Eugenics is a periodic malady that seems to be a natural function of politics - a nation of identical people would be much easier to exploit than a nation of wildly differentiated individuals. And it's another nice theory that doesn't work in practice, because one ape among the horde of imperfect simians must derive a conception of what the perfect person would be like.

This, for example, is every German mother's dream.

The German example can probably be discounted as a straw man: a nation of swine led by a raving idiot can hardly be cited as clinical evidence of anything except ... well ... what happens when a nation of swine is led by a raving idiot.

Of course, when you consider the British and Thatcher, the French and Mitterand, Italy and whoever-it-is-this-week, etc., perhaps it's a fitting example after all. It's a particularly disturbing thought.

Is this the beginning of the end?

Now that experimentation with human cloning has been banned in North America, it's only a matter of time before scientists start tinkering with gametes overseas and end up with a dozen Xerox copies of the same skanky Eurotrash girl. Maybe the Belgians will decide that, since Scotsmen are cloning sheep, they could use a few more mistresses as well.

So long as it's kept in countries where farm animals are more valuable than humans, maybe this side of the Atlantic will be safe for a decade or two.