The death worshipers are angry

President Bush picked up his veto pen for the first time today to kill a bill which would have lifted funding restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research. The left reacted predictably with condemnation of the President's actions. Dick (Turban) Durbin said, "Those families who wake up every morning to face another day with a deadly disease or a disability will not forget this decision by the president to stand in the way of sound science and medical research."

Michael Fumento has a more reasonable, not to mention accurate and sane, take on the whole affair. Writing in NRO:

Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) receive tremendous media attention, with oft-repeated claims that they have the potential to cure virtually every disease known. Yet there are spoilsports, self included, who point out that they have yet to even make it into a human clinical trial. This is even as alternatives - adult stem
cells (ASCs) from numerous places in the body as well as umbilical cord blood and placenta - are curing diseases here and now and have been doing so for decades. And that makes ESC advocates very, very angry.

How many diseases ASCs can treat or cure is debatable, with one website claiming almost 80 for umbilical-cord blood alone. Dr. David Prentice of the Family Research Council, using stricter standards of evidence, has constituted a list of 72 for all types of ASCs. But now three ESC advocates have directly challenged Prentice's list. They've published a letter in Science magazine, released ahead of publication obviously to influence President Bush's promise to veto legislation that would open wide the federal funding spigot for ESC research. The letter claims ASC "treatments fully tested in all required phases of clinical trials and approved by the U.S Food and Drug Administration are available to treat only nine of the conditions" on his list.

In the detailed attachment to their letter, the Science magazine warears aren't just at odds with Prentice but the medical community as a whole. For example, regarding sickle-cell anemia, they claim "adult stem cell transplants from bone marrow or umbilical cord blood can provide some benefit to sickle cell patients" and "hold the potential to treat sickle cell anemia." "Some benefit" and "potential?"

An article from the May 2006 issue of Current Opinion in Hematology notes that "there is presently no curative therapy" for sickle-cell anemia other than allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. "Hematopoietic" means from marrow or blood; "allogeneic" means the cells are from another person. Seminars in Hematology (2004) states, ". . . curative allogeneic stem cell transplantation therapy" has "been developed for sickle cell anemia." Meanwhile, ". . curative allogeneic stem cell transplantation therapy [has] been developed for" sickle-cell anemia according to Current Opinions in Molecular Therapy (2003), while "hematopoietic stem cells for allogeneic transplantation" are "currently the only curative approach for sickle cell anemia" observes the journal Blood (2002). (All emphasis mine.)

What does everybody seem to know that the Science writers and editors don't?

Words like "could" and "potential" are trick phraseology used throughout the letter attachment for ASC curative therapies that have been used routinely for years. This appears to give them no advantage over ESC therapy, all of which
boasts nothing but potential.

The writers are correct about FDA approval; but that's a trick. Some ASC therapies are approved in other countries but not yet here. More importantly, stem cell therapdoesn'tnot a drug and therefore the FDA doesn't regulate it the same way. Some have been used successfully for decades with no one seeking or receiving federal approval.

[Snip]

How can Science not know all this? Simple; it does. I've written repeatedly of how the publication has made itself a propaganda sheet for ESC research, as well as other political causes. At the least, it should change its name to Pseudoscience. Sometimes it prints easily falsifiable studies, such as this, attacking the usefulness of ASCs. Other times it falsely promotes ESCs. That culminated in January when the journal was forced to retract two groundbreaking ESC studies that proved frauds.

The journal wants to flood unpromising ESC research with taxpayer dollars because private investors know just how very unpromising it is. Now yet again Science has showcased the scientific and moral bankruptcy of the entire ESC-advocacy movement.

Now the 64 thousand dollar question is WHY. Why are a scientific publication, almost every elected Democrat and a block of liberal Republicans willing to go to such lengths to fund an ethically questionable line of research when more promising areas are open without the negative moral baggage?

In my view the modern political/cultural movement encompassed by the term "left-liberalism" is little more than a giant death-cult.
So many of their core positions come back to an embrace of death of one sort or another. From the cultural death of multiculturalism to the literal death of the abortion mill. What else explains feminists making common cause with Islamofascist mutilators of girl children and enslavers of adult women? The same could be said of America’s outspoken Gay activists who hold the President in contempt despite the fact that he is making war on savages who stone homosexuals to death or bury them alive.

Everything about the modern left from its advocacy of radical animal rights, which reduce the value of a human life to equality with that of a dung beetle, to its support for “right to die”, which always crosses over into involuntary euthanasia when given half a chance, screams out a fundamental antipathy to life itself.

The origin of this bizarre mindset can only be a form of pathological self-loathing coupled with an extreme narcissism bordering on total megalomania. The afflicted person desires the negation of his own existence, but in his delusional mindset his own existence becomes confused with all of existence. His inability to truly perceive other people, places and things as genuinely separate from his own existence leads him to identify the end of himself with the end of . . . everything.

As to the origin of this self-hatred I can not even begin to guess. How the offspring of the most prosperous and free societies in the history of the earth have come to despise their own existence to the point that they would take everything and everyone else down with them I haven’t a clue.

They have my sympathy. Truly anyone that miserable deserves pity, but at the same time they are not content to retire from participation in the political process until they can get some medication and counseling. This makes them enemies to be opposed. And oppose them we must. Otherwise the lunatics will truly be running the asylum and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.