I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
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...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
IBM EXECUTIVE TYPEWRITERS. So now we hear that the Bush Jerry B. Killian documents may be forgeries. Are they? I have no idea. But I do know some things that are nonsense when I see them, such as this:
The experts also raised questions about the military's typewriter technology three decades ago. Collins said word processors that could produce proportional-sized fonts cost upwards of $20,000 at the time.
"I'm not real sure that you would have that kind of sophistication in the office of a flight inspector in the United States government," Showker said.
"The only thing it could be, possibly, is an IBM golf ball typewriter, which came out around the early to middle 1970s," Haley said. "Those did have proportional fonts on them. But they weren't widely used."
What a lot of bullshit. Some "expert." I was typing profusely in the Seventies, and while it's certainly true that they were a minority of typewriters, the IBM Executive C came out in 1959, and could be found in countless offices. Oh, yeah, it was proportional font. So was the Executive A, which came out in 1948. So was the B, which came out in 1954. (See timeline here.)
The IBM Executive uses a unique system of letter spacing... instead of every character taking exactly the same space on the writing line, as on standard typewriters, thin letters get narrower space, wide letters get the wider space needed. So, each word, each line, is more attractive, and more legible, and the overall appearance is outstanding.
It doesn't take a typography expert to recall that the Executive typewriter model, made for decades, was highly popular -- though, yes, in less use than monospaced typewriters -- that millions were made and found in offices everywhere, and at prices commensurate with other upbrand models. They in no way cost "$20,000" or even $2000. They sold new for a few hundred dollars.
"The only thing it could be, possibly, is an IBM golf ball typewriter, which came out around the early to middle 1970s," Haley said. "Those did have proportional fonts on them. But they weren't widely used."
More bullshit. The golfball Selectric came out in 1961. I have no idea how many or few the Army might have bought, but I have no problem believing that by 1972 it might have been more than quite a few.
But Haley added that the use of the superscript "th" cast doubt on the use of any typewriter.
"There weren't any typewriters that did that," Haley said. "That looks like it might be a function of something like Microsoft Word, which does that automatically."
Or it might have been done by a Selectric, which most certainly did superscripts and subscripts. All you had to do is switch golfballs. Doesn't anyone remember actually using these things?
Here is the document in question. Here is the main CBS piece.
Conclusion: does this prove the document isn't a forgery? Of course not. Aside from it being difficult to prove a negative, it's early yet in the examination of these documents. We'll see. There remain valid open questions, and whatever one's desires are to Believe in a particular direction, that doesn't advance verification either of authenticity or falsification of these documents. But I do know that the linked to "doubts" raised by this article are demonstrably spurious in those I have knowledge of and can check, which certainly doesn't give me faith in the reliability of what I can't check (the handwriting assertions).
YET LATER: Avedon Carol reminds me of what I knew perfectly well, but had slipped my mind, which is that the Selectrics all had a little lever to pull (upper right, I think) to tighten the kerning when you chose. So that would strongly suggest a possible (though unproven) answer to the Mystery Of The Kerning.
It's also interesting that the White House has been spending the past two days sending out copies of the CBS memos, and discussing them at length, without challenging their authenticity, though that, too, of course, doesn't prove anything at all. If they are forgeries, though, and I were Bush, Rove, and company, I'd sure be mad at my press office for this cock-up in not challenging the documents as such.
EVEN YET LATER: Hmm, well, that's gotten a few more hits than I expected, thanks to such folks as Unfogged, Oxblog, Atrios, Pandagon, and others (yes, I wuv you too). Do, visitors, along with possibly enjoying or frowning at other posts, consider the words at the top of the page, please; as ever, it's a good week for that.
LATER, LATER, LATER: Contrary to comments on various other blogs: a) the Selectric was not an Executive, and vice versa. The Executive was not a golfball typewriter; a lot of people without a clue have this confused. b) The only reason a Composer would be in someone's office complex was if a newsletter/magazine were produced there; those were highly expensive, and unusual, machines. c) Dan Bartlett spent a lot of time discussing the memos, as linked to above, and his office sent out dozens, maybe hundreds, of copies of them. This doesn't constitute "ignoring" the story, nor provide a reason for not suggesting the documents are forgeries. d) The documents, or some of them, may still turn out to be forgeries. Life doesn't follow our druthers.
IT'S ALWAYS LATER. Along with all the others (see below on the individual post), Aaron Barnhart of "TV Barn" linked to this (no permalink)!
ETERNALLY LATER. Come to think of it, while manually turning the knob on the machine up or down to do a super or subscript wasn't exactly a braintwister, nor physically award-winning, I also seem to recall that the little lever on the upper left (I think) would also do that for you. This wasn't exactly some sort of hyperspatial maneuver. Ooh, spooky, kids, turn the knob, or move the lever: how could anyone possibly do something so complicated!?
And swapping typeballs took about three, maybe five, eight seconds max; doing so that quickly was more or less the point of the Selectric; everyone using it did so as a matter of course in more documents than not; I realize that's hard to understand in the 21st Century, but try asking any geezer who was a secretary or writer or user in the Seventies how long it took or exotic it was.
(Again: the documents may be, and quite possibly are, fake; the amount of ignorance on typewriters remains astonishing; I feel very very very very very old.)
COSMICALLY LATER. A bunch of blogs have said I pointed out that IBM introduced proportionally spaced typewriters in 1953 or 1948. This is untrue. I pointed out that IBM began mass producing an incredibly popular typewriter, the Executive, then. IBM introduced a typewriter with those capabilities in 1941, with the Electromatic Model 04. My point wasn't that by the Fifties and Sixties typewriters were capable of doing proportional typing, but that it was a commonday occurrence in zillions of offices with the Executive. It's irrelevant whether Col. Killian might have conceivably put out such documents; what matters is how reasonable and likely it was.
# The Selectric II had a Dual Pitch option to allow it to be switched (with a lever at the top left of the "carriage") between 10 and 12 characters per inch, whereas the Selectric I had one fixed "pitch".
# The Selectric II had a lever (at the top left of the "carriage") that allowed characters to be shifted up to a half space to the left (for inserting a word one character longer or shorter in place of a deleted mistake), whereas the Selectric I did not.
# The Selectric II had a lever (above the right platen knob) that would allow the platen to be turned freely but return to the same vertical line whereas the Selectric I did not. This feature permitted the insertion of subscripts and superscripts.
It's also interesting that the White House has been spending the past two days sending out copies of the CBS memos, and discussing them at length, without challenging their authenticity, though that, too, of course, doesn't prove anything at all. If they are forgeries, though, and I were Bush, Rove, and company, I'd sure be mad at my press office for this cock-up in not challenging the documents as such.Indeed. Surely, interesting though it is, the authenticity of these records takes second place to the fact the White House and Bush aren't furiously refuting their content at all.
If this whole National Guard issue matters, it matters because Bush has been lying - up to this day - about the events. Anything else is sidetracking from the issue.
I vaguely recall my mom dragging me to her office at NIH around 1970 to learn how to use her mag card typewriter, which was also a Selectric II, and it wasn't new then.
I already had my own Selectric II at home, but it wasn't mag card (in fact, it wasn't even a correcting Selectric). Purchased cheap at government auction, which means it had been in use by the gov for years before I got my hands on it.
You're ignoring all of the other discrepencies, however. For example, there's strong evidence that this memo was typed at night, but artificial light sources were not available until 1982! Also, Killian's kindergarten teacher says he couldn't read worth a damn and frequently confused his Rs and Ps, yet these memos are letter perfect. And the most glaring thing: the memos are in PDF form! There were PDF printers in the early 1970s, but they cost several million dollars and required a team of trained llamas to provide motive power for the disk drives.
Just to follow up on John W.'s excellent research, I would add the fact that Killian's wife and son would obviously have been fully aware of what their husband/father was doing and thinking every moment he was alive.
Why isn't the White House challenging the authenticity of these documents? I think it's because the White House generated them.
Or, to be more specific, a certain guy in the White House with the initials K.R.
Or, to be even more specific, some unknown underling working at Rove's behest (because, don't you know, Rove always leaves "no fingerprints").
You have a fruitful evidence trail, and all the real evidence looks bad for your guy, so what do you do? You generate fake evidence and hope someone rises to the bait. Then, if that works out, you sit back and let others prove the fraud. (Hey, you don't know anything about fraud -- you're just a humble adviser.)
And when one set of documents on this subject is proved to be a fraud, the entire pursuit of the subject looks fraudulent.
Democrats discredited. Bush still a hero. Game, set, and match.
I think the Bush response is telling. If he knew for a fact that he had never tried to "game" the system, he would be crying foul. The documents might be forgeries, but it certainly sounds like Bush has enough guilt about that time period that it seemed feasible to him. Unless he was experiencing the alcoholic blackouts?
Does this matter? I don't know. Seems to me that it casts some doubts on his sterling character that he seems to be selling, but I agree with those bloggers who say that the bigger credibility problem is his last 4 years in office. Bungled war, world-wide anti-American sentiment, cratering economy, environment up for sale, more people sliding into poverty--those are the key reasons I won't vote for him. Hell, if I had been in his shoes in 1972, I might have done the same thing.
I really am deeply confused about this. Can't we just talk about the mess Bush has made of foreign policy and economics? No? Crap.
It seems plausible to me is that the content of the disputed memos reflects what happened and Killian's reaction. We have Killian's commanding officer confirming that he discussed these issues. Note also that the White House did not dispute the content but just tried to offer some spin. (I'm keeping my tinfoil beanie around just in case this is all part of a setup by Rove, of course.) So the core story -- Bush disobeyed orders and skipped his physical -- seems pretty damn solid to me.
But the two private memos could still be forgeries, created either by someone desperate for that last little bit of damning concrete evidence -- perhaps this was a rash last minute decision made shortly before the docs were handed over to CBS, so the memo was rigged on Word instead of the perpetrator doing the sensible thing and grabbing some old manual typewriter from the 60s. Or *puts on tinfoil beanie* the mixture of genuine and false documents were planted by operatives of Rove et. al.
Sure, the IBM Executive could handle proportional spacing, kerning and superscript, but from the description below, it seems that it would take a bit of fussing. Would the Texas office require that superscripts be used on all official and private memos? If some fiddling with the machine was required to create superscript, I can see a practiced clerk having this down to an art, while an officer typing a few reports here and there would be more awkward. Why would Killian trouble himself with superscript for a private memo? And if there was kerning adjustment available on this model, why fiddle with that, too, for a private memo? (I've seen the back and forth on kerning elsewhere, and not everyone is convinced that it exists in these documents.)
But on the other hand, maybe the superscript on/off pattern in one of the docs does point towards Killian doing the typing. He remembers the superscript key one time, but forgets to use it another time. If he had little experience with fancy typewriters, that seems like a very plausible error to make.
From what others have reported, it seems likely that workaday reports and memos were done on cheap typewriters with monospaced font, while the relatively expensive Selectrics and Executives were used for more polished public documents. Kerry's service records look to be done in good old Courier, so that certainly fits my mental model of what miltary typing from 35 years ago looks like. But if it turns out that some Texas corporation shipped a few used Executives to the local National Guard office so that everyone had access to nifty typewriters, that mental model is irrelevant.
Can CBS please clean this up soon so we can get back to real issues?
Do not get side-tracked here. We've established the existence of the typewriter. The rest is minutiae.
All points are moot except the one that states that, while in the National Guard, George W. Bush, Your Commander-In-Chief and all-around tough guy, DISOBEYED A DIRECT ORDER from a superior! And got away with it!
There's your meat and potatoes.
Period.
That will turn any Vet purple.
If this is true and is NOT from K. Rove, then the above needs to be hammered home constantly at all costs.
If this all IS from K.R., then immediately drop the whole story, with the clear exception of the constant repetition of Bush's DISOBEYING A DIRECT ORDER! If Rove's really behind it, then it is a major tactical blunder on his part, putting the concept of Bush's DISOBEYING A DIRECT ORDER out there into the general consciousness.
Whether this idea of Bush's DISOBEYING A DIRECT ORDER ends up as Legend or Urban Legend, who cares? Doesn't really matter.
That we take this page from the K.R. textbook and lock in the fact in people's minds that George W. Bush DISOBEYED A DIRECT ORDER, is all that is important here.
In my professional opinion (as a veteran of pre-word-processing publishing), if those documents had been done on an IBM Executive typewriter, each letter would be on a slightly different baseline.
According to this animated GIF which points out several discrepancies between a Word sample and the CBS document, the baseline for letters did indeed vary. I don't know how much of this variance, however, could be due to degradation from copying, faxing, etc.
I used several electric and electronic typewriters in the 70s and 80s, but can't remember clearly whether any typewriter, especially the Executive, would perform automatic carriage returns based on the margins you set. One still-solid pro-forgery argument is that the line length is *exactly* what you get by default in Word. If the Executive required that the typist manually choose to insert a carriage return, it seems pretty improbable that even an experienced typist would achieve exactly the same pattern.
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