This just in from www.ctv.ca: "Federal Justice Marshall Rothstein's most famous case is the so-called Harvard mouse case. Harvard wanted to patent a genetically-engineered rodent developed at the university for use in cancer research. On a split decision, Rothstein felt Harvard could patent that mouse. However, the Supreme Court of Canada later overturned the case."

Harvard lost a patent and now it’s losing a President – Lawrence Summers. Poor Harvard.

At any rate, Justice Rothstein is Stephen Harper’s newest appointment to Canada’s Supreme Court. Cloned mice are hardly as hot-button an issue as the gestating infants left unprotected by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, but just think of the moneymaking possibilities in the scientific community, for that is what all "patenting" is about, protecting the income of an authentic inventor.

One would hardly like to think that fetal tissue is a moneymaking business, but it is. Whether mothers who abort their babies view themselves as more Christian for donating their children’s remains to Science… that’s a controversial question and may be debated in court one day. If abortion clinics charge research labs for fetal specimens, that’s hardly Christian.

"Just for expenses," they might say.

"Oh, bottling and… uh… stuff like that, right?," I’d ask.

"Delivery, too."

"Hmmm. This gives a whole new meaning to ‘Ob and Gyn,’ doesn’t it? The word ‘delivery,’ I mean."

"Ha, ha… very funny."

"What can you get for a full-term cadaver? What’s a ballpark ‘delivery’ fee for a gestating infant aborted at full-term, upon ‘delivery’ and then sent to a research lab?"

"They pick them up."

"They pick up the full-termer but have the fetal tissue ‘delivered’?"

"Really… this is no longer funny."

"I’m not a comedian. I’m an actor."

"Well, you’re acting on the wrong supposition."

"Which is what?"

"That Science is making money from fetal tissue."

"Any money in zygotes?"

"Oh, please… fuck off!"

So, that’s a brief idea of how things might go for an inquiring actor.

It seems, though, that President George W. Bush is holding firm to his position on full-term abortion. He’s against it… I guess… but he says he’s against abortion and he hasn’t really done anything about it, even after Justice Antonin Scalia said the only way the legislature can overturn Roe v. Wade is by a Constitutional amendment, but no one’s tried it, certainly not any member of the Bush family.

They’re dragging their feet and have done so for almost three full Presidential terms. That’s more than foot-dragging. It’s Arkansas molasses from the bottle in a Winnipeg winter windstorm.

I’m writing more frequently about the scientific community and how it’s changed since World War II; its promises are becoming as reliable as Paul Martin’s desperate pledges made during the heat of an election campaign. AIDS is still here, but the focus has shifted to cancer. The "scientific experts" are saying that nothing will cure cancer faster than gestating infants aborted upon delivery, full-term – nice new freshly-born cadavers.

If you think of 1.5 million abortions a year in the U.S. as another Holocaust, as I do, then fetal tissue and full-term cadavers are almost as good as gold from the teeth of Auschwitz inmates.

Promised cures are not the only thing that scientists are failing to deliver on. They seem less interested in the space program, especially terraforming – that is, ways to build atmospheres and make other planets habitable.

Here’s my take on that. Our sun might have triggered the formation of a compound in the Earth’s geological makeup that, prior to the presence of life and oxygen, could sustain two types of eco-existence – one in a vacuum but, in potential; another photosynthetic with the sun’s rays and therefore oxygen-producing. So it wouldn’t take much to realize how life began on Earth. No life, at least the kind we know of, survives without an atmosphere. Therefore, plant life had to develop before microscopic organisms like amoebas started to appear. The oceans out of which many biologists say the first lifeform crawled couldn’t have existed until water arrived on a surface almost as barren as the Moon’s.

Weather requires an atmosphere, which literally sprang out of some form of "thin air."

If we can set foot on the Moon, we can bring adaptable, oxygen-producing plants to other planets in the same way the stars bring light.

As far as I’m concerned, we could have had an orbiting space station circling another planet in our solar system or even a fully-equipped and -staffed Moonbase a decade ago. It might have been hothouse life, enclosed in a Buckminster Fuller prefabricated geodesic dome, but it would have been our escape hatch – another place for humanity to survive on.

But since the heyday of the space program in the sixties, the idea took hold that "we have a population problem!" Moving along on space age development might have helped, in the same way Americans moved from the crowded eastern cities to the Wild West.

"No," the socialists say, "we must clear everything up here first! Put everything in order, you know. Cure hunger, poverty, crime and disease. Nothing has so helped us with that as abortion, not only with the reduction in population… but the aborted fetuses will be used for research that will lead to cures for Alzheimer’s, cancer and other diseases."

There’s a Parable of Christ’s that deals with this kind of attitude. It’s the tale of the Seven Evil Spirits. In it, a man’s house is inhabited by these spirits. He’s determined, by an act of his own will, to clean them all out. The Seven Evil Spirits go off, find seven more, then return and the man and his house end up worse off than they were before.

Gee, if we began to live on other planets, maybe these Seven Evil Spirits would inhabit a planet of their own and leave us all alone… for a while, at least.

The universe is just waiting for us to fill it with life.