The gutting of the United States Intelligence community and military is another.
I can't speak about the intelligence community, though I will note that Bush & Co. have consistently given the CIA short shrift when making their decisions. However, I can tell you with certainty, having been in the service during most of the Clinton administration, that the idea the military was "gutted" during that time is bullshit of the purest ray serene.
I'm saying that the whipped-it-out-in-Word theory doesn't hold up. Doesn't mean it's not a forgery (though I have yet to see any credible evidence that it was) just that it's not this particular kind of forgery.
Your comments about what was and was not possible for typewriters of the time have already been refuted by many other posters, so I won't bother adding to it. I will, however, point out that your belief that TNR is a product of the Eighties is so ignorant as to make you not worth taking seriously on this topic.
You might find this interesting. Or not, if you're determined to believe the memos are forgeries.
During the decades of transatlantic "sharing" of the Times designs, and the transfer of the faces from metal to photo to digital, various differences developed between the versions marketed by Linotype and Monotype. Especially these became evident when Adobe released the PostScript version, for various reasons having to do with how Adobe produced the original PostScript implementations of Times. The width metrics were different, as well as various proportions and details.
In the late 1980's, Monotype redrew its Times New Roman to make it fit exactly the proportions and metrics of the Adobe-Linotype version of Times Roman. Monotype claimed that its new version was better than the Adobe-Linotype version, because of smoother curves, better detailing, and generally greater sensitivity to the original designs done for The Times and Monotype by Victor Lardent, who worked under the direction of Stanley Morison. During the same period, Adobe upgraded its version of Times, using digital masters from Linotype, which of course claimed that it had a superior version, so there was a kind of competition to see who had the most refined, sensitive, original, genuine, bona-fide, artistically and typographically correct version. Many, perhaps most, users didn't notice and didn't care about these subtle distinctions, many of which were invisible at 10 pt at 300 dpi (which is an em of 42 pixels, a stem of three pixels, a serif of 1 pixel, and so on).
Bush is a deserter. Kerry is a war hero. If you can't deal with that, maybe you should look at your basic assumptions.
"Turns out to have been faked"? More like, "are alleged to be fake by people who are desperately trying to preserve the image of the Chickenhawk-in-Chief as a macho warrior when it's obvious to everyone who's paying attention that he's a deserter."
Note that the superscript "th", which seems to be causing the most tinfoil-hat theorizing among the folks who think modern typography was invented by Bill Gates, doesn't line up at all between the memo and the Word version. Give it up, folks.
I am of the opinion (feel free to disagree) that a person who has never served in the military should not be put in charge of it.
Okay, I'll disagree.;)
Largely as an artifact of the Cold War, the President's responsibility as Commander in Chief has been blown waaay out of proportion to his many other reponsibilities. Look, the President is the Chief Executive of the United States of America. His decisions intimately affect the economy, law enforcement, education, transportation, health care, and damn near everything else that has a bearing on the everyday lives of Americans -- in many cases, much more bearing than a war on the other side of the world. So unless you want a President who has not only served in the military but has worked in all the other areas I listed above, and many others, as well, it's impossible to have a President who is personally qualified to make decisions about every aspect of governance. That's why Presidents have a Cabinet, and numerous advisers on just about every issue you can think of. And I say this as a veteran.
All that being said...
This makes past military service relevant when it comes to choosing a president.
What makes it relevant, IMO, is that if a candidate served in the military, then the nature of that service says something about his character. Kerry served honorably, was decorated for heroism, was wounded multiple times in combat, and showed considerable courage when he returned from the war by testifying to its true nature. Bush, in contrast, first fled from a war he claimed to support, then feld the service entirely. (The word for this is not AWOL; it's desertion, because he never went back.) That is what the military service issue in this particular election should be.
Re:There's a reason for two parties -
on
Open the Debates
·
· Score: 1
There were no "original architects of our two party system" -- the Founding Fathers, based on their speeches and writings of time, apparently wanted a non-partisan government. They should have known better, of course, given that definable parties were forming in American politics well before the Constitution was written, but there's no evidence that they intended it to happen. The fact that our system strongly favors two parties instead of multiple parties is an accident of its structure.
Yeah, I was lucky. My American History teacher in particular (who IIRC was the one who made that pronouncement) held us to a college-level standard of research, if not of length and volume of writing. He took a lot of flak for it, but you know, we learned in that class -- not just the history itself (which is always good to know) but also academic skills that have served me, and probably my classmates, well ever since.
... I was taught by teachers and librarians not to rely on the printed encyclopedia (the only we kind we had back then, you young whippersnappers!) as an authoritative source, since all it contained, by its nature, was summary data which was easily outdated. I remember one teacher in high school even telling the class that anyone who cited an encyclopedia article in a paper would get an F. A bit drastic, maybe, but it got the point across: an encyclopedia is not supposed to be the be-all and end-all of research. It's a place to get a quick idea of a subject and ideas on how to learn more, a starting point for research in depth. In this role, Wikipedia performs admirably.
I think there's plenty of blame to go around. Yeah, the telcos shouldn't allow it in the first place, but... if I find out that it's particularly easy to file the serial numbers off a particular brand of handgun, and start selling such guns without the serial numbers right next door to a crack house, a reasonable jury might decide that I am at least partly at fault when the dealers start carrying them. Know what I mean?
That's probably straight from a *38 press release.
How about this: "The backlash against Star38 is the type of friction that can arise between companies offering a service for which there is no legitimate use and rational people who resent the use of legal loopholes by people who want to make money by offering their services to scum, and wish to remain free from harassment in their workplaces and homes."
There is no legitimate reason for anyone calling me to hide his identity. None. I'm not saying the originator of this "service" should be killed, but I would like to see him spend the rest of his life in a concrete cell with no furniture except a phone that never stops ringing.
But you are in the US military and you have to obey your officers period. Thus voting against your Commander in Chief *should* get you in court!
Parent post isn't a troll; it's just frighteningly ignorant.
When you're in the US military (or any other military) you are obligated to obey lawful orders from your officers and your C-in-C. (This distinction is necessary because -- though the Bush campaign hopes you forget this -- the President is not a military officer.) "Vote for me" is not a lawful order. End of story.
Oh, bullshit. I enlisted in the USAF for two terms (1989-1997, including Desert Storm) and I'm a Democrat. A lot of the people I served with were too. Yeah, a lot of us may have been poor; that doesn't mean we're stupid.
Happens at the other end of the scale, too: Merrill McPeak is endorsing Kerry, as are a number of other retired flag officers. Don't project your biases onto everyone else.
Well, you could do worse than the documents linked to from the first site. These look like particularly relevant ones (adjust as needed for/.'s URL-breaking behavior):
If a site calling itself environmentaldefense.org seems a bit leftish to be trusted, you might want to consider the current official study by the US government. When even the Bush White House acknowledges what's going on...
Um... did you actually read the first of the three sites you linked to?
In case you can't be bothered, I'll sum it up to you: the first is an excellent summary of what we now know about global warming, and a refutation of those who claim it's nothing to worry about, while the second two are propaganda by corporate shills with zero credibility. Anyone who denies global warming, or that a large portion of it has human causes, is at this point right up there with creationists, flat-Earthers, and Holocaust-deniers on the "crazy crank" scale.
China has its own lobbyists, to be sure (though I'm sure the oil lobby has less relative power than it does here.) They're doing something very tricky, continuing to call themselves communist while working toward a kind of ultra-regulated capitalism. I honestly don't know if it's ever been tried before -- successfully, at any rate; it's similar to what Gorbachev wanted to do in the USSR, but we know how that came out -- and it will be interesting to see how things work out.
Sure, anyone can bounce around the net looking for weird stuff. However, cataloging it in a coherent fashion represents quite a bit of useful work, if for no other reason than that there's so much of it.
If the USA hadn't helped, the UK and USSR would've been defeated.
Maybe, maybe not. Hitler had already given up on trying to invade the UK by the time the US got involved, and the USSR was preparing to fall back much farther than Stalingrad if necessary. My guess is that there would have been a negotiated peace, with Germany holding much of its conquests, but the UK and the USSR still very much in existence and building up for WW3 some time in the Fifties.
If the UK and USSR had surrendered early, the USA would've still won by 1948. That would be when the atomic bombs fall on Berlin.
Or on New York and Washington and San Francisco... Both the German and the Japanese programs could almost certainly have produced atomic weapons within a couple more years, and the Manhattan Project would not have progressed nearly as fast as it did without British participation. And, of course, nobody but the Germans had anything that could be developed into an ICBM.
Oh, so China and India are both stronger militarily than the USA?
Flip answer: if we ever have to fight for Taiwan, we'll find out.
Non-flip answer: of course technology makes a difference, and if we were ever to go war with either country, we would achieve enormous kill ratios. But if we were fighting either one, especially China, for possession of any particular chunk of land equally accessible to both parties... it's even money at best.
There's a difference between primitive and poor. Yes, they had to import the typefaces -- but they could pay from them. Everyone had food and shelter, and IIRC, US life expectancies surpassed those found in most places in Europe not long after the Revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you disagree with the facts presented in the article, or are you simply disregarding it because of the source?
At least they're honest about their partisanship, which is more than you can say for most "objective" media sources.
At least when we talk to George W Bush, we know where he stands, and we know he'll do his level best to keep his promises.
I can't even tell what John Kerry is promising, it seems to change every other day.
Who's the flip-flopper?
The gutting of the United States Intelligence community and military is another.
I can't speak about the intelligence community, though I will note that Bush & Co. have consistently given the CIA short shrift when making their decisions. However, I can tell you with certainty, having been in the service during most of the Clinton administration, that the idea the military was "gutted" during that time is bullshit of the purest ray serene.
I'm saying that the whipped-it-out-in-Word theory doesn't hold up. Doesn't mean it's not a forgery (though I have yet to see any credible evidence that it was) just that it's not this particular kind of forgery.
Your comments about what was and was not possible for typewriters of the time have already been refuted by many other posters, so I won't bother adding to it. I will, however, point out that your belief that TNR is a product of the Eighties is so ignorant as to make you not worth taking seriously on this topic.
Oh yeah ...
...
The Times New Roman appeared for the first time on october 3rd 1932
You might find this interesting. Or not, if you're determined to believe the memos are forgeries.
During the decades of transatlantic "sharing" of the Times designs, and the transfer of the faces from metal to photo to digital, various differences developed between the versions marketed by Linotype and Monotype. Especially these became evident when Adobe released the PostScript version, for various reasons having to do with how Adobe produced the original PostScript implementations of Times. The width metrics were different, as well as various proportions and details.
In the late 1980's, Monotype redrew its Times New Roman to make it fit exactly the proportions and metrics of the Adobe-Linotype version of Times Roman. Monotype claimed that its new version was better than the Adobe-Linotype version, because of smoother curves, better detailing, and generally greater sensitivity to the original designs done for The Times and Monotype by Victor Lardent, who worked under the direction of Stanley Morison. During the same period, Adobe upgraded its version of Times, using digital masters from Linotype, which of course claimed that it had a superior version, so there was a kind of competition to see who had the most refined, sensitive, original, genuine, bona-fide, artistically and typographically correct version. Many, perhaps most, users didn't notice and didn't care about these subtle distinctions, many of which were invisible at 10 pt at 300 dpi (which is an em of 42 pixels, a stem of three pixels, a serif of 1 pixel, and so on).
Bush is a deserter. Kerry is a war hero. If you can't deal with that, maybe you should look at your basic assumptions.
"Turns out to have been faked"? More like, "are alleged to be fake by people who are desperately trying to preserve the image of the Chickenhawk-in-Chief as a macho warrior when it's obvious to everyone who's paying attention that he's a deserter."
Note that the superscript "th", which seems to be causing the most tinfoil-hat theorizing among the folks who think modern typography was invented by Bill Gates, doesn't line up at all between the memo and the Word version. Give it up, folks.
[mulls it over]
... Gee, which takes precedence? Sounds like a complicated decision!
University regulations vs. Federal law
I am of the opinion (feel free to disagree) that a person who has never served in the military should not be put in charge of it.
;)
...
Okay, I'll disagree.
Largely as an artifact of the Cold War, the President's responsibility as Commander in Chief has been blown waaay out of proportion to his many other reponsibilities. Look, the President is the Chief Executive of the United States of America. His decisions intimately affect the economy, law enforcement, education, transportation, health care, and damn near everything else that has a bearing on the everyday lives of Americans -- in many cases, much more bearing than a war on the other side of the world. So unless you want a President who has not only served in the military but has worked in all the other areas I listed above, and many others, as well, it's impossible to have a President who is personally qualified to make decisions about every aspect of governance. That's why Presidents have a Cabinet, and numerous advisers on just about every issue you can think of. And I say this as a veteran.
All that being said
This makes past military service relevant when it comes to choosing a president.
What makes it relevant, IMO, is that if a candidate served in the military, then the nature of that service says something about his character. Kerry served honorably, was decorated for heroism, was wounded multiple times in combat, and showed considerable courage when he returned from the war by testifying to its true nature. Bush, in contrast, first fled from a war he claimed to support, then feld the service entirely. (The word for this is not AWOL; it's desertion, because he never went back.) That is what the military service issue in this particular election should be.
There were no "original architects of our two party system" -- the Founding Fathers, based on their speeches and writings of time, apparently wanted a non-partisan government. They should have known better, of course, given that definable parties were forming in American politics well before the Constitution was written, but there's no evidence that they intended it to happen. The fact that our system strongly favors two parties instead of multiple parties is an accident of its structure.
Yeah, I was lucky. My American History teacher in particular (who IIRC was the one who made that pronouncement) held us to a college-level standard of research, if not of length and volume of writing. He took a lot of flak for it, but you know, we learned in that class -- not just the history itself (which is always good to know) but also academic skills that have served me, and probably my classmates, well ever since.
What the hell does that mean, "too far"?
"It's weird and scary and dangerous and a threat to my job, so I'm going to condemn it." Cf. Microsoft, MPAA, RIAA, buggy-whip makers.
... I was taught by teachers and librarians not to rely on the printed encyclopedia (the only we kind we had back then, you young whippersnappers!) as an authoritative source, since all it contained, by its nature, was summary data which was easily outdated. I remember one teacher in high school even telling the class that anyone who cited an encyclopedia article in a paper would get an F. A bit drastic, maybe, but it got the point across: an encyclopedia is not supposed to be the be-all and end-all of research. It's a place to get a quick idea of a subject and ideas on how to learn more, a starting point for research in depth. In this role, Wikipedia performs admirably.
Heh. If I'm not Daniel Dvorkin, there's a Daniel Dvorkin out there who's going to be pretty pissed off at me. (There aren't that many of us.)
Different person from what? Do I know you IRL?
I think there's plenty of blame to go around. Yeah, the telcos shouldn't allow it in the first place, but ... if I find out that it's particularly easy to file the serial numbers off a particular brand of handgun, and start selling such guns without the serial numbers right next door to a crack house, a reasonable jury might decide that I am at least partly at fault when the dealers start carrying them. Know what I mean?
That's probably straight from a *38 press release.
How about this: "The backlash against Star38 is the type of friction that can arise between companies offering a service for which there is no legitimate use and rational people who resent the use of legal loopholes by people who want to make money by offering their services to scum, and wish to remain free from harassment in their workplaces and homes."
There is no legitimate reason for anyone calling me to hide his identity. None. I'm not saying the originator of this "service" should be killed, but I would like to see him spend the rest of his life in a concrete cell with no furniture except a phone that never stops ringing.
But you are in the US military and you have to obey your officers period.
Thus voting against your Commander in Chief *should* get you in court!
Parent post isn't a troll; it's just frighteningly ignorant.
When you're in the US military (or any other military) you are obligated to obey lawful orders from your officers and your C-in-C. (This distinction is necessary because -- though the Bush campaign hopes you forget this -- the President is not a military officer.) "Vote for me" is not a lawful order. End of story.
Oh, bullshit. I enlisted in the USAF for two terms (1989-1997, including Desert Storm) and I'm a Democrat. A lot of the people I served with were too. Yeah, a lot of us may have been poor; that doesn't mean we're stupid.
Happens at the other end of the scale, too: Merrill McPeak is endorsing Kerry, as are a number of other retired flag officers. Don't project your biases onto everyone else.
Well, you could do worse than the documents linked to from the first site. These look like particularly relevant ones (adjust as needed for /.'s URL-breaking behavior):
1 _T AR-FRONT.PDF
R -0 7.PDF
1 _T AR-FRONT.PDF
...
o cp 2004-5.pdf
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/pdf/WG
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/pdf/TA
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/pdf/WG
If a site calling itself environmentaldefense.org seems a bit leftish to be trusted, you might want to consider the current official study by the US government. When even the Bush White House acknowledges what's going on
Oh, here's the URL for the full report:
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/ocp2004-5/
Um ... did you actually read the first of the three sites you linked to?
In case you can't be bothered, I'll sum it up to you: the first is an excellent summary of what we now know about global warming, and a refutation of those who claim it's nothing to worry about, while the second two are propaganda by corporate shills with zero credibility. Anyone who denies global warming, or that a large portion of it has human causes, is at this point right up there with creationists, flat-Earthers, and Holocaust-deniers on the "crazy crank" scale.
China has its own lobbyists, to be sure (though I'm sure the oil lobby has less relative power than it does here.) They're doing something very tricky, continuing to call themselves communist while working toward a kind of ultra-regulated capitalism. I honestly don't know if it's ever been tried before -- successfully, at any rate; it's similar to what Gorbachev wanted to do in the USSR, but we know how that came out -- and it will be interesting to see how things work out.
Sure, anyone can bounce around the net looking for weird stuff. However, cataloging it in a coherent fashion represents quite a bit of useful work, if for no other reason than that there's so much of it.
If the USA hadn't helped, the UK and USSR would've been defeated.
... Both the German and the Japanese programs could almost certainly have produced atomic weapons within a couple more years, and the Manhattan Project would not have progressed nearly as fast as it did without British participation. And, of course, nobody but the Germans had anything that could be developed into an ICBM.
... it's even money at best.
Maybe, maybe not. Hitler had already given up on trying to invade the UK by the time the US got involved, and the USSR was preparing to fall back much farther than Stalingrad if necessary. My guess is that there would have been a negotiated peace, with Germany holding much of its conquests, but the UK and the USSR still very much in existence and building up for WW3 some time in the Fifties.
If the UK and USSR had surrendered early, the USA would've still won by 1948. That would be when the atomic bombs fall on Berlin.
Or on New York and Washington and San Francisco
Oh, so China and India are both stronger militarily than the USA?
Flip answer: if we ever have to fight for Taiwan, we'll find out.
Non-flip answer: of course technology makes a difference, and if we were ever to go war with either country, we would achieve enormous kill ratios. But if we were fighting either one, especially China, for possession of any particular chunk of land equally accessible to both parties
There's a difference between primitive and poor. Yes, they had to import the typefaces -- but they could pay from them. Everyone had food and shelter, and IIRC, US life expectancies surpassed those found in most places in Europe not long after the Revolution.