PLAYING DARPA: 10 INSANE CASES OF GENETIC ENGINEERING IN THE ...

More than anything else, this article which I am about to share with all of you, and which came to me from Mr. V.T., a regular reader here, should point out the futility of anyone assuming to write on transhumanism and claiming to be "current," for as soon as you do, what you say has already been overtaken by events. When my co-author on Transhumanism: A Grimoire of Alchemical Agendas, Dr. Scott D deHart and I were researching that book, it was difficult enough to keep pace with developments, much less write about them in anything resembling coherence. If nothing else, however, what we discovered was that alchemy and alchemical thinking were alive and well.

This one, however, takes the cake:

10 Insane Cases of Genetic Engineering

That's right, we now have:

1. Goats that produce spider silk in their milk;
2. Mice that sing and tweet like birds, ostensibly so scientists can study the problem of the evolution of human language(and folks, I'm not even going to begin to try and wrap my head around this bizarre marriage of Neo-Darwinism and genetic miscegenation, though I strongly suspect there's probably a few biologists scratching their heads over that one too);
3. The "super  salmon"( that's the one we blogged about a few days ago, you know, the one that likes to mate with brown trout);
4. Banana vaccines (for Hepatitis B in this case, but oh, just think of the possibilities here to sneak all sorts of vaccines into the population for testing without the population knowing about it);
5. Phosphorus-friendly pigs (that...well... uhm...add less phosphorus in their manure... just imagine the possibilities here too... but we won't go into them);
6. Chickehumans laying eggs with cancer-fighting proteins (and, again, just imagine the possibilities: why not cancer-causing proteins for export to your favorite elitist target population?)
7. And while we're at it, bovino-menschen, i.e., cows that make human milk (uhm...hello? What are calves supposed to drink? Oh yea, I forgot, goat-milk with spider silk);
8. Scorpiocabbage, modified with the deadly venom of a scorpion to be an insect repellant (this from the Chinese, by the way. And note, even the article itself suggests "hey guys, this may not be such a good thing, given "that an organism’s genetic makeup changes with each successive generation. With the building blocks already in place for a highly toxic venom, how long would it take before the genes mutate into something that actually is toxic to humans?")
9. Xenotransplantation: organ growing and harvesting: human organs being grown in pigs (and other animals presumably). When Dr. deHart and I were writing Transhumanism, they were confining themselves to pigs that manufactured human blood; and last but not least:
10. DARPA's supersoldier, and this one, again, the article itself has a few difficulties with:

"But here’s another project that’s, honestly, blatantly terrifying: Their Human Assisted Neural Devices program (on page 70 of the budget, if you want to look), sets a goal to “Determine whether networks of neurons can be differentially modulated through optogenetic neural stimulation in animal models.” Optogenetics is an obscure branch of neuroscience that is used to, we kid you not, “manipulate neuronal activity and to control animal behaviour.”

And the budget goes on to specify that they hope to have a working demonstration of that technology on a 'non-human primate' sometime this year, which indicates that they’re pretty far along, and definitely shows where they want to eventually go with the technology—zombie human supersoldiers.

That's right folks: they want to create a modified "supersoldier", maybe one that will follow orders without question (sounds more than just a bit like the SS), and that means everyone is in trouble. But hey, DARPA, if you're listening, why not female supersoldiers that can spin their own spider silk (like Spiderman), doesn't have to have more than two hours of sleep per week, grows like a super salmon, grows its own replacement organs, sings like a mouse...er...bird, and has scorpion venom in its(her?) sweat to repel insects, and lays chicken eggs full of wonder drugs which, when ingested, speed the healing of battlefield injuries and diseases? Throw in some of those new and improved retinas that allow infrared and ultraviolet sight, a dandy exoskeleton for improved strength and armor protection (aw, what the heck, just genetically engineer one from a spider or something), and voila, the new and improved human...

Plug it into a world wide web via a computer chip interfaced directly into the Sentient World Simulation programs you've got going, and really start cooking.

The scientists really are mad. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

See you on the flip side.