HEY: I'm back and I actually read the Charles Murtaugh invasion of National Review. Murtaugh on cloned kids, as any clone would have to be at some point:

A cloned child, made rather than begotten, is a pet: His or her "breed" picked out for its "unique characteristics" just as a border collie is chosen for its intelligence and a poodle because it doesn't shed much hair.

Our children do not live for our pleasure. They are not pets, and we are not their masters. In addition to warming the hearts of their owners, cloned pets may serve as living, breathing reminders that the bonds of family life are not simply psychological leashes.

Glenn Reynolds promises revenge on Charles for these transgressions --wait, no, he just said he'd rebut them mildly. For my own take on this, I think Charles' points are sort of leading me to wonder what kind of parents are going to be the ones who choose cloning for their reproductive option. I mean, they're either going to be high-profile adventurer-tycoon types (like the father in Beggars In Spain) or people really emotionally stuck on their own genome --both types not what you'd call ideal parents, if you have an ideal for parents. To say the same thing a different way: it'll be your traditional techmonkey early adopters --the laserdisc buyers of reproductive tech-- and people really caught on a memory of someone they love or once loved. An odd set of people creating a set of people who have to be raised by the odd set of people. But hey, nobody ever said technology was going to eliminate the creation of new freaks --Brave New World dystopic visions or not.

An aside: Brave New World is the most tossed-around book that I have never read. That or 1984, but I've read 1984, clocks striking thirteen and all that. But Brave New World is a term comprehensible outside of its origins at this point, like lilliputian or something, so I don't feel that bad about using it in a sentence. (Why do you say Orwellian but not Huxleyan? Maybe because there's more than one Huxley.) I should probably stop proclaiming my own ignorance and just read the stupid thing.