This is not the story of Mary Cheney's baster baby, although it certainly is related. Ms. Cheney and her partner probably would like to cut the man milk out of the whole process of birthing babies, if at all possible.

Who can blame them ? Look at Mary Cheney's dad, a mean spirited war- mongering, greed monkey who, in a just world, would be frog- marched to the Hague to be tried for WAR CRIMES, along with his buddy Saddam. Who can blame Mary Cheney ? Men generally suck,a sorry bunch of troglydites for the most part, ----who freakin needs them ?

I can say that, because I am a self-hating male. I don't care. Red meat male culture just plain makes me sick. Always has. What's more, it is now demonstratably killing the planet. World wide eco-cide. Bigger faster, and more more more. I am pretty much disgusted all the time about where our testosterone addicted cuture is leading us.

( If universal global doom is your cup of tea, then just keep on doing what you are doing. Go ahead , buy that SUV, and take that atmosphere shredding jet plane ride. Buy more , consume more, be patriotic !!! Expand your carbon food print !!! The emporer penguin and the polar bear, with their dieing screams, yell " Thanks ! ".)

Virgin birth is no big deal if you are a frog, but when virgin birth happens to a woman lieing out in the sheep shed, we humans make a huge deal out of it. Every year we trot out the creche, with homeless Mary and Joseph huddled together in the hay and animal shit, the Jesus baby swaddled up, attended by three astrologers. Human females are just not supposed to self-fertilize.

Parthenogenesis is just not part of the human design: to reproduce, the human female must entice some knuckle -dragging, ESPN watching, bastard into fertilizing her. That usually is not too hard, but getting them to stick around to help with child rearing sure is. After breeding, the human male might just as well be consumed, as males are in the insect world, their reproductive role fulfilled, now just lunch, munch, munch, munch.

Alas, in the human world men are allowed to live after breeding, where they go on to become Republicans, start wars, kill, murder, rape and steal. The world would be much better of right now certainly if, after sexing Laura up to produce the twins, George W. had been chopped up, and served to dinner guests with chianti and fava beans.  If the twins had grown up without knowing their Dad, maybe they would not be the brainless alcoholic tramps they are today. But this is all wishful thinking, like hopping into a time machine, and smothering the disaster monkey in his crib, long before Poppy helped him become Governor of Texas.

Elsewhere in the animal kingdom, when males are scarce or absent altogether, self-fertilising reproduction does occur. Take the recent behavior of Komodo dragons in England for instance : a miracle worthy of religious epiphany in the human world, but no big deal for these big mama Indonesian lizards.

From the AP, in an article called, " Virgin dragon ready for holiday birth ", which appeared in my local " Dog Trainer":
 
" As Christmas passes, a virgin mother is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her offspring. She's Flora, the Komodo dragon. In an evolutionary twist, Flora has managed to become pregnant without any male help. It would seem the timing is suspicious : the seven baby Komodo dragons are due this festive season.


( Yeah, it sure is festive, with 3,000 young kids dead for a pack of lies, 650,000 Iraqi's dead and Saddam hanging from a noose, in a Stalinist show trial, and with Bush ready, willing, and able to BOMB IRAN, while cowardly Democrats, despite their huge wins at the polls, continue to play nice with the war criminals, instead of reflecting the wishes of the electorate. But, I digress... )

" " We were blown away when we realized what she'd done, " said Kevin Buley, a reptile expert at Flora's home at the Chester Zoo in this town in northern England. " But we certainly won't be naming any of the hatchlings Jesus ".

( Better names would be Bush, Rummy, Dick, Condi, Colin, Trent, Newt --- or just fill in the blanks with your favorite neo-fascist Republican bastard. )

" Other reptile species reproduce asexually in a process known as parthenogenesis. But Flora's virginal conception, and that of another Komodo dragon earlier this year at the London Zoo, are the first time it has been documented in a Komodo dragon.

.... The cases of Flora and the London lizard, Sungai, are described in a paper published Thursday in Nature. Parthenogenesis is a process in which eggs become embryos without male fertilization. It has been seen in about 70 species, including snakes and lizards. "


Lacking males, these giant lizards cloned themselves. Not uncommon, but unknown in mammals, let alone humans. Maybe it did happen that God sent an Angel with his sperm to Mary, but I think highly unlikely. People just ain't Komodo dragons.. Much more likely is that the Jesus boy was conceived the old fashioned way --- no angelic baby- baster from the Lord. Mary received her man milk, sure as silk, either from behind, or with Mary riding the bejesus out of Joseph.

 No missionary position at all. Then the divers writers of the Christian Holy Books, frightened by women's powers and reproductive mysteries, expunged the whole  idea of  physical sex from their writings. Only coupling with a male God could lead to the Christ. Normal human hokey- pokey could never lead to an ascended master like Jesus, right ?

Bollocks to all that. Jesus, the man, was conceived from human intercourse. Jesus the man then went on to grow up and have sex himself with ( gasp ! ) women. Jesus preached Peace and Reconciliaton. For his trouble, the war mongering Romans put him to death on a cross of wood, as all common criminals and troublemakers were in those days.

 Today, a new empire kills with poison on a gurney or the electric chair. In China, if you are a trouble maker, and practice Fulung gong or something, they take you away to an eviseration camp, so your organs can be harvested for sale to wealthy Westerners. Not much has changed, really, since Christ's death, just the means by which the State takes vengeance on those who get out of line.

If you take away the " miracle " of the human virgin birth, the whole Christian Church thing pretty much falls apart. Jesus becomes just what he is, another thinker and teacher, in a long history of thinkers and teachers, hounded, misunderstood, dispossessed and eventually put to death for the crime of SPEAKING TO POWER.

Imagine a planet wrapped in a shroud.