removing incorrect form entries in Firefox and Explorer For years, I've suffered the frustration that I would type the wrong user name into some web site, and after that, the wrong name would be a permanent suggestion in the form history. It would confirm me if I started to type the same wrong user name again, and if I knew that I didn't remember the right user name, it would give me wrong alternatives.

I finally got annoyed enough to look for a solution and found it here. It's easy, and I'll bet it works in other web browsers too.

Basically, you just highlight the wrong entry and press shift-delete.  ¶ 2:24 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  worst movie tagline ever? How about "feel the wrath" for the upcoming "Wrath of the Titans"?

Seriously? "Feel the wrath"? That's supposed to make me want to see the movie? Who wants to feel the wrath? Hey, if you want to feel the wrath, walk into a gay bar some time and yell, "Hey, there's a couple of fags kissing out in the parking lot! Who wants to go with me and beat them up?" Or if you feel like some really, really risky wrath feeling, go up to a woman suffering from PMS and say, "Man, those pants make you look really fat and bloated! That's why women of your years should wear skirts."

No one wants to feel the wrath. People want to avoid feeling the wrath. I can't help but wonder if the people involved in marketing this film have no idea what "wrath" means. Maybe they think it means something like "clash", since the first movie was called "clash of the titans". Not that it's a great tagline in that case either, but at least it's not quite so bone-head stupid.

What's going to top this one? Maybe a movie about Masada with the tagline "feel the hopeless desperation"? Or a movie about Job with the tagline, "feel the boils"? Maybe Braveheart should have used the tagline, "feel the disembowlment".  ¶ 10:55 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  a sad day for Edgar Rice Burroughs fans The movie "John Carter" is loosely based on "A Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The movie wasn't bad. Taylor Kitsch surpassed my expectations and played a passable John Carter. The other acting was all good as well. The special effects and 3D artwork were outstanding except that the tusks on the green guys were anatomically implausible to the point of being distracting. The plot was an entertaining string of effective dramatic devices stolen from other films. If the movie were just a new product, I would have called it an entertainment success.

However, I was disappointed because John Carter was changed from a traditional knight-figure, a warrior of impeachable courage, honor and integrity, into a reluctant hero, contemptuous of duty and honor, tortured by a tragic past, driven by greed and selfishness. Dejah Thoris was changed (predictably) from a spunky, incomparably beautiful princess in distress to a super-sword-wielding super-scientist who really doesn't need a man. I say "predictably" because there is some kind of law in California that you can't make movies any more where the male lead demonstrates more of the traditional masculine virtues than the female lead does.

Beyond that I was disappointed that the story wasn't the story that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote. Why would a screen-play writer reach for his library of random cool stuff from other movies when he has in his hands a license to use a great story by one of the greatest story tellers of all time? You don't need to spice up an Edgar Rice Burroughs story with stolen dramatic action, because ERB was the master of dramatic action.

I don't think it would be too much of a spoiler if I illustrate my point from an early scene of the movie. Burroughs begins A Primcess of Mars with a neat little Western short story. The movie screen play throws away Burroughs's story and replaces with a mishmash of Clint Eastwood westerns. The scene opens in a trading post like a scene from The Outlaw Jose Wales with the same three characters present that were in the Eastwood film. It is obvious immediately that John Carter is going to get into a fight with the two men in the corner like Wales did in the Clint Eastwood movie.

The shopkeeper refuses to sell Carter anything because Carter is behind on his tab like the prospector in Pale Rider, and Carter unsuccessfully tries to come across like the mysteriously menacing Man With No Name (a canonical Eastwood character). Then the guys in the corner attack Carter for no apparent reason --except maybe that they are outraged Eastwood fans who can't take his ham-handed mimicry. Subsequent events are stolen from Quigly Down Under, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and another western that I can't remember (anyone remember a movie where a cavalry officer forces a retired scout to work for him?).

Now, if you are going to steal from movies, you could do a lot worse than the ones I name above. I fully condone stealing from Clint Eastwood westerns. But ... when you have in your greedy little hands a license to steal the WHOLE FREAKING STORY from a genius like Burroughs, why in the world are you stealing random bits from random movies and stringing them haphazardly together in a senseless tumble?

And it was pretty senseless in places. Jose Wales had a bounty on his head so the guys in the trading post had a reason to go after him. The prospector in Pale Rider was occupying land that some rich guy wanted and the toughs were paid to drive him off. In the movie, John Carter, there is no motivation for the attack.

Then after these two random strangers attack Carter and Carter beats them down, he draws a gun on the nice shopkeeper who had done nothing but kindly tell him to go home --essentially forgiving his debt if he will give up a hopeless quest. So Carter sticks him up at gun point for beans and other supplies THEN shows him that he found a little gold medallion or something so SURPRISE he had the means to pay off his tab the whole time and the entire scene was for nothing.

So, worth seeing if you aren't picky about story quality and you haven't read A Princess of Mars or you aren't expecting to see A Princess of Mars in the movie.

UPDATE: Doh! I woke up this morning realizing that I had given the wrong name for the Burroughs book. I suffer great fan shamedom for the lapse. It is corrected now.  ¶ 1:07 AM 1 Comments Links to this post

  more on the bishops I don't want to come across as anti-Catholic especially since some of my favorite bloggers are Catholics, so I think it's worthwhile to mention that my complaints here are specifically about the bishops and not about Catholics in general. Many Catholics are wonderful allies in the fight against the anti-Christian Leviathan state, but that shouldn't prevent us from criticizing their leadership when necessary.

My concern is that by letting the bishops lead a movement against Obamacare when they have only the most minimal imaginable disagreement with it and otherwise support it enthusiastically, the right is in danger of getting suckered and making it look like there was a compromise when there wasn’t.

Conservatives and libertarians need to make it emphatically clear that the bishops’s concerns with Obamacare are not the full set of concerns and make sure that everyone knows that the bishops actually support most of the parts of Obamacare which the right finds odious, so although we support them in this intramural squabble, they do not speak for us and can’t make deals for us.

I see that Ann Coulter is leading the way on this. Good for her. Conservatives need to forcefully articulate that this is not about birth control. That may be what the bishops are worried about, but those of us who are supporting them are doing so because we care about freedom, not just religious freedom, and certainly not just freedom from paying for birth control.

Unfortunately, some on the right seem to have been suckered on this and have fallen into the trap of making this a social-conservative issue, as noted by Michael D. Tanner (link from Instapundit). It's not even a good social conservative issue since the majority of social conservatives probably don't have an issue with contraception.

Don't let them sucker you into a losing position again, Republicans.  ¶ 11:29 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  a catholic who agrees that the bishops had it coming Paul A. Rahe is a Catholic who had thoughts similar to mine on this issue. And since he is a lot more knowledgeable, I thought I'd link to him (link from Powerline, who also had similar thoughts ... I don't feel so lonely any more ...).

Here are some quotes from his post:

At the prospect that institutions associated with the Catholic Church would be required to offer to their employees health insurance covering contraception and abortifacients, the bishops, priests, and nuns scream bloody murder. But they raise no objection at all to the fact that Catholic employers and corporations, large and small, owned wholly or partially by Roman Catholics will be required to do the same. The freedom of the church as an institution to distance itself from that which its doctrines decry as morally wrong is considered sacrosanct. The liberty of its members – not to mention the liberty belonging to the adherents of other Christian sects, to Jews, Muslims, and non-believers – to do the same they are perfectly willing to sacrifice.

This is a good point. I think if I were a Catholic, I'd be writing to some of these bishops to ask why they aren't protecting my freedom of conscience, only their own.

More from Rahe:

This is what the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church forgot. In the 1930s, the majority of the bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and they did so with the best of intentions. In their concern for the suffering of those out of work and destitute, they wholeheartedly embraced the New Deal.

People today forget that the evil foe of the Democrat party used to be WASPs: White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Before Roe v. Wade and the Reagan Revolution, Catholics were as closely identified with the Democrats and their socialist enterprise as blacks are today.

And more:

In the process, the leaders of the American Catholic Church fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States – the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity – and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In its place, they helped establish the Machiavellian principle that underpins modern liberalism – the notion that it is our Christian duty to confiscate other people’s money and redistribute it.

  ¶ 11:48 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  the bishops get theirs I've been reading all over the blogosphere about Catholic bishops being upset at a mandate in Obamacare that would force almost all employers, including Catholic hospitals and schools to provide contraception as part of their health insurance. I would be more sympathetic, but, ... weren't these the same bishops that gave cover to Obamacare as long as they were getting their special exception? Aren't these the same bishops that have always supported the welfare state?

I seem to recall discussions of the welfare state as an extension of Christian charity. As though the bishops had mixed up "love thy neighbor" with "render unto Cesar" and ended up with "Render under Cesar so that Cesar can love thy neighbor for you."

Catholics (not all Catholics, but probably the majority) have supported expansion of government services under the theory that since Christians have a responsibility to help those in need, they should support a government that helps those "in need".

There are two serious problems with this theory. First, God didn't command us to help the poor just because God wanted the poor to be helped. If that were the purpose then God is perfectly capable of giving the poor whatever help they need. God commands us to help the poor because he wants us to have the spiritual exercise of voluntarily giving up something that is ours in order to help others. Sacrifice is good for the soul.

This side of the giving is completely lost when taxes are taken from us at gunpoint to give to the poor, and since the poor are getting far more help from the government than they need, people who want to exercise their souls have fewer opportunities to do so.

The second problem is that when the government is doing the charity for you then the government decides what charity work needs to be done with your money --not you and not your church. Not only does this mean that your "charity" money goes disproportionately to the politically connected (because that's where all government spending goes) but in addition, politically powerful special interests will piggyback on this spending to push their interests.

That last thing is what the bishops have suddenly come up against, but I don't see any sign that this was a learning experience for them. All they seem to want is their special exception over religious objections. If people have pragmatic, philosophical, or financial objections, well, screw them. They can just knuckle under and do what Mr. government charity tells them to do. It really strikes me as a sort of un-Christian, I've-got-mine-so-I-don't-care-about-your-problems approach to the issue.

It would be nice to see some indication that Catholics have learned a lesson about the dangers of the Leviathon government, but I'm not seeing it in any of the reading I've been doing. I expect that the bishops will eventually win this one and that they will then go back to supporting the very policies that led to the problem to begin with.  ¶ 11:00 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  wealth Marxists base a lot of their demands for social justice on the idea that there is just a limited pool of wealth that everyone fights over. But this idea is wrong. Wealth expands as people expend effort and create organization and goods.

After a factory makes a car, there is a new bit of wealth in the world: the car. The car is something that people want. Similarly, after someone makes a bar of soap or a pizza or a washing machine, there is new wealth in the world. The same is true when someone delivers the pizza to your house. He took a pizza that was of little value to you because it was far away, and he brought it to your door and handed it to you, greatly increasing the value of that pizza to you and thereby slightly increasing the total wealth of the economy. That’s why he gets paid: he takes low-value pizzas and turns them into high-value pizzas. The money that he gets is extracted from the difference in the low and the high value.

Manufacturers are similar to pizza-delivery guys. They take raw materials and create something that people value more than they valued the raw materials. Soap makers take low-value chemicals and perfumes and mix them together to make a product that will leave you feeling fresh as an Irish spring. That soap product is more valuable to people than the raw chemicals were, so new wealth has been created. The soap makers, like the pizza-delivery guy, get their profit from that difference between the value of the raw materials and the value of the finished product. They create new wealth and then take out a slice of it for their trouble.

But notice that everyone is better off: the guys who owned the chemicals are better off because they valued the money that was paid for the chemicals more than they valued the chemicals. The customer is better off because she values smelling Irish more than she valued the money that she paid for the soap. The manufacturer is better off because he valued the profit that he made more than he valued the time that he had to put in to make the profit. And the employees of the manufacturer are better off because they value their wages more than they value the time that they had to put in to make the wages.

This is the key of free-market trading, the reason that free economies always outstrip planned economies and the factor that Marxist economic theories miss: every free trade increases the wealth of both parties to the trade! The very fact that the trade was freely made shows that both parties to the trade value what they got more than what they gave up. Since both parties to a free trade are wealthier and no one became less wealthy, every free trade increases the overall wealth of society.

The same is not true in planned economies. In a planned economy, you go to work because you have been assigned a job by the Central Planning Committee. You don't do the job because you freely decide that the time you spend is of less value to you than the money you receive; you do the job to avoid punishment. This is genuine coercion (as opposed the the fake coercion and “exploitation” that Marxists are always talking about, which involves people just not having the choices that they would like to have). In a Central Planning economy, many of the transactions do not increase the overall wealth of society because the transactions are coerced, and so one or both of the people involved in the transaction is not better off and the wealth of society may actually decline as a result of the transaction.

Wealth is just “what people want”. It is nothing else. The only way to ensure that the wealth of a society increases is to let the members of the society chose their own transactions based on what they want. There is no other way known to ensure that the transactions actually give people what they want.  ¶ 1:38 AM 0 Comments Links to this post