car accident paid the Raelians $1 million to finance the first attempt to create her genetic twin. The Raelians are huge believers in genetic manipulation in all forms, as they believe that humans were created in the lab by some alien race (our "gods"). It's bad enough that we've got ethically-challenged corporate scientists busily messing with mother nature, now we have to contend with a lunatic fringe and their "alien-given" right to play God with our genes. Lovely.

Meanwhile, Dr. Robert White, a neurosurgeon who transplanted monkey heads thirty years ago (they lived nine hours), was continuing his quest to perform the world's first "body transplant." This means putting your head on a better body. Dr. White says "it's going to be done...and if I don't do it, you can bet someone else will eventually." This, combined with the perfection of cloning technology, will bring us to the holy grail of 21st century science: immortality! Here's the scenario: as a young, healthy human, you have your body cloned. (Don't worry, they only make headless clones to avoid any moral or ethical dilemmas. Without a head, of course, a clone is not really a person.) So in an underground lab somewhere, sit a couple of your headless clones, and whenever one of your organs gives out, you can replace it with a healthy organ from one of your cloned sacks of flesh. The other clone is left intact, until your body is so old and decrepit that you decide on a full body transplant, and your wrinkled up old head is put on a fresh young copy of yourself. Ta-da!

This is approximately the line of thinking that caused a group of seriously Christian scientists to begin the Second Coming Project. Their plan is to clone Jesus himself, by taking a cell from a "Holy Relic of Jesus' Blood" (so they say), extracting its DNA, and inserting it into an unfertilized human egg and then into the womb of a young virgin who will then bring the baby Jesus to term in a second virgin birth. What a great idea! Their goal is to have a Dec. 25, 2001 birth, and I, for one, couldn't be more excited.

Of course, it would make perfect sense if Jesus were to return next year, as 2000 definitely provided some key events that fit perfectly with the Book of Revelations' End Time Prophecies. Not only is the state of Israel oh-so-close to Armageddon, but the Vatican assured us that the Anti-Christ is now alive and well on planet Earth, and they went on to inform us that the number of exorcisms being performed worldwide is sharply rising. The Pope himself was forced to perform an emergency exorcism on Sept. 6 when a 19-year-old girl at the Vatican started heckling him by "screaming insults in a cavernous voice...as if in a fit of rage." But no luck. The Devil's voice "sneeringly laughed from within her" as the Pope failed in his attempt to drive him away. Stranger still was the fact that this was reported by all the major news outlets with hardly a raised eyebrow.

As if that's not enough, it would seem that the Mark of the Beast is now a reality. In October, a company called Digital Angel unveiled a working prototype of a dime-sized computerized device that can be implanted under your skin so that your whereabouts can be tracked anywhere on the planet. That sounds reassuring... Tracking devices of this sort have already been successfully marketed to pet owners, and soon will be pushed on parents as a way to locate their children should they ever go missing.

Of course, I'm just being paranoid if I think that having these chips in our bodies is bound to create some horrific health hazard, aren't I? There couldn't possibly be side effects to all the wonders of modern technology that science tries to sell us, could there? In case you missed it, 2000 brought us the news that aspartame causes blindness, cell phones disrupt the growth of cells, flu shots cause neurological disorders, vaccines are not only directly linked to autism, but contain thimerosal (49.6% mercury), which can seriously damage the central nervous system, the kidneys, and the immune system. Meanwhile, Europe is freaking as mad cow disease has spread from England to France to Spain to Germany, and the World Health Organization has released a statement that they are concerned about "exposure worldwide" and expect that it is "only a matter of time" before the mad cows overrun North America. If we can't even trust a hamburger, how can we trust the Frankenfoods they're pushing on us? Experts now estimate that 60% of the food on the supermarket shelves is genetically modified. But that's a whole other rant...

Geez, what a year, and I don't even have room to mention Chemtrails, Anthrax, Ritalin, weather manipulation, mind control technology, child slavery, or that mockery of democracy that was the American election. Oh yeah, and this is the year we finally learned that not only is the world run by a few rich fat bastards hogging all the pie, but those nasty goons are shape-shifting reptilians from another dimension! I can't say I'm surprised, but somehow I thought they'd be a little bit brighter than George W. If that's they best they can do, maybe there's hope for us humans yet...