Priorities

If you've ever stopped to help a homeless or needy person—and I mean truly help them by providing food, clothing, or shelter—you may have found yourself in the awkward and paradoxical position of being rejected by someone desperately in need of your help. While this has never happened to me, I have heard more than enough anecdotal evidence that this type of thing can happen. I don't mean to condemn all homeless people, or urge against offering charity to those in need, but merely to illustrate that sometimes, people will act contrary to their best interests, and attack those with their best interests in mind.

The drunk who curses at the helpful soul who offers food or a job instead of a handout is, of course, addicted to his vice. He cannot, through strength of will, alone, overcome his temptation and has become so dependent on it that he refuses the basic help he needs. Another way of stating this is that his appetites are not subject to his reason, and he cannot freely choose what is good for him, but is instead enslaved to the dictates of his passions.

With me so far?

Now, to shift gears and approach my thesis from another direction: an argument made by the Other Side during the whole Komen/Planned Parenthood debacle, was that sure, Planned Parenthood might have its flaws, but can't we put that aside for the sake of helping women with cancer? One of the slogans I saw along these lines was, "Instead of having my cancer detected by an organization under government investigation, now my cancer won't be detected at all!" It, of course, ignores the reason that Komen halted some funding for Planned Parenthood, namely, that Planned Parenthood wasn't very good at detecting cancer in the first place, but at least it's a step in the right direction. Rather than screaming ad hominem arguments or beating down straw men, it is an actual attempt to engage in rational debate. Credit where it's due.

So I can understand that argument. Put petty squabbles (where "petty" involves the extermination of 300,000 human beings a year) aside in the interest of some greater cause.

But that argument should apply both ways, shouldn't it?

Let's take a look at some recent events.

Miscellany

(Source)

In light of the whole Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood PR fiasco.

It's hard to say exactly what is going on here. News headlines boiled down to "Komen to defund Planned Parenthood" and "Komen reverses decision", but neither is strictly true, from what I can tell. As the founder of the Susan G. Komen foundation said in an interview, they never defunded PP, and PP still has several grants from them. Of course, the pro-choice crowd immediately launched in hysterics, claiming that the Komen foundation must hate women, hacking the SGK website, etc. etc. Not one of them appears to be at all interested in what or why SGK is doing what it's doing: they simply changed their grant policy to try and give money to direct providers of cancer screenings, rather than referrers. Since Planned Parenthood does not do mammograms, or really any breast cancer screening aside from what you can do at home by yourself, SGK simply decided there was better use of its money.

To put that in words that even liberals can understand, SGK "defunded" (for certain values of defunded) PP because PP is not very good at providing cancer screenings.

Komen's "reversal" appears to be a rephrasing of their original policy shift. At this point, it is unclear what exactly is going on, other than PP is trying to bully SGK in some sort of mafia shakedown ("Nice charity, you got there. Would be a shame of somethin' were to happen to it"). Canonist Ed Peters (how do I get a title like that? I mean, aside from studying Canon Law) summed up what was going on pretty well. Of course, they have the media to assist them on the shakedown, and Get Religion has an excellent piece on the atrocious reporting of the story.

On Martyrdom.

Years ago, back when I went to the YMI day retreats, one of my group leaders asked us if we knew what it meant to be a martyr. Me, always the over-achiever, raised my arm high and proclaimed that it was someone who died for their faith. The missionaries laughed at me. "Not in America!" they proclaimed.

And I think they are right. The idea of feeding Catholics to lions, or burning them to death as was the fate of the Ugandan martyrs, seems highly unlikely. The American character is too averse to such open persecution, and the evil too blatant, to really grab hold in this country. So what does martyrdom look like in America?

(And you are fooling yourself if you think there aren't American martyrs. The world cannot simultaneously hate the Church and tolerate Her presence. A sinner hates nothing more than the guilt of his sin, and cannot help but harbor a grudge against those who reinforce that guilt by denouncing the sin.)

About once a year, a priest from Vladivostok, Russia, makes the tour of Orange County, preaching at parishes, and asking for support for the missionary work in Russia, undoing the evils of the Communists. He tells the story of what happened to the Church in Vladivostok at the beginning of the Revolution. Most of the city's inhabitants were Orthodox—too many to openly persecute—so the Soviets simply bombed the churches. One Easter Sunday, in front of all the faithful, they simply closed the Orthodox churches, save one, and blew them up, to be rebuilt for The Party's use. The Catholics were not so lucky. They were a small minority, and the Communists saw no reason to try and tolerate them. Catholics were simply rounded up and executed, and the city didn't notice much difference.

So there is strength in numbers. It's hard to imagine a relatively peaceful country killing off a fifth of its inhabitants (or even a twentieth, if we only count those who meet the bare minimum requirement of weekly Mass attendance). 60 million (or 15 million) is a lot of graves to fill. But the tactics of the Soviets may lend an insight. If there are too many to round up, simply keep them out of their churches.

Of course, even the American government closing churches is a bit too much to take seriously. But a literal shutting of doors is not necessary, and probably not even desired by the secularists. Instead, the tactic will be to keep them in their churches. Shut the doors with the faithful inside.

"Leave your religion at the church door," I suspect, will be the descriptive phrase for the age to come. If the world can't keep people from being religious, it can at least try to keep religious people from being in the world. And this is the persecution that we are already seeing.

Moo, Baa, La, La, La!

The Build from Hell: Part VI: Batman: Arkham City

Isn't it nice when things just work? You get in your car, turn the key, and the engine doesn't tell you that your log in information is incorrect. You pick up the phone, push some buttons, and don't have to enter your 20-digit hexadecimal product code to complete the call. You turn a knob on a faucet and don't get a message that you've used water in the maximum number of approved sinks.

This is the way computers should be and, until recently, the way they had been working for me. That all changed with The Build from Hell.

Back in part I, I mentioned that one of the things I wanted to do on the new HTPC was be able to play vidjimagames. A nice new processor, with a good graphics card would make it faster than my desktop, and ideal for playing any games that support a controller.

Around this time, I was working my way through Batman: Arkham City, sequel to the game-of-the-year Batman: Arkham Asylum. I loved Arkham Asylum and pre-ordered Arkham City on Steam as soon as it became available.

The Resident Batman-lover, that is Anne Marie, forbade me from playing either game without her present at every moment. This usually meant me sitting at my desk, with her sitting behind me, looking over my shoulder. A workable solution, but not ideal. This seems like the perfect game to be able to sit on the couch and play with my wireless controller.

So I install Steam on HiFi and begin downloading the many billions of bytes necessary to play the game. While it's downloading would be a good time to explain Steam Cloud.
Valve, in their infinite wisdom, has implemented a feature in Steam called Steam Cloud. Basically, game data, such as saves, preferences, and configurations can be saved to The Cloud, or on Steam's servers. The advantage to this is that you can then move from one computer to any other computer and retain your saved games, or keyboard configuration, or player customizations. Arkham City supports this, so I can easily move from my desktop to the HTPC, and pick up where I left off in the game.

And this feature works exactly as advertised, so after I install Arkham City on the HTPC, I try to play. This is where I crash head-first into the dark and shady side of what is otherwise such an amazing piece of game design: Games for Windows Live.

Shocked and Appalled

Star Wars: The Old Republic launched about a month ago (motto: "What Would WoW Do?"). There is much that can be said about the game, like EA's general jackassery, the fact that it is simultaneously the fastest-selling MMO and failing to meet sales projections, whether or not a game of that scale is sustainable, how successfully Bioware integrated their "fourth pillar" of story, or myriads of other topics. Many others are talking about such things, and perhaps I will weigh in later. But for now, I wanted to focus on one particularly shocking and appalling aspect of the game.

The artists at Bioware decided, it seems, to give one of the six Star Wars movies particular attention. One scene from one of the six movies. One costume choice from one scene from one of the six movies (I think you see where this is going).

Slave Leia costume, seen modeled here by the Murloc's cosplay friend Christy Marie.

Apparently, Bioware thinks that this costume comprised fully three quarters of the Star Wars films, despite the fact that the costume only has a combined 150 seconds of screen time, "including facial closeups and shots of stunt doubles and visual effect images," according to Wookieepedia. Every planet in the game has at least one scuzzy dive populated by alien slave girls doing erotic dances while wearing this costume.

The Build from Hell: Part V: Watching Blu-Rays

Isn't it nice when things just work? You get in your car, turn the key, and the engine doesn't tell you that it only works on manufacturer-approved roads. You pick up the phone, push some buttons, and don't have to press speakerphone to hear over the handset. You turn a knob on a faucet and don't get an error message that your sink is not in the correct region.

This is the way computers should be and, until recently, the way they had been working for me. That all changed with The Build from Hell.

So part of the reason for the Build from Hell was to be able to watch Blu-rays. A few days after the initial frustrations, I decided to test this ability out.

The movie of choice was Toy Story 3, because it's one of three Blu-rays we have (the other two being Toy Stories 1 and 2). Pop the disc in, Windows Media Center automatically opens and... wants me to set the region for the Blu-ray drive. OK, this is a little odd, considering I had already set the region when I watched a DVD the other night. Can you set the region for Blu-ray playback separately from DVD? Kind of cool, if so, but irrelevant.

So I set the region, then hit play and... an error appears! (Were you expecting anything else?) The error is (some of the more knowledgeable of you may have seen this coming) "Blu-ray playback requires a connection that supports HDCP encryption, such as DVI or HDMI".

BLARGH BLARGH BLARGH BLARGH!

As you may remember from Part III, while the card has DVI out, the TV only has VGA in, thus necessitating a converter (of which I have plenty lying around), and the HDMI plain and simple doesn't work... unless another monitor is plugged into the video card. This gives me my workaround: I leave the DVI-to-VGA connection in place, but reconnect the HDMI. The Windows desktop is now extended from one TV connection to the other. Flipping inputs on the TV changes between the two halves of the Windows desktop. I set up the HDMI-half of the desktop as the primary desktop (and ironically have difficulty getting the Display Settings control panel onto it), and try the Blu-ray again. Now it works.

This is how it remains to this day: the Windows desktop is extended on the same display device. The second half of the display only exists so the first one--the one I want--will actually work.