and a lower per capita rate of crime than half the nation.

Though higher than New York. Or South Carolina. Or Mississippi....

Well, maybe. Of the Republicans running or widely considered to be possibly running for President, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal
Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum are all Catholic. That's a pretty good chunk of the people considered to be actual contenders.

The Pope has always had access to excellent advice from more-or-less anyone he wants (invitations to join the Pontifical Academy of Sciences are rarely turned down, and are by no means restricted to Catholic men). I may or may not agree with him, but I would never assume that he is being mislead by, or even has to rely on, outside advisors.

Surely, the church has always had a remarkable scientific establishment. They didn't lock up and suppress Galileo because of his science, they were just hostile to free thought and the free exchange of ideas more generally. :)

The Catholic Church generally supports universal free healthcare, as long as it doesn't pay for the Pill or abortions.

Well, here's your mistake, then:

We EXPECT the government to serve our needs and prevent abuses such as this.

You mispelled "their own" in the above.

So, who does the "biomatter" belong to when the "biomatter" is a fertilized egg?

It's not her DNA, it's not his DNA. And the fertilized egg is not a human in the eyes of the law...

So, who does the "biomatter" belong to? And why?

Why not it's working fuckin great for Hamas...

I'm no cardiologist, but couldn't these fractions be simplified?

Cardiology has nothing to do with this. Cardiology is about hearts, not eyes....

Designing and building a dam that provides drinking water and electricity to millions is not "societally meaningful"?

Likewise, designing a weathersat that improves predictions of hurricanes and such is not "societally meaningful"?

Interesting that the argument being used is that "most of what engineers do does nothing for society, so women don't want to do that sort of thing"....

Say some kid doesn't quite get what they were talking about in the lesson, and has additional questions. Where would that kid go?

To the FAQ page?

Seriously, while I doubt very much that educator is going to disappear, a great deal of the raw information is quite susceptible to computerization.

The most important thing you need a teacher for at that level is the socialization skills - we have less need of well-educated psychopaths than you might think (other than politicians and such, of course)....

Or maybe there's not really all that much NEW stuff that can be done "with a computer" or "in the Cloud"?

It's just possible that the industry is entering maturity, and the only things left are doing the things it already does slightly more efficiently than the competition, rather than in a radically different way.

Note that the very early years of aviation included a lot of innovation, both in terms of capability and use-cases. But the airline industry has since pretty much settled down to "move people about long distances as cost-effectively as possible". Not much has really changed in a long time other than incremental improvements in aircraft efficiency....

Or did everyone really think that computers/cloud-computing/whatever were going to be new and rapidly changing forever?

The Secret Squirrels should not be monitoring all Americans. They should be tracking terrorists!

Great idea! Wonder why noone ever thought of that before.

So, any ideas about how to go about "tracking terrorists"? I'm assuming you're going to start by identifying some of them? And then you're going to do what, exactly?

No, there's not a whole lot of really good reason for warrantless (or even warranted) wiretapping of everyone. Nonetheless, security takes a bit more than "well, we should track terrorists!!!"

Note that the real question is more properly phrased as "how much liberty should we sacrifice in exchange for how much security?"

Everyone will have a different answer to that (mostly divided along "how much of YOUR liberty for MY security" lines. A small number of people will rephrase that as "how much of MY liberty for YOUR security", and an even smaller number will say "I'd rather have the liberty than the security, thank you".

Most of the latter group will, of course, change their minds the first time they lose a job for an extended period, but that's neither here nor there.

What is relevant is that the question won't go away. You can't have absolute liberty and absolute security at the same time. So finding a level acceptable to as many people as possible is essential.

And mostly done by guess and by golly....