The Ark and The Dove

Biden on Abortion

via Pewsitter...

Tom Brokaw put Biden in the hotseat on abortion in this video.
The Senator gets all worked up in a tizzy saying that he's a good, devout Catholic, who believes what the bishops teach, but merely votes against it because he can't let his personal belief that human beings are being murdered influence legislation for people who are ignorant of the murders they commit.
Like Pelosi, he tries to defend his position based on outdated philosophical debates, summoning (summa-ing?) Thomas Aquinas's questions on the quickening as defense that the Church doesn't really know what she is talking about, and therefore is no basis for imposing its views on others. My favorite part is when, if I heard him correctly, he asserts that there are even more devout people in other faiths who are cool with abortion.
The clip ends, of course, with Biden making an angry, forceful proclamation that he and Obama are going to be the candidates who reduce the number of abortions because they are going to be the ones to provide women with the resources necessary to bring pregnancies to term.
He might really believe this (and if they are elected, I certainly hope they are sincere).
But, especially given the Mass readings this Sunday, I have to wonder what is the more charitable, more neighborly, more democratic thing to do...1) avoid imposing one's religious views on one's neighbor, or 2) prevent one's neighbor from committing murder?

SPORE's Quite Intelligent Intelligent Design Ad Campaign

If you haven't heard of it yet, SPORE is a new game by Maxis directed by Will Wright (the guy behind SimCity and the Sims franchises). I haven't picked it up yet because I'm not sure whether or not my aging PC can actually run the thing, but the premise of the game is that you are tasked with evolving life forms from their micro-organism origins all the way to their role as inter-galactic conquistadors. That's a lot of game.
Anyway, the advertisement video they are currently running on the SPORE home page casts the game as being essentially a simulation of intelligent design. Every time the little life form runs into a problem, the narrator says something like "Someone decided that it needed a longer flagella," and so the creature evolves a longer flagella and swims around the obstacle. After several iterations of hearing that "Someone" has altered the creature's DNA, the advertisement ends with "And that 'Someone' is You."
Either the game really is interested in intelligent design theory or the advertising campaign is intentionally trying to deflect any possible anti-evolution backlash by making it sound as palatable as possible to creationists.
In any event, it looks like a darned fun game.

The GUI Presence

There are other members of this blog who post less frequently who can probably better articulate this point (if only to correct it's fallacies), but the thought popped in my head today at Mass that one metaphor for the Eucharist might function a bit like a computer's graphic user interface.
Think about the fact that all of the icons and images that you use on your screen are just visual metaphors for code (I'm cribbing this part from Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Commandline.) That is, when you click on an image of Microsoft Word, the computer translates that action into code to launch an application (which itself is really just telling the computer to display another series of metaphors for the computer to perform other actions). The main idea I want to play with here is the fact that when you click Microsoft Word, you are really doing no such thing at all. You can't really click on a program. You have moved some blobs of light (the cursor) over some other blobs of light (the icon), and the computer knows that when those two blobs of light intersect, you want it to do something (but only because it's doing math and geometry inside it's mechanical head to know when you've done that...not because it recognizes the blobs of light the way you do).
But what would happen if someone came on your computer and changed what all of those icons linked to?
What if the Microsoft Word icon suddenly linked to your e-mail? The icon wouldn't change at all. You would perceive it precisely the same as it always was. You could click it, drag it, and move it around just like you always could an icon. In every regard it would behave just as it always did. You'd only know the difference if you tried to open the application, or if you could see the magic coding inside the computer.
By now you can probably figure out where I am going. The host is like an icon: it looks like bread, and it links us to bread before the consecration. After the consecration, it's as if God has altered the secret coding of the Universe. The icon doesn't change, but what the visual representation of bread signifies has been redirected...and we can't recognize that change unless we break it open, as the Apostles did.

Fan Politics

I blew ten bucks today on a pretty bad video game based on the Michael Bay Transformers Movie. It's not the worst game in the world, but it has some serious drawbacks. There are some really frustrating minibosses, and the camera is one of the worst I've ever scene in a 3D game. It's more of a novelty than a game, and I'm just glad I didn't pay more than ten dollars for it.
Here's the kicker: I knew it was a bad game. All of the reviews said it was a bad game. My friends who have played it said it was a bad game. On two occasions, store clerks have told me not to buy it because it is such a bad game.
Store clerks.
Two of them.
I bought it, primarily, because it was a Transformers video game (and because I saw some cheat codes to let you play as characters from the original cartoon). I'm a fan...so I felt compelled to buy something against my better logic, wisdom, and taste.
This is what concerns me most about the upcoming election.
Obama doesn't have supporters: he has a fan base. No matter how many mistakes Obama makes or how better equipped the Republicans appear, Obama's fans are going to have a hard time letting go of their beloved franchise. Like the adult male who buys video games based on toys he used to play with or like the forty year old who dresses up like a Klingon or an Imperial Stormtrooper, the Obama fan is going to still spend their money and wait in long lines even after the franchise has gone sour. That is, I'm certain that there are many Obama fans who are already being convinced that Obama is not the right choice for the nation, but they simply can't stop supporting Obama. They've got an Obama itch and they certainly don't want to pack up all of their Obama collectibles just yet. They'd rather defer the embarrassment of acknowledging how they had been duped or how they had deceived themselves. They simply have too much invested in Obama to stop now, even when they know they are going to be disappointed. Winning their votes isn't simply a matter of convincing fans that Obama isn't the best choice. They know the Obama they love is not the real Obama. Fan loyalty isn't based on reality...it's based on the self-conceived idealization of something that is known to be broken.

Advertising Backfire?

via Drudge...
Politico ran a report on a new ad campaign in which Obama attacks McCain's desire to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
I guess this ad is supposed to scare the leftist Hilary supporters who might be attracted to Palin, but does Obama realize that McCain's greatest weakness as a Republican was that conservatives were afraid that he wasn't going to be conservative enough?
This ad campaign makes me want to vote for McCain even more since it blows away arguments that he's left-leaning.
McCain might lose ultra-feminists who have been deluded by abortion rhetoric, but he might still hold on to feminists who are more interested in seeing a woman in office at all. Are the women whom McCain might lose to this add more or less in number than the conservatives he might gain?
I have to wonder if Obama just pulled a slam dunk in the wrong basket...

Deeds Done in Darkness

There are two aspects of the Bristol Palin story that I find really worth considering.
First, her illegitimate pregnancy makes a great example of how two individuals making poor choices in private can have drastic social ramifications. It is quite clear that leftist bloggers want to make a case that Bristol's quite serious teenage indiscretions somehow make her mother ill-fit to be Vice President, and, in turn, discredit John McCain's ability to lead the nation.
There are Obamaniacs who believe that the choices made by these two kids should influence who we elect as leader of an entire nation...a nation combating economic panic, meteorological chaos, and military hostilities.
Suddenly, the private sin of premarital sex becomes an act of global consequence.
That's point one.
The second point is how terrifyingly misguided these leftist voices are in their attempts to shame the Palins.
Perhaps fifty-years ago, hypocritical Christians would have been enraged to find out that the Vice-President's daughter had a baby out of wedlock. However, in this post-Roe v. Wade world, I think a good many Christians have radically changed their views on teenage pregnancy. I'm not saying that we are somehow pro-premarital sex, but I do think there is much more compassion for the teenage mother today precisely because we are relieved that she did not elect to kill her baby. Democrats and leftists have drastically underestimated the rise of a kind of neo-charity, for lack of a better word...and it's going to bite them in the rear.
They think that conservatives are stodgy grumpy-pants who would label their daughters as whores and kick them out on the street. What they don't seem to take into account is how many conservative families can identify with the position Sarah Palin is in, either because they are in the same situation themselves or because they hope they would be as compassionate and supportive given the circumstances.
The end result is that the extreme left will appear even more alien and out-of-touch to the God-fearing, workaday Americans that they are trying to seduce.