Personally, I think Shrub's ban on new stem cell lines is pretty moronic. It fails to draw a distinction between a blastocyst and a baby. I mean, I'm not a big fan of abortion either (not my choice to make, though), but the stage at which an embryo is harvested for stem cells precludes any argument for conciousness that wouldn't apply equally to bacteria. I can swallow a certain amount of religious pap in public discourse, but this amounts to "save the germs!" and that's just silly.
Now it could be argued that this technology benefits no one as yet, and I would stipulate that, but so what? UNIVAC didn't do the home user much good either, but here we are, forty some years later, using it's great-x-5-grandchildren to have the argument. This technology has the potential to make Chris Reeve walk again, to provide unrejectable organs, to replace teeth with teeth instead of plastic, perhaps even to replace a woman's damaged womb and allow her to have healthy children.
Further, the coutries that kicked our forfathers out for being so stubbornly and stiff-necked-ly retro-religious are not going to be held up by this argument and are going to develop this. I undertand offshoring manufacturing, I understand offshoring call centers, and I even understand shipping some nuts and bolts module programming to Mexico, India, and China, but do we really want to outsource the next breakthrough in technology?
In short, there is no perpective but a relgious one that makes the Bush policy on this anything other than asinine, and the religious perspective that validates it is just a shade this side of David Koresh.
As for the hypocrisy inherent in the military's funding study abroad, well, It doesn't get much more clear cut than that. On the other hand, this is the kind of issue that might be used to overturn this ill conceived brainfart of a policy.
ABBA '04
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