Editorials

The attack by American forces on the Shayrat airbase in Syria on April 7, 2017 was enough to show that our president and our country are aware that a chemical agent was used to kill civilians in Syria. The cruise missiles that targeted some of Assad’s military assets should clearly have demonstrated our disapproval of the use of any chemical or biological means for harming humans. Unfortunately, as a number of analysts have pointed out, the toughest problem is what America should do next.

At and around the founding of the American republic, a well-armed militia or a combination of a few could have overthrown the government. If necessary, citizen soldiers could have prevailed in a fight to protect the country from tyranny, preserve the rights of the people, abolish a regime that had lost its legitimacy.

We make rules and look to rulebooks to help us manage our interactions in games and in life. There are even rules for war. Of course, getting everyone to comply with all the rules all the time can be challenging and in many cases impossible. Yet we try. Order in society entails our support for institutions, laws, the rules of a game. Our lives in society are structured to such an extent that we follow different scripts in a variety of circumstances; those scripts guide our actions and communications in restaurants, stadiums, casinos, churches, hospitals, banks, battle-zones.

In the latest encyclical, "Laudato Si'" [1], Pope Francis delivers theology with consequences, though apparently not the theology many of his critics espouse, and not the consequences those critics want to see derived under any circumstances from any source—earthly or supernatural.

Now that the Boy Scouts have accepted the policy of admitting openly gay members, the organization should just focus on all the other aspects of its mission and move on. Forget the debate. The arguments in favor of discrimination against gays are weak and will, we hope, begin to fade away.

There have been many mass shootings and several bombings that have received considerable attention from the media. A few are mentioned here.

In a Century 16 theater in the Town Center at Aurora, Colorado, on July 20, 2012, a shooter killed ten people and wounded many others, including two who died later in hospital. James Eagan Holmes, the man charged with this crime, had acquired hundreds of 12-gauge shotgun shells and thousands of rounds of ammunition for handguns and semiautomatic rifles in a few months before the massacre.

Robots are playing more and greater roles in industry, entertainment and everyday life.

They are already performing some menial tasks, retrieving items from a stockroom, for example, and supporting sophisticated manufacturing for the automotive, aviation and electronics industries. They are assisting surgeons performing delicate operations, and they are helping police and military forces, where they keep humans at a distance from dangerous environments. Some robots are exploring other worlds.