improving Safari’s Services -> Mail option

The letters page in MacWorld (oh, what a thin little book that is these days) had a contributed bookmarklet that improves on the all-but-useless Services -> Mail option.

To use it, create a new bookmark and populate the address field with this (yes, there is a hard return/newline before SUBJECT).

What this will do is create a new mail message, put the title of the page in the Subject, and put the href and any selected text into the body of the message.

javascript:location.href='mailto:?SUBJECT='+document.title+'&BODY='+escape(location.href)+'\r\r'+window.getSelection()

Or just drag this to your bookmark bar . . . .
mail it

people who are hiding things must have something to hide

At least, that’s what the president said during his last press conference . . . .

Salon.com News | Bush’s flight from the Guard:

Unlike lawyers, journalists pay little attention to concepts like chain of custody for evidence. In the case of the president’s Guard records, whoever possessed them and had the motive and opportunity to clean them up is a critical question. When Bush left the Guard about a half year early to attend Harvard Business School, his hard-copy record was retained in a military personnel records jacket at the Austin offices of the Texas Guard. Eventually, those documents were committed to microfiche. A copy of the microfiche was then sent to the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver and the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Those records are considered private, and they cannot be released to anyone without the signature of the serviceman or woman. The White House has never indicated that Bush has signed the authorization form. And this is what prompts unending suspicion.

According to this article, we don’t know if the president has authorized the release of his full record: all we know is the bits and pieces his handlers have delivered. Since Senators McCain and Kerry have released theirs, we now know what to look for — the report on why he quit flying after absorbing a million dollars on taxpayer funded training, his pay stubs, his retirement points — all of which are missing.

a grateful nation, continued

Communications From Elsewhere » FOIA coffin photos update:

Are NASA astronauts US military personnel? I don’t know. In any case, here’s an easy way to tell the difference between the Columbia crew and casualties of the war in Iraq: the Columbia crew photos are the ones shot during the day, with an honor guard in full dress uniforms and a high-ranking NASA official saluting them; the Iraq war casualties are the ones being unloaded from cargo planes at dawn or dusk by people in camo fatigues

Makes you wonder if the war dead were a surprise to anyone . . .

iPod woes

Well, after 10 months of fun, my iPod has had too much of it. It’s manifesting some weird symptoms and I have ordered a service on it. As I write this, it’s doing a hard disk check that I never asked for, and it’s not the first time that’s happened.

The chief problems are

* the battery not holding a charge OR the batter indicator acting up. Hard to tell which, though I think the battery has lost some effectiveness.

* it stops playing in the middle of a track. I can advance to the next track, then return to the other one, and all is well. Sort of.

So now I’m waiting for the box to arrive so I can send it off.

I’m glad I registered it online when I bought it: otherwise I might have to track down proof of purchase information to get it taken care of under warranty.

Since I’ll never see this one again (they don’t return the same unit: you get a new one or a refurbished one), I’ll be getting a case for it to prevent it getting as scratched up as this one is.

this just in: veep drops “iron curtain” on his foot

Some background: the vice president booked a speaking engagement at the same college where Winston Churchill gave his “Iron Curtain” speech, ostensibly to make what his campaign staff called “a major foreign policy statement.” Turns out to have been a stump speech, attacking the Democrats’ presumptive nominee such that the president of the college, a retired brigadier general and decorated veteran of Korea and Vietnam, felt compelled to apologize to the faculty and students for the speech’s content.

TheState.com: Your guide to news, sports, jobs, homes, cars:

[Westminster College President Fletcher] Lamkin said he was not expecting a speech minus any mention of presidential politics during an election year, but that the second half “was all about politics and a political stump speech and in that respect it was disappointing.”

In the e-mail, Lamkin said that “in the interest of balance and fairness and integrity, we will strongly encourage Senator Kerry to take advantage of this venue to make his views known as well.”

Kerry spokesman Bill Burton said the campaign had received Lamkin’s e-mail and would consider a visit to Westminster, which is located in the center of a presidential battleground state.

So instead of cloaking themselves in Churchill’s statesmanlike mantle, they open themselves for a widely-publicized rebuttal in a key state. If stupidity was painful, these clowns would be incapacitated.

a grateful nation, continued

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: April 25, 2004 – May 01, 2004 Archives:

George W. Bush has faced three opponents (McCain, Gore and Kerry) since he came onto the national political stage — each served in Vietnam, though each under very different circumstances. He’s had his lieutenants attack the service of each one.

So here we have the same pattern again — no different. The president wants to challenge John Kerry’s military service. So he gets Karen to do it for him. You can get tripped in the chutzpah of this because this not only throws light on an earlier period when the president couldn’t fight his own fights, it repeats the pattern.

It seems risky to attack a soldier for their service, especially one with multiple decorations or one whose sacrifices are obvious (John Kerry, Robert Kerrey, Max Cleland): it’s not like a Purple Heart is a winning Lotto ticket. And it seems even less sensible when the attacker has managed to avoid putting themselves in a harm’s way.

On the other hand, attacking those who initiated a war and made the decision to send young men and women to their deaths is not just sensible but should be required if we are to consider ourselves a free people.

I think it’s wise for the Kerry campaign to let the documents do their talking on this, but I hope to see this issue come up in a debate, when it’s just the candidates, no handlers, no family retainers.

memes

Electrolite: Okay, so maybe the “moron cooties” remark was a little over the top.

In the comments to this post, there are two gems, for historians and pop culture lovers alike:

* The Avignon Presidency
* pay no attention to the men behind the cretin

For the origin of Avignon as a perjorative, I commend you to the Wikipedia. This one has been around awhile: I just haven’t seen it before today.

The other should require no explication.

today’s ten dollar word: epistemology

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: April 25, 2004 – May 01, 2004 Archives

Interesting discussion about why so many people — voters — still believe in the myths of a Saddam Hussein/Osama bin Laden connection, the stores of terror weapons in Iraq, etc.

Juan Cole takes the academic approach and looks at this as epistemology in action. I don’t think that’s necessarily relevant.

It seemed to me I had encountered this before, as cognitive dissonance:

According to cognitive dissonance theory, there is a tendency for individuals to seek consistency among their cognitions (i.e., beliefs, opinions). When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance. In the case of a discrepancy between attitudes and behavior, it is most likely that the attitude will change to accommodate the behavior.

If you give up on something as essential as Iraq war, what other beliefs will have to be examined? As these things go, wars are not terribly subtle: if someone can get that wrong, what more refined elements of statecraft might have been fumbled?

I sympathize with anyone who is still clinging to the increasingly threadbare justification for the war, the patriot act, and the other assorted affronts to the founders’ legacy. I just hope they let go and get hold of the truth before their beliefs unravel completely.

a grateful nation

The New York Times > New York Region > About New York: Home From Iraq, and Without a Home:

Two months ago, she returned to Bronx circumstances that were no less difficult than when she had left them three years earlier; no yellow ribbons greeted her. Now, every day, she soldiers on to find a residence where the rent is not covered by in-kind payments of late-night bus rides to shelters and early-morning rousting. All the while, she keeps in mind the acronym she learned in the Army: Leadership. L is for loyalty; D for duty; R for respect; S for selfless service; H for honor; P for personal courage. “And I is my favorite,” she says. “It’s integrity.”
[ . . . ]
A relationship with another soldier ended after she became pregnant, and in early 2003 she flew to the California home of some friends from the military – the Bronx was not an option, she says – to give birth in March of that year. A few weeks later, she did the hardest thing she has ever had to do: she left Shylah with her California friends and returned to Germany to complete her service.
[ . . . ]
A war veteran wearing a backpack, pushing a stroller and carrying a baby stayed in another strange hotel room last night, mostly because the city of her birth does not know what to do with her. Welcome home.

As bad as it is, the single young mother in this piece seems to be doing the best she can. I wish the same could be said of her family (who turns their own daughter and granddaughter out in the street?) and the father of the child (he evidently didn’t get the same training in Loyalty, Honor, and Integrity).

The story notes that many veterans have problems re-integrating into society: for young men, it’s bad enough, but I have a harder time with young women and children on the streets. Shame that veterans are hard to come by in the current political regime: perhaps there would more assistance, even leadership, forthcoming.

honoring those who served

TeledyN: The Right Heroes

Gary points out that not all the images of American dead arriving at Dover AFB are of Iraqi war victims: some of the images date back to the Columbia accident. (I don’t differentiate between them too much: if I had to, those from Iraq who went off to do their nation’s bidding, knowing they were going into harm’s way, would edge out the astronauts: the shuttle crew would be more confident of their return, barring accidents).

Does it make any sense that, until the surreptiously taken photo that appeared in the weekend papers, the only images we had been shown were of the “contractors'” disfigured corpses being paraded around?

While I agree with the notion I read earlier today — that the Normandy invasion might not have been as well-supported, had images of American GIs floating off the beaches been distributed — I think it’s important to acknowledge the sacrifice and honor those who literally gave all they had. Only then can we decide if their sacrifice is worth it.

Somehow, this seems to tie into my suspicion that the armchair generals in charge of this misadventure think this is no more serious than a game of Risk.