I know someone who was part of Dick Cheney's social circle when he worked at Halliburton. She said he was a heavy drinker and womanizer.
George Bush has said he had a serious problem with alcohol.
Both have the personalities of people who are dry alcoholics. Stopping drinking does not completely change the alcoholic's personality.
The Bush daughters have serious problems with drugs, not minor teenage experimentation problems, like you seem to have had.
Being an alcoholic is very different from being a teenage experimental drinker.
Wow! It's a game of "How do you feel".
on
Mock World Vote
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Wow! It's a game of "How do you feel?" I can contribute to that!
How do you feel about the fact that Bush's education improvements in Texas were at least partly Fraud?
How do you feel about George W. Bush holding hands in public with Saudi Arabia's "Prince Bandar", especially since al Qaeda's prime complaint is that the U.S. government is interfering with Saudi politics, and the U.S. government is, in fact, doing that, partly through this man the Bush family calls "Bandar Bush"? (See the network TV footage shown in the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" for the hand holding.)
How do you feel about the fact that the U.S. government has engaged in
24
wars since WW2? The U.S. government seems to create fear to get support from the people, so richpeople
can profit from violence.
How do you feel about the fact that Bush and Cheney are the most arrested U.S. leaders in history? Bush says he has been arrested 3 times, once for the very serious crime of driving while drunk. Cheney has been arrested at least twice, both times for driving while drunk:
DUI means "Driving Under the Influence" of alcohol. A DUI is a conviction for a very serious crime, a crime that endangers everyone on the road, a crime that often kills people. A DUI conviction means that the driver felt such a strong need to be drunk that he or she was willing to take a chance of murder.
How do you feel about the fact that family life is so stressful in the U.S. that children turn to drugs to try to cope:
"The daughter of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was arrested...... while allegedly trying to buy the anti-anxiety drug Xanax." (Jeb
Bush is George W. Bush's brother.) Noelle Bush was arrested and charged
with fraud, not for trying to buy marijuana, but for trying to buy an
anti-anxiety drug. Why was she willing to break the law to buy a drug
to become less anxious? Because living in her family is very
anxiety-producing?
George W. Bush's daughters seem to be imitating their alcoholic
father. The BBC article, Alcohol sentence for Bush daughter, says that "Barbara and Jenna Bush were both charged." Ask yourself, why do these teenage women feel they need a drug like alcohol so badly that they are willing to break the law?
You said, "However, it is not at all irrelevant that the only typewriter that anybody has suggested to be the origin of the message does not produce text with matching line lengths."
I guess you did not read what I wrote. You seem not to have read even the first sentence that I wrote. Why do you continue to talk about typewriters? All typewriters are completely irrelevant.
I had seen that web site before. It's weird. Here is an example quote:
"One question that came up was whether this was really Times New Roman, or
perhaps Palatino, a font very similar to Times New Roman. I looked in my font
list (I have hundreds of fonts installed on my machine), and found a font
called "Palatino Linotype". Admittedly, this does not say anything about the
font that might be used by a sophisticated typesetter in 1972, but it shows
that the hoaxer really did use Times New Roman and not Palatino."
I found Palatino and Palatino Linotype on the machine I'm using to type this.
The font used in the memos was definitely not Palatino.
The font used to make the memos was definitely not Times New Roman. It's weird
that anyone could think that the fonts used in the memos are that font. Only
someone who knows nothing about fonts, or someone who is mis-communicating,
would say that.
The emphasis on line lengths seems to be because that's the only thing that
matches. The fonts are only somewhat similar. Within the lines, there are many
cases of spacing mismatches.
His analysis drifts. He begins talking about office machines. By the time he
reaches the paragraph above, he is talking about "a sophisticated typesetter
in 1972".
I assume, but have not tested on machines of that vintage, of course, that
someone typeset the memos, instead of typing them. Maybe they were training a
new typesetter. Maybe they were experimenting. Since it happened to me several
times that I took typing to someone, and they gave me typesetting instead, I
suppose it could happen to someone else.
I thought every base had a printing office. A large enough base, or one with
special responsibilities, would have a typesetter, I suppose. I haven't
thought about that in many years, of course. Certainly there was a
steady stream of typeset documents. Not all of them came from headquarters, I
think. I have no idea of the size of Ellington in 1972.
My guess is that you didn't read and understand everything he said. You are
linking to him because he seems authoritative. Is that true?
Anyone who claims that Palatino is "very similar to Times New Roman", would probably say that
Garamond was very similar, also. In some sense, hundreds of fonts are very similar to each other.
I have more than 5,000 fonts, and many people do. Everyone I've known who has
an interest in typography has had thousands of fonts. Only a few hundred are
installed, because Windows becomes unstable with more than that. Everyone I've
known with an interest in typography has a program that lets them move any
font from uninstalled to installed by dragging and dropping.
It is ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT to the Bush documents that some machine that a critic has chosen cannot do typesetting. Just choose another machine that can.
Decades ago, it sometimes happened that I would go to some company that did both typesetting and typing to pick up my typing, and be handed, not pages of typing, but pages of typesetting film. The first time that happened I was scared, because if the company thought that had I ordered typesetting, the cost would be very high. I said something like, "I wanted this typed, not typeset." As proof I said something like, "It's just an informal business letter." The woman behind the counter laughed and said something like, "I was at the typesetter when someone handed me your job, and I was too lazy to get up and go over to the typewriter." "But what about the cost?" "I'm only charging you $4."
The woman thought she was doing me a favor (while wasting her company's typesetting film), but she wasn't. Sure the letter looked wonderful, but typesetting was so psychologically powerful back then that the fact that a letter was typeset would distract the reader from the message. (It should be obvious that I copied the letter from the typesetting film to a piece of paper.)
NOTHING about what you see when you print a document typed in Times New Roman in Microsoft Word has ANYTHING WHATSOEVER to do with either Microsoft Word or Microsoft Corporation.
On the computer I am using to type this, Times New Roman is supplied to me as the file times.ttf, dated 08/29/2002, 05:00 AM. If you look at the file with a tool that can view binary, you will see this message, and a lot of other heavy-duty legal language:
"This typeface is the property of Monotype Typography and its use by you is covered under the terms of a license agreement. You have obtained this typeface software either directly from Monotype or together with software distributed by one of Monotype's licensees."
Microsoft Word ONLY follows the information in this file. You can prove this to yourself by downloading and installing a copy of Open Office from www.OpenOffice.org. Open Office is better in important ways than Microsoft Office, and it is free, as in "You don't pay anything." Type anything you want in both Microsoft Office and Open Office, using the same font, and notice that it looks identical.
Open Office did not automatically superscript the "th". I didn't like that superscripting thirty years ago, and I don't like it now. Only a company like Microsoft, that doesn't really pay attention to anything it does, would make the superscripting of "th" automatic. In 1972 it had already been decades since that was in fashion, although it persisted on some machines, and was used by novices. Even when it was "in fashion" that was only because there was a period when typesetters liked to show off what they could do.
To superscript the "th" in Open Office, I selected the "th" and chose Format/ Character/ Position/ Superscript. The output was identical to the output of the version of Microsoft Word in Office 2000.
This is not surprising, since all of the information is stored in Monotype's font file, and none of the information is stored in the word processor. What chance would there be that Monotype would choose to license a file to Microsoft that would corrupt the most famous font in the world, that Monotype owned?
People thought Times Roman was a work of art in the 1770s when the first version was designed for the London Times. I have spent hours in the rare book room of Oxford University Library, Oxford, England, examining type faces used in books printed as early as the 1620s. (A graduate of Oxford signed an application for me to get a library card.) It is only when you see what went before that you can fully appreciate that Times Roman was an advancement in western civilization.
People thought version 2 of Times Roman, Times New Roman, was an even better work of art when it was designed in 1932.
This discussion is becoming surprising for me. Many experts are being
consulted, but I seem to be the only person who has actual experience with the
Selectric Composer. It has been a weird experience, slowly realizing I seem to
be the world authority on a few tiny details.
I certainly could not have afforded a machine that cost half as much as a new
car. But, many years ago, I wrote computer user manuals and published them by
having them typeset by a woman who owned a Selectric Composer, and copied on a
Xerox machine. Her work was much less expensive than traditional typsetting.
She did work for maybe a hundred customers. She would go to people's offices
to pick up work.
Consider this quote: "Two letterheads typed three months apart can be
superimposed on each other so perfectly that no difference at all can be seen.
It's the same deal as before: the red in front was superimposed over the black
behind it. You just can't see the black copy because the red copy is perfectly
aligned with it. These letterheads weren't centered to within a couple of
points of each other. They were centered exactly the same. Three months
apart."
The answer is easy. There must be hundreds of thousands of people who
know the answer to this question, if they would just think about it, even
though they never saw a Selectric Composer. Typewriters had memory back then.
You would type repeated text into memory and then just press a button whenever
you wanted it played back. Obviously, you would do this with a letterhead,
because it was difficult to make a letterhead look just right. If you knew you
would be typing numerous items for an organization, you would enter the
organization's letterhead first.
The Selectric Composers could vary the letter and line spacing, so don't look
for an exact match unless you have one of the machines and are willing to
experiment. Also, third parties both sold and repaired type balls for the
machines.
One of the documents released by the White House also had a superscripted "th".
Why did typists superscript the "th" sometimes and not others? I don't know; maybe just
to show they could. Maybe they were experimenting to learn more about their machines.
I do know that I had a conversation about that very issue with my typesetter concerning the Selectric Composer.
It went something like this: "How did you do that?" [Some answer] "But why did you do that?" She laughed and gave some explanation that did not make a lot of sense to me.
It is useful to keep in mind that Microsoft Word and the IBM Selectric Composer, and all typesetters available then and now, try to imitate as much as possible the Times New Roman typeface, which was designed in 1932. The look close to the same because the designers intentionally made them the same.
It's interesting to note how much the arguments of those who assume the
documents are forgeries have eroded.
What do we know with certainty? Here are some facts about which
everyone agrees:
1) Something was wrong with George W. Bush's service in the Air National
Guard.
2) George W. Bush was an active alcoholic back then. How do we know that? He
told us.
The forger was dumb, but the forger was smart? The forger was so dumb
he did not think to switch to Courier as he was using Microsoft Word to type
the documents? But, he was smart enough to vary the baseline in exactly the
way a Selectric Composer would when it was not adjusted?
See the article in the Boston Globe: Authenticity backed on Bush documents. I think I did quite well, considering I am not a full-time document
investigator.
Denial is thinking George W. Bush is not a recovered alcoholic, and
that he is able to be fully mentally engaged in being a leader. Don't you see
the puzzled look on his face as he reads things that are written for him?
Have you ever seen the "presidential moments" on the Late Show with David
Letterman? These are network footage of George W. Bush doing something really inappropriate. According to Letterman, and a lot of people, George W. Bush
doesn't really want to be there. That seems right to me. Bill Clinton, a child
of severe alcoholics and severely affected by it, but not an alcoholic
himself, at least has an interest in government. To me it seems that GWB has
no real interest.
Look at the recent presidents:
Richard Nixon: Twenty-four of the top officials in his administration went to jail for extremely serious crimes. He himself was pardoned.
Jimmy Carter: A good man, but far too inexperienced at running
large organizations to be president.
Ronald Reagan: An ACOA, Adult Child of Alcoholics. His father
was a severe drunk, and very abusive. Reagan exhibited a lot of the
characteristics of ACOAs.
George H. W. Bush: Raised an alcoholic. His grandchildren have
severe problems with drugs. Life in the Bush family is so stressful that the
children turn to drugs to try to cope:
"The
daughter of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was arrested...... while allegedly trying to buy the anti-anxiety drug Xanax." (Jeb
Bush is George W. Bush's brother.) Noelle Bush was arrested and charged
with fraud, not for trying to buy marijuana, but for trying to buy an
anti-anxiety drug. Why was she willing to break the law to buy a drug
to become less anxious? Because living in her family is very
anxiety-producing?
George W. Bush's daughters seem to be imitating their alcoholic
father. The BBC article, Alcohol sentence for Bush daughter, says that "Barbara and
Jenna Bush were both charged." Ask yourself, why do these teenage women
feel they need a drug like alcohol so badly that they are willing to break the
law?
Bill Clinton: Severely affected by the fact that both of this
parents were violent alcoholics. President Clinton would often seem like he
was lying even when he wasn't.
George W. Bush: A recovered alcoholic. George W. Bush was
arrested once for the crime of DUI and Dick Cheney twice:
DUI means "Driving Under the Influence" of alcohol. A DUI is a
conviction for a very serious crime, a crime that endangers everyone on the
road, a crime that often kills people. A DUI conviction means that the driver
felt such a strong need to be drunk that he or she was willing to take a
chance of murder.
According to his wife Laura Bush and George W. Bush himself, she
threatened to leave him because of his drinking.
Denial is thinking that all of this doesn't matter. Denial is thinking that the U.S. does not have a leadership problem.
See especially the Boston Globe article. See this also, for how it happened when I was in the military and my guess how it happened at Ellington AFB:
The conversation might have been something like this:
Officer to secretary: "God damn if I'm going to get my ass in a crack over some lazy son of an ambassador."
Secretary, the next day, with a typed memo: "Let's put this in the records."
Even someone uncomfortable with memos would have been more uncomfortable about being court-martialed.
It is easy to guess that the man's secretary typed their discussions, and the man signed them to protect himself from any allegation that he voluntarily allowed George W. Bush to corrupt military procedure. The issue was very serious; you could be court-martialed if the IG (Inspector General) decided to investigate, and it was found that you were part of an effort to transgress deliberately against regulations, especially in so important a matter. The office of the IG often allowed corruption, but you could never be sure that they would continue. They would prosecute transgressors sometimes for reasons having to do with trying to prevent criticism of the IG office. It could be capricious.
Remember, if her boss were court-martialed, his secretary would have a lot of extra work, and might lose her job.
Neither of them cared or knew much about a lazy, alcoholic (by GWB's own admission) son of an ambassador. Back then, GWB was not important to anyone.
They were just acting in their own self-interest.
I seldom use Microsoft Word. Office 2000 does not have that feature, that I can see. The control over baseline shift would need to be very fine, and Word has not had fine control, at least up to and including Office 2000. (We are completely converting to Open Office.)
Could you try it yourself? I presume you have a more recent version of Microsoft Office. Focus on the way the doubled letters, like ll and tt, are sometimes, but not always, at a different height. I had a conversation about that with an IBM service technician. The effect is connected with the inertia of the type ball and the fact that the play in the mechanism is affected by where the ball was before it typed a letter. In the word "tell", the look of type from a poorly adjusted machine would be affected by the fact that the first L was typed after an E, and the second L was typed after an L.
But that's a little beside the point. Someone who knew that shifting the baseline would make one person out of a thousand realize that the documents were genuine, would be smart enough to do the job with other software. I've never used Quark Express, but, from conversations with typesetters I know it has extremely fine control.
I'm really happy with what I've said. My revised comments are copied below. I'm just someone who remembers the old machines because he so much wanted one. But my comments are corroborated by a document expert:
"Bouffard, the Ohio document specialist, said that he had dismissed the Bush documents in an interview with The New York Times because the letters and formatting of the Bush memos did not match any of the 4,000 samples in his database. But Bouffard yesterday said that he had not considered one of the machines whose type is not logged in his database: the IBM Selectric Composer. Once he compared the Bush memos to Selectric Composer samples obtained from Interpol, the international police agency, Bouffard said his view shifted.
"In the Times interview, Bouffard had also questioned whether the military would have used the Composer, a large machine. But Bouffard yesterday provided a document indicating that as early as April 1969 -- three years before the dates of the CBS memos -- the Air Force had completed service testing for the Composer, possibly in preparation for purchasing the typewriters.
"As for the raised "th" that appears in the Bush memos -- to refer, for example, to units such as the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron -- Bouffard said that custom characters on the Composer's metal typehead ball were available in the 1970s, and that the military could have ordered such custom balls from IBM.
" 'You can't just say that this is definitively the mark of a computer,' Bouffard said."
The document expert is missing a point, however. The type balls were VERY expensive, and very brittle. There were people who offered to repair broken type balls, and those people had the ability to put unusual characters on the ball. That was one of the services they offered.
This statement in the article from the man's son is completely credible to me: 'Also suspicious is Killian's son, Gary D. Killian of Houston. "I still contend that my father would not have written these documents. I know the type of man he was -- if he felt he was being pressured, he'd confront it head on, not write a memo about it," Killian, 51, said in a telephone interview. His father died in 1984.'
Back then people often didn't type their own memos. It was very common that someone unusual would have one of the Composers because people who didn't understand them but had power and money would order them, and find that their secretaries would refuse to use them, because they were more complicated. Why would powerful people order them? Because back then a
They weren't typewriters. They were low cost typesetting machines.
The word breaks and line spacing are identical because they are both
imitating typesetting machines, and Times New Roman, a famous font since 1932.
It's not called line spacing. In typesetting it is called leading, or, more
recently, ledding, because originally they used pieces of lead to make the
line space.
Here's the latest revision of my remarks:
When I saw the Bush documents, I laughed because they are obviously
genuine. They have a defect that I learned to recognize: Baseline shift
of repeated characters. A long time ago, I talked to an IBM service
technician and he explained why it happens in machines like the IBM
Selectric and IBM composer.
For an explanation of how this was and is connected with humor, see
below.
Typeface and font used in the letters. -- Much is being made of
the proportional font used in the letters. People are saying the
proportional spacing is an indication of forgery, because the letters
look like Microsoft Word documents.
However, I've often had the
experience of walking into a military office and being shocked by the
office equipment there. There are numerous ways that people in the
military get things that they don't really need. For example, a general
may requisition something and then discover that his secretary doesn't
want to learn how to use it. So, then it is available to an office of
lower rank.
The fonts are consistent with those sold with a kind of
upscale IBM Selectric typewriter that was actually a low-cost
typesetting machine. (Typesetting was what it was called before
everyone could do it on a personal computer.) These machines had a
one-use carbon ribbon. The impression of each character was clearer
than the clearest printer.
I'm a bit confused about the model numbers of the
typewriter. It could have been called a Selectric costing then about
$2,500, I believe. I seem to remember that they had another name for
the more upscale, true typesetting machines, apparently IBM Composer. (Back then I
wrote computer manuals
which were prepared on those upscale machines.)
The more expensive machines, the IBM Composers, used much bigger type
balls than the Selectrics, but they were all designed around the same
basic idea.
There were usually some odd symbols and characters like "th"
on the type balls used by the Selectric family of typesetting machines.
That's because of the design of the balls. Whereever there was room,
there were characters, partly to assure that the balls would be
balanced, I suppose, and partly just because there was room.
There's a funny side to the self-consistency in my guess about the
machine used to
prepare the memos. Back then anyone writing and publishing
computer
user manuals really struggled with the publishing. Whenever something
needed to look professional, we had it typeset. To do that, we did what
is called "spec type". On one occasion I spent 11 hours specifying
typesetting values for one particularly complicated page.
After you have spent many, many hours worrying about the look
of type, you begin to be extremely sensitive to everything about it.
(Either that, or you wouldn't be successful.)
Looking at the letters discussing preferential treatment for
George W. Bush brings back strong memories. The Selectric was an
unbelievably complicated machine that needed frequent service because
it depended on everything being adjusted to extremely fine tolerances.
Anyone familiar with this can see something funny about the
letters immediately. It's obvious to me. Whoever had the typing machine
did not have the maintenance contract. It's easy to know this because
the letters are not all level with the baseline.
Paridel, I did not intend to cause you to feel negative feelings.
There is a very serious issue here, however. In my opinion, U.S. government violence must stop. The U.S. government has entered into 24
wars since WW2, killing 3,000,000 people who did not threaten the U.S. It's all part of creating fear so richpeople
can profit.
By some measures, the U.S. government is the most violent government that has ever existed.
One thing you should know is that I introduced some confusion into the discussion by not knowing what the IBM model is called. Most Selectrics did not have the capability of proportional spacing. I don't remember the name of those IBM machines that did.
There seem to me to be several facts that are important:
1) The one superscript TH in the documents is an anomaly whether the document is real or a forgery. Why was it used in only one place?
2) The whole thing that got me started doing an analysis of this was that I thought immediately that I recognized the shift in baseline that can most easily be seen in characters that are repeated, like ll and tt. That cannot be done with Microsoft Word. It is a characteristic of out-of-adjustment IBM machines.
3) There were third-party suppliers of type balls for these machines. Some definitely produced weird characters like TH. Whether I have seen TH, I don't know. I only remember saying to an owner of one of the machines, "Why is that character there?"
4) I don't agree with people who say they can tell that the font is Microsoft Times New Roman, rather than Times New Roman, which was designed in 1932. That argument was introduced when Bush supporters first began to realize that Times New Roman was not a Microsoft invention.
5) The machine that produced the letters may have been an IBM Composer, and not have been called a "Selectric". These are both different from the IBM Executive typewriter.
6) I was a big user of typesetting in those days, and I was supersensitive to typesetting issues then. I was very envious of those who had the top-level IBM machines. I noticed that you would see them in unlikely places. Sometimes they would be bought and the secretary would refuse to learn how to use them, so they would be used by someone else, who obviously could not have afforded them.
The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932. Everything that produces proportional
characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New
Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM machines
and MS Word try to be identical. The differences between MS Times New Roman and the 1932 Times New Roman are very small.
Times Roman was designed in the 1770s for the Times of London.
Someone was discussing this later in the story, and I looked it up. The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932.
Everything that produces proportional characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM Selectric typewriters and MS Word look identical because they are trying to be exactly identical.
The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932. Everything that produces proportional characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM Selectric typewriters and MS Word look identical because they are trying to be identical.
See this analysis. There were IBM Selectrics that had proportional spacing.
Most people now know nothing of typesetting, because their computers do a better job than the $40,000 to $1,100,000 typesetters ever did. However, those who know about typesetting know that Microsoft Word and the old Selectrics are imitating the same font. Both are trying to look like typesetting.
Times Roman, for example, was designed for the London Times in the 1770s, for example.
IBM put some quirky symbols on the Selectric type balls because there was room for more than just the standard characters. I don't specifically remember which symbols, and there were many balls with many selections of characters.
The old one-use carbon ribbons used in the Selectrics made a more clean impression than a laser printer, and impression quite like letter press, which is still the standard in fine-looking type.
I'm not saying this is the only possible explanation, but this is what I thought of when I looked at the Bush documents
in PDF format that can be seen on the Washington Post web site. The documents brought back strong memories of working with those machines.
Typeface and font used in the letters. -- Much is being made of
the proportional font used in the letters. People are saying the
proportional spacing is an indication of forgery, because the letters
look like Microsoft Word documents.
However, I've often had the
experience of walking into a military office and being shocked by the
office equipment there. There are numerous ways that people in the
military get things that they don't really need. For example, a general
may requisition something and then discover that his secretary doesn't
want to learn how to use it. So, then it is available to an office of
lower rank.
The fonts are consistent with those sold with a kind of
upscale IBM Selectric typewriter that was actually a low-cost
typesetting machine. (Typesetting was what it was called before
everyone could do it on a personal computer.) These machines had a
one-use carbon ribbon. The impression of each character was clearer
than the clearest laser printer.
I'm a bit confused about the model numbers of the
typewriter. It could have been called a Selectric costing then about
$2,500, I believe. I seem to remember that they had another name for
the more upscale, true typesetting machines. (I wrote computer manuals
which I typed on a Selectric and were prepared on those machines.)
There were usually some odd symbols and characters like "th"
on the type balls used by the Selectric family of typesetting machines.
That's because of the design of the balls. Whereever there was room,
there were characters, partly to assure that the balls would be
balanced, I suppose, and partly just because there was room.
There's a funny side to the self-consistency in my guess about the
machine used to
prepare the memos. Back then anyone writing and publishing
computer
user manuals really struggled with the publishing. Whenever something
needed to look professional, we had it typeset. To do that, we did what
is called "spec type". On one occasion I spent 11 hours specifying
typesetting values for one particularly complicated page.
After you have spent many, many hours worrying about the look
of type, you begin to be extremely sensitive to everything about it.
(Either that, or you wouldn't be successful.)
Looking at the letters discussing preferential treatment for
George W. Bush brings back strong memories. The Selectric was an
unbelievably complicated machine that needed frequent service because
it depended on everything being adjusted to extremely fine tolerances.
Anyone familiar with this can see something funny about the
letters immediately. It's obvious to me. Whoever had the typing machine
did not have the maintenance contract. It's easy to know this because
the letters are not all level with the baseline. That's what would
happen when the Selectric or other typing machine from the same family
was not adjusted.
The funny self-consistency is this. It's easy to guess that
they got the machine from the general's office after some civilian
secretary there decided that the new machine was too complicated to
learn. But, since an office of lower rank was not allowed to have such
a machine, they did not have the maintenance contract. That could be
why the baseline of the type is so messy.
Someone said that the letters were forgeries because they
were obviously done with Microsoft Word. It is impossible to simulate
the variation of baseline with Microsoft Word; Word is too basic a
tool, it is not able to do many of the functions of real typesetting.
People who are sensitive to the beauty of type certainly don't use MS
Word.
Focus on the humor of the situation: Someone somehow had a machine that cost then half as much as a new car, if I remember the prices correctly. However, the person did not have the money to get the machine adjusted.
Whenever you saw that back then, you knew something unusual was happening. For example, maybe the machine was stolen, and could not be adjusted, because only IBM technicians had the tools, and they always checked the serial numbers and would report stolen machines.
Or maybe the machine was owned by an office supply store that was using it while trying to find a buyer.
There is simply very, very little chance that a machine used by the military was stolen, so there must be another reason.
When someone offered to sell me a used Selectric in perhaps 1979, I immediately called IBM to see if it was stolen. I was told it was okay. By then it was a newer model that did not need as much adjustment. Even in 1979 these were expensive machines.
Bush's education improvements were fraud. Why would you expect something better in the case of his military service?
George W. Bush was an active alcoholic back then. See Method of Corruption #7 for a discussion of this. See the section just after that for a discussion of how his personality is exactly what you would expect from a recovered alcoholic.
Not meeting commitments is exactly what would be expected of an alcoholic.
The document is not similar to Word. MS Word is similar to the document, by design. They are both trying to be like a typesetting machine. They are both implementing a famous font.
The blurring of photocopying is different from the characteristic uneven baseline from an out-of-adjustment Selectric style machine.
The change in baseline from letter to letter is caused by the type ball rotating very fast and coming from different directions for different combinations of letters. The play in the mechanism that drives the ball causes the unevenness. It's not possible to get the same effect with MS Word; MS Word is a toy.
The blurring from photocopying is also consistent with the old-style Xerox machines, which had much poorer optics and much lower resolution than the Xerox machines of today. For some reason, the old toner would clump. That clumping is different from the loss of resolution caused by modern faxing.
Look at this map of Cambodia. Notice that it is less than 180 miles (300 kilometers) from the end of the Mekong Delta to Cambodia.
Those who research these things say that the U.S. killed only 150,000 to 300,000 Cambodian people directly, if I remember correctly. (None of these people threatened the United States. Even if they knew where the U.S. was, they would not have had the money to go there.) However, the researchers say that it is sensible to estimate that the U.S. government is responsible for the deaths of perhaps 2,000,000 more that happened because of the resultant destabilization of the country.
The U.S. government was trying to hide its activities in Cambodia because officials feared the reaction of U.S. citizens. However, there were military activities in Cambodia long before Henry Kissinger was open about bombing there.
There's a funny self-consistency in my guess about the machine used to prepare the memos. Back then anyone writing and publishing computer user manuals really struggled with the publishing. Whenever something needed to look professional, we had it typeset. To do that, we did what is called "spec type". On one occasion I spent 11 hours specifying typesetting values for one particularly complicated page.
After you have spent many, many hours worrying about the look of type, you begin to be extremely sensitive to everything about it. (Either that, or you wouldn't be successful.)
Looking at the letters discussing preferential treatment for George W. Bush brings back strong memories. The Selectric was an unbelievably complicated machine that needed frequent service because it depended on everything being adjusted to extremely fine tolerances.
Anyone familiar with this can see something funny about the letters immediately. It's obvious to me. Whoever had the typing machine did not have the maintenance contract. It's easy to know this because the letters are not all level with the baseline. That's what would happen when the Selectric or other typing machine from the same family was not adjusted.
The funny self-consistency is this. It's easy to guess that they got the machine from the general's office after some civilian secretary there decided that the new machine was too complicated to learn. But, since an office of lower rank was not allowed to have such a machine, they did not have the maintenance contract. That could be why the baseline of the type is so messy.
Someone said that the letters were forgeries because they were obviously done with Microsoft Word. It is impossible to simulate the variation of baseline with Microsoft Word; Word is too basic a tool, it is not able to do many of the functions of real typesetting. People who are sensitive to the beauty of type certainly don't use MS Word.
I use Ventura Publisher. It is possible to vary the baseline in Ventura or in Quark Express. I've never had experience with Quark, but I've talked extensively with professional typesetters who do use it.
Slashdot Mirror
I know someone who was part of Dick Cheney's social circle when he worked at Halliburton. She said he was a heavy drinker and womanizer.
George Bush has said he had a serious problem with alcohol.
Both have the personalities of people who are dry alcoholics. Stopping drinking does not completely change the alcoholic's personality.
The Bush daughters have serious problems with drugs, not minor teenage experimentation problems, like you seem to have had.
Being an alcoholic is very different from being a teenage experimental drinker.
Wow! It's a game of "How do you feel?" I can contribute to that!
How do you feel about the fact that Bush's education improvements in Texas were at least partly Fraud?
How do you feel about George W. Bush holding hands in public with Saudi Arabia's "Prince Bandar", especially since al Qaeda's prime complaint is that the U.S. government is interfering with Saudi politics, and the U.S. government is, in fact, doing that, partly through this man the Bush family calls "Bandar Bush"? (See the network TV footage shown in the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" for the hand holding.)
How do you feel about the fact that the U.S. government has engaged in 24 wars since WW2? The U.S. government seems to create fear to get support from the people, so rich people can profit from violence.
How do you feel about the fact that Bush and Cheney are the most arrested U.S. leaders in history? Bush says he has been arrested 3 times, once for the very serious crime of driving while drunk. Cheney has been arrested at least twice, both times for driving while drunk:
George W. Bush DUI, 1st record of arrest
George W. Bush DUI, 2nd record of arrest
Dick Cheney DUI, record of 1st arrest
Dick Cheney DUI, record of 2nd arrest
DUI means "Driving Under the Influence" of alcohol. A DUI is a conviction for a very serious crime, a crime that endangers everyone on the road, a crime that often kills people. A DUI conviction means that the driver felt such a strong need to be drunk that he or she was willing to take a chance of murder.
How do you feel about the fact that family life is so stressful in the U.S. that children turn to drugs to try to cope:
"The daughter of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was arrested...
George W. Bush's daughters seem to be imitating their alcoholic father. The BBC article, Alcohol sentence for Bush daughter, says that "Barbara and Jenna Bush were both charged." Ask yourself, why do these teenage women feel they need a drug like alcohol so badly that they are willing to break the law?
He's right. In Windows XP, Click on Start/ Control Panel/ System/ Advanced/ Startup and Recovery Settings/. Uncheck "Automatically Restart".
--
Bush's education improvements were fraud
You know even more that you have provoked people when far more famous bands campaign to get rid of you.
--
24 wars since WW2: Creating fear so rich people can profit.
You said, "However, it is not at all irrelevant that the only typewriter that anybody has suggested to be the origin of the message does not produce text with matching line lengths."
I guess you did not read what I wrote. You seem not to have read even the first sentence that I wrote. Why do you continue to talk about typewriters? All typewriters are completely irrelevant.
I had seen that web site before. It's weird. Here is an example quote:
"One question that came up was whether this was really Times New Roman, or perhaps Palatino, a font very similar to Times New Roman. I looked in my font list (I have hundreds of fonts installed on my machine), and found a font called "Palatino Linotype". Admittedly, this does not say anything about the font that might be used by a sophisticated typesetter in 1972, but it shows that the hoaxer really did use Times New Roman and not Palatino."
I found Palatino and Palatino Linotype on the machine I'm using to type this. The font used in the memos was definitely not Palatino.
The font used to make the memos was definitely not Times New Roman. It's weird that anyone could think that the fonts used in the memos are that font. Only someone who knows nothing about fonts, or someone who is mis-communicating, would say that.
The emphasis on line lengths seems to be because that's the only thing that matches. The fonts are only somewhat similar. Within the lines, there are many cases of spacing mismatches.
His analysis drifts. He begins talking about office machines. By the time he reaches the paragraph above, he is talking about "a sophisticated typesetter in 1972".
I assume, but have not tested on machines of that vintage, of course, that someone typeset the memos, instead of typing them. Maybe they were training a new typesetter. Maybe they were experimenting. Since it happened to me several times that I took typing to someone, and they gave me typesetting instead, I suppose it could happen to someone else.
I thought every base had a printing office. A large enough base, or one with special responsibilities, would have a typesetter, I suppose. I haven't thought about that in many years, of course. Certainly there was a steady stream of typeset documents. Not all of them came from headquarters, I think. I have no idea of the size of Ellington in 1972.
My guess is that you didn't read and understand everything he said. You are linking to him because he seems authoritative. Is that true?
Anyone who claims that Palatino is "very similar to Times New Roman", would probably say that Garamond was very similar, also. In some sense, hundreds of fonts are very similar to each other.
I have more than 5,000 fonts, and many people do. Everyone I've known who has an interest in typography has had thousands of fonts. Only a few hundred are installed, because Windows becomes unstable with more than that. Everyone I've known with an interest in typography has a program that lets them move any font from uninstalled to installed by dragging and dropping.
It is ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT to the Bush documents that some machine that a critic has chosen cannot do typesetting. Just choose another machine that can.
Decades ago, it sometimes happened that I would go to some company that did both typesetting and typing to pick up my typing, and be handed, not pages of typing, but pages of typesetting film. The first time that happened I was scared, because if the company thought that had I ordered typesetting, the cost would be very high. I said something like, "I wanted this typed, not typeset." As proof I said something like, "It's just an informal business letter." The woman behind the counter laughed and said something like, "I was at the typesetter when someone handed me your job, and I was too lazy to get up and go over to the typewriter." "But what about the cost?" "I'm only charging you $4."
The woman thought she was doing me a favor (while wasting her company's typesetting film), but she wasn't. Sure the letter looked wonderful, but typesetting was so psychologically powerful back then that the fact that a letter was typeset would distract the reader from the message. (It should be obvious that I copied the letter from the typesetting film to a piece of paper.)
NOTHING about what you see when you print a document typed in Times New Roman in Microsoft Word has ANYTHING WHATSOEVER to do with either Microsoft Word or Microsoft Corporation.
On the computer I am using to type this, Times New Roman is supplied to me as the file times.ttf, dated 08/29/2002, 05:00 AM. If you look at the file with a tool that can view binary, you will see this message, and a lot of other heavy-duty legal language:
"This typeface is the property of Monotype Typography and its use by you is covered under the terms of a license agreement. You have obtained this typeface software either directly from Monotype or together with software distributed by one of Monotype's licensees."
Microsoft Word ONLY follows the information in this file. You can prove this to yourself by downloading and installing a copy of Open Office from www.OpenOffice.org. Open Office is better in important ways than Microsoft Office, and it is free, as in "You don't pay anything." Type anything you want in both Microsoft Office and Open Office, using the same font, and notice that it looks identical.
Open Office did not automatically superscript the "th". I didn't like that superscripting thirty years ago, and I don't like it now. Only a company like Microsoft, that doesn't really pay attention to anything it does, would make the superscripting of "th" automatic. In 1972 it had already been decades since that was in fashion, although it persisted on some machines, and was used by novices. Even when it was "in fashion" that was only because there was a period when typesetters liked to show off what they could do.
To superscript the "th" in Open Office, I selected the "th" and chose Format/ Character/ Position/ Superscript. The output was identical to the output of the version of Microsoft Word in Office 2000.
This is not surprising, since all of the information is stored in Monotype's font file, and none of the information is stored in the word processor. What chance would there be that Monotype would choose to license a file to Microsoft that would corrupt the most famous font in the world, that Monotype owned?
People thought Times Roman was a work of art in the 1770s when the first version was designed for the London Times. I have spent hours in the rare book room of Oxford University Library, Oxford, England, examining type faces used in books printed as early as the 1620s. (A graduate of Oxford signed an application for me to get a library card.) It is only when you see what went before that you can fully appreciate that Times Roman was an advancement in western civilization.
People thought version 2 of Times Roman, Times New Roman, was an even better work of art when it was designed in 1932.
All of this should indicate that no one should
This discussion is becoming surprising for me. Many experts are being consulted, but I seem to be the only person who has actual experience with the Selectric Composer. It has been a weird experience, slowly realizing I seem to be the world authority on a few tiny details.
I certainly could not have afforded a machine that cost half as much as a new car. But, many years ago, I wrote computer user manuals and published them by having them typeset by a woman who owned a Selectric Composer, and copied on a Xerox machine. Her work was much less expensive than traditional typsetting. She did work for maybe a hundred customers. She would go to people's offices to pick up work.
Consider this quote: "Two letterheads typed three months apart can be superimposed on each other so perfectly that no difference at all can be seen. It's the same deal as before: the red in front was superimposed over the black behind it. You just can't see the black copy because the red copy is perfectly aligned with it. These letterheads weren't centered to within a couple of points of each other. They were centered exactly the same. Three months apart."
The answer is easy. There must be hundreds of thousands of people who know the answer to this question, if they would just think about it, even though they never saw a Selectric Composer. Typewriters had memory back then. You would type repeated text into memory and then just press a button whenever you wanted it played back. Obviously, you would do this with a letterhead, because it was difficult to make a letterhead look just right. If you knew you would be typing numerous items for an organization, you would enter the organization's letterhead first.
The Selectric Composers could vary the letter and line spacing, so don't look for an exact match unless you have one of the machines and are willing to experiment. Also, third parties both sold and repaired type balls for the machines.
One of the documents released by the White House also had a superscripted "th". Why did typists superscript the "th" sometimes and not others? I don't know; maybe just to show they could. Maybe they were experimenting to learn more about their machines. I do know that I had a conversation about that very issue with my typesetter concerning the Selectric Composer. It went something like this: "How did you do that?" [Some answer] "But why did you do that?" She laughed and gave some explanation that did not make a lot of sense to me.
It is useful to keep in mind that Microsoft Word and the IBM Selectric Composer, and all typesetters available then and now, try to imitate as much as possible the Times New Roman typeface, which was designed in 1932. The look close to the same because the designers intentionally made them the same.
It's interesting to note how much the arguments of those who assume the documents are forgeries have eroded.
What do we know with certainty? Here are some facts about which everyone agrees:
1) Something was wrong with George W. Bush's service in the Air National Guard.
2) George W. Bush was an active alcoholic back then. How do we know that? He told us.
The forger was dumb, but the forger was smart? The forger was so dumb he did not think to switch to Courier as he was using Microsoft Word to type the documents? But, he was smart enough to vary the baseline in exactly the way a Selectric Composer would when it was not adjusted?
See the article in the Boston Globe: Authenticity backed on Bush documents. I think I did quite well, considering I am not a full-time document investigator.
Denial is thinking George W. Bush is not a recovered alcoholic, and that he is able to be fully mentally engaged in being a leader. Don't you see the puzzled look on his face as he reads things that are written for him?
Have you ever seen the "presidential moments" on the Late Show with David Letterman? These are network footage of George W. Bush doing something really inappropriate. According to Letterman, and a lot of people, George W. Bush doesn't really want to be there. That seems right to me. Bill Clinton, a child of severe alcoholics and severely affected by it, but not an alcoholic himself, at least has an interest in government. To me it seems that GWB has no real interest.
Look at the recent presidents:
Richard Nixon: Twenty-four of the top officials in his administration went to jail for extremely serious crimes. He himself was pardoned.
Jimmy Carter: A good man, but far too inexperienced at running large organizations to be president.
Ronald Reagan: An ACOA, Adult Child of Alcoholics. His father was a severe drunk, and very abusive. Reagan exhibited a lot of the characteristics of ACOAs.
George H. W. Bush: Raised an alcoholic. His grandchildren have severe problems with drugs. Life in the Bush family is so stressful that the children turn to drugs to try to cope:
"The daughter of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was arrested...
George W. Bush's daughters seem to be imitating their alcoholic father. The BBC article, Alcohol sentence for Bush daughter, says that "Barbara and Jenna Bush were both charged." Ask yourself, why do these teenage women feel they need a drug like alcohol so badly that they are willing to break the law?
Bill Clinton: Severely affected by the fact that both of this parents were violent alcoholics. President Clinton would often seem like he was lying even when he wasn't.
George W. Bush: A recovered alcoholic. George W. Bush was arrested once for the crime of DUI and Dick Cheney twice:
George W. Bush DUI, 1st record of arrest George W. Bush DUI, 2nd record of arrest
Dick Cheney DUI, record of 1st arrest Dick Cheney DUI, record of 2nd arrest
DUI means "Driving Under the Influence" of alcohol. A DUI is a conviction for a very serious crime, a crime that endangers everyone on the road, a crime that often kills people. A DUI conviction means that the driver felt such a strong need to be drunk that he or she was willing to take a chance of murder.
According to his wife Laura Bush and George W. Bush himself, she threatened to leave him because of his drinking.
Denial is thinking that all of this doesn't matter. Denial is thinking that the U.S. does not have a leadership problem.
Not a Selectric, certainly. A Selectric Composer. They certainly did not use Courier as their main font.
Anyhow, it's all explained in another comment: Someone who knew to baseline shift would...
See especially the Boston Globe article. See this also, for how it happened when I was in the military and my guess how it happened at Ellington AFB:
The conversation might have been something like this:
Officer to secretary: "God damn if I'm going to get my ass in a crack over some lazy son of an ambassador."
Secretary, the next day, with a typed memo: "Let's put this in the records."
Even someone uncomfortable with memos would have been more uncomfortable about being court-martialed.
It is easy to guess that the man's secretary typed their discussions, and the man signed them to protect himself from any allegation that he voluntarily allowed George W. Bush to corrupt military procedure. The issue was very serious; you could be court-martialed if the IG (Inspector General) decided to investigate, and it was found that you were part of an effort to transgress deliberately against regulations, especially in so important a matter. The office of the IG often allowed corruption, but you could never be sure that they would continue. They would prosecute transgressors sometimes for reasons having to do with trying to prevent criticism of the IG office. It could be capricious.
Remember, if her boss were court-martialed, his secretary would have a lot of extra work, and might lose her job.
Neither of them cared or knew much about a lazy, alcoholic (by GWB's own admission) son of an ambassador. Back then, GWB was not important to anyone. They were just acting in their own self-interest.
I seldom use Microsoft Word. Office 2000 does not have that feature, that I can see. The control over baseline shift would need to be very fine, and Word has not had fine control, at least up to and including Office 2000. (We are completely converting to Open Office.)
Could you try it yourself? I presume you have a more recent version of Microsoft Office. Focus on the way the doubled letters, like ll and tt, are sometimes, but not always, at a different height. I had a conversation about that with an IBM service technician. The effect is connected with the inertia of the type ball and the fact that the play in the mechanism is affected by where the ball was before it typed a letter. In the word "tell", the look of type from a poorly adjusted machine would be affected by the fact that the first L was typed after an E, and the second L was typed after an L.
But that's a little beside the point. Someone who knew that shifting the baseline would make one person out of a thousand realize that the documents were genuine, would be smart enough to do the job with other software. I've never used Quark Express, but, from conversations with typesetters I know it has extremely fine control.
I'm really happy with what I've said. My revised comments are copied below. I'm just someone who remembers the old machines because he so much wanted one. But my comments are corroborated by a document expert:
See the article in the Boston Globe, Authenticity backed on Bush documents:
"Bouffard, the Ohio document specialist, said that he had dismissed the Bush documents in an interview with The New York Times because the letters and formatting of the Bush memos did not match any of the 4,000 samples in his database. But Bouffard yesterday said that he had not considered one of the machines whose type is not logged in his database: the IBM Selectric Composer. Once he compared the Bush memos to Selectric Composer samples obtained from Interpol, the international police agency, Bouffard said his view shifted.
"In the Times interview, Bouffard had also questioned whether the military would have used the Composer, a large machine. But Bouffard yesterday provided a document indicating that as early as April 1969 -- three years before the dates of the CBS memos -- the Air Force had completed service testing for the Composer, possibly in preparation for purchasing the typewriters.
"As for the raised "th" that appears in the Bush memos -- to refer, for example, to units such as the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron -- Bouffard said that custom characters on the Composer's metal typehead ball were available in the 1970s, and that the military could have ordered such custom balls from IBM.
" 'You can't just say that this is definitively the mark of a computer,' Bouffard said."
The document expert is missing a point, however. The type balls were VERY expensive, and very brittle. There were people who offered to repair broken type balls, and those people had the ability to put unusual characters on the ball. That was one of the services they offered.
This statement in the article from the man's son is completely credible to me: 'Also suspicious is Killian's son, Gary D. Killian of Houston. "I still contend that my father would not have written these documents. I know the type of man he was -- if he felt he was being pressured, he'd confront it head on, not write a memo about it," Killian, 51, said in a telephone interview. His father died in 1984.'
Back then people often didn't type their own memos. It was very common that someone unusual would have one of the Composers because people who didn't understand them but had power and money would order them, and find that their secretaries would refuse to use them, because they were more complicated. Why would powerful people order them? Because back then a
They weren't typewriters. They were low cost typesetting machines. The word breaks and line spacing are identical because they are both imitating typesetting machines, and Times New Roman, a famous font since 1932.
It's not called line spacing. In typesetting it is called leading, or, more recently, ledding, because originally they used pieces of lead to make the line space.
Here's the latest revision of my remarks:
When I saw the Bush documents, I laughed because they are obviously genuine. They have a defect that I learned to recognize: Baseline shift of repeated characters. A long time ago, I talked to an IBM service technician and he explained why it happens in machines like the IBM Selectric and IBM composer.
For an explanation of how this was and is connected with humor, see below.
I examined the documents in PDF format that can be seen on the Washington Post web site.
Typeface and font used in the letters. -- Much is being made of the proportional font used in the letters. People are saying the proportional spacing is an indication of forgery, because the letters look like Microsoft Word documents.
However, I've often had the experience of walking into a military office and being shocked by the office equipment there. There are numerous ways that people in the military get things that they don't really need. For example, a general may requisition something and then discover that his secretary doesn't want to learn how to use it. So, then it is available to an office of lower rank.
The fonts are consistent with those sold with a kind of upscale IBM Selectric typewriter that was actually a low-cost typesetting machine. (Typesetting was what it was called before everyone could do it on a personal computer.) These machines had a one-use carbon ribbon. The impression of each character was clearer than the clearest printer.
I'm a bit confused about the model numbers of the typewriter. It could have been called a Selectric costing then about $2,500, I believe. I seem to remember that they had another name for the more upscale, true typesetting machines, apparently IBM Composer. (Back then I wrote computer manuals which were prepared on those upscale machines.) The more expensive machines, the IBM Composers, used much bigger type balls than the Selectrics, but they were all designed around the same basic idea.
There were usually some odd symbols and characters like "th" on the type balls used by the Selectric family of typesetting machines. That's because of the design of the balls. Whereever there was room, there were characters, partly to assure that the balls would be balanced, I suppose, and partly just because there was room.
There's a funny side to the self-consistency in my guess about the machine used to prepare the memos. Back then anyone writing and publishing computer user manuals really struggled with the publishing. Whenever something needed to look professional, we had it typeset. To do that, we did what is called "spec type". On one occasion I spent 11 hours specifying typesetting values for one particularly complicated page.
After you have spent many, many hours worrying about the look of type, you begin to be extremely sensitive to everything about it. (Either that, or you wouldn't be successful.)
Looking at the letters discussing preferential treatment for George W. Bush brings back strong memories. The Selectric was an unbelievably complicated machine that needed frequent service because it depended on everything being adjusted to extremely fine tolerances.
Anyone familiar with this can see something funny about the letters immediately. It's obvious to me. Whoever had the typing machine did not have the maintenance contract. It's easy to know this because the letters are not all level with the baseline.
Paridel, I did not intend to cause you to feel negative feelings.
There is a very serious issue here, however. In my opinion, U.S. government violence must stop. The U.S. government has entered into 24 wars since WW2, killing 3,000,000 people who did not threaten the U.S. It's all part of creating fear so rich people can profit.
By some measures, the U.S. government is the most violent government that has ever existed.
It does not. Character Spacing is horizontal. Baseline shift is vertical.
One thing you should know is that I introduced some confusion into the discussion by not knowing what the IBM model is called. Most Selectrics did not have the capability of proportional spacing. I don't remember the name of those IBM machines that did.
There seem to me to be several facts that are important:
1) The one superscript TH in the documents is an anomaly whether the document is real or a forgery. Why was it used in only one place?
2) The whole thing that got me started doing an analysis of this was that I thought immediately that I recognized the shift in baseline that can most easily be seen in characters that are repeated, like ll and tt. That cannot be done with Microsoft Word. It is a characteristic of out-of-adjustment IBM machines.
3) There were third-party suppliers of type balls for these machines. Some definitely produced weird characters like TH. Whether I have seen TH, I don't know. I only remember saying to an owner of one of the machines, "Why is that character there?"
4) I don't agree with people who say they can tell that the font is Microsoft Times New Roman, rather than Times New Roman, which was designed in 1932. That argument was introduced when Bush supporters first began to realize that Times New Roman was not a Microsoft invention.
5) The machine that produced the letters may have been an IBM Composer, and not have been called a "Selectric". These are both different from the IBM Executive typewriter.
6) I was a big user of typesetting in those days, and I was supersensitive to typesetting issues then. I was very envious of those who had the top-level IBM machines. I noticed that you would see them in unlikely places. Sometimes they would be bought and the secretary would refuse to learn how to use them, so they would be used by someone else, who obviously could not have afforded them.
This comment seems right to me. I know I have seen the machines used to type letters. I cannot remember the exact model name.
The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932. Everything that produces proportional characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM machines and MS Word try to be identical. The differences between MS Times New Roman and the 1932 Times New Roman are very small.
Times Roman was designed in the 1770s for the Times of London.
Another thought: The IBM Composer could do proportional spacing, also, and also was very complicated mechanically.
Someone was discussing this later in the story, and I looked it up. The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932.
Everything that produces proportional characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM Selectric typewriters and MS Word look identical because they are trying to be exactly identical.
The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932. Everything that produces proportional characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM Selectric typewriters and MS Word look identical because they are trying to be identical.
See this analysis. There were IBM Selectrics that had proportional spacing.
Most people now know nothing of typesetting, because their computers do a better job than the $40,000 to $1,100,000 typesetters ever did. However, those who know about typesetting know that Microsoft Word and the old Selectrics are imitating the same font. Both are trying to look like typesetting.
Times Roman, for example, was designed for the London Times in the 1770s, for example.
IBM put some quirky symbols on the Selectric type balls because there was room for more than just the standard characters. I don't specifically remember which symbols, and there were many balls with many selections of characters.
The old one-use carbon ribbons used in the Selectrics made a more clean impression than a laser printer, and impression quite like letter press, which is still the standard in fine-looking type.
I'm not saying this is the only possible explanation, but this is what I thought of when I looked at the Bush documents in PDF format that can be seen on the Washington Post web site. The documents brought back strong memories of working with those machines.
Typeface and font used in the letters. -- Much is being made of the proportional font used in the letters. People are saying the proportional spacing is an indication of forgery, because the letters look like Microsoft Word documents.
However, I've often had the experience of walking into a military office and being shocked by the office equipment there. There are numerous ways that people in the military get things that they don't really need. For example, a general may requisition something and then discover that his secretary doesn't want to learn how to use it. So, then it is available to an office of lower rank.
The fonts are consistent with those sold with a kind of upscale IBM Selectric typewriter that was actually a low-cost typesetting machine. (Typesetting was what it was called before everyone could do it on a personal computer.) These machines had a one-use carbon ribbon. The impression of each character was clearer than the clearest laser printer.
I'm a bit confused about the model numbers of the typewriter. It could have been called a Selectric costing then about $2,500, I believe. I seem to remember that they had another name for the more upscale, true typesetting machines. (I wrote computer manuals which I typed on a Selectric and were prepared on those machines.)
There were usually some odd symbols and characters like "th" on the type balls used by the Selectric family of typesetting machines. That's because of the design of the balls. Whereever there was room, there were characters, partly to assure that the balls would be balanced, I suppose, and partly just because there was room.
There's a funny side to the self-consistency in my guess about the machine used to prepare the memos. Back then anyone writing and publishing computer user manuals really struggled with the publishing. Whenever something needed to look professional, we had it typeset. To do that, we did what is called "spec type". On one occasion I spent 11 hours specifying typesetting values for one particularly complicated page.
After you have spent many, many hours worrying about the look of type, you begin to be extremely sensitive to everything about it. (Either that, or you wouldn't be successful.)
Looking at the letters discussing preferential treatment for George W. Bush brings back strong memories. The Selectric was an unbelievably complicated machine that needed frequent service because it depended on everything being adjusted to extremely fine tolerances.
Anyone familiar with this can see something funny about the letters immediately. It's obvious to me. Whoever had the typing machine did not have the maintenance contract. It's easy to know this because the letters are not all level with the baseline. That's what would happen when the Selectric or other typing machine from the same family was not adjusted.
The funny self-consistency is this. It's easy to guess that they got the machine from the general's office after some civilian secretary there decided that the new machine was too complicated to learn. But, since an office of lower rank was not allowed to have such a machine, they did not have the maintenance contract. That could be why the baseline of the type is so messy.
Someone said that the letters were forgeries because they were obviously done with Microsoft Word. It is impossible to simulate the variation of baseline with Microsoft Word; Word is too basic a tool, it is not able to do many of the functions of real typesetting. People who are sensitive to the beauty of type certainly don't use MS Word.
I use Ventura Publisher. It is possible t
Focus on the humor of the situation: Someone somehow had a machine that cost then half as much as a new car, if I remember the prices correctly. However, the person did not have the money to get the machine adjusted.
Whenever you saw that back then, you knew something unusual was happening. For example, maybe the machine was stolen, and could not be adjusted, because only IBM technicians had the tools, and they always checked the serial numbers and would report stolen machines.
Or maybe the machine was owned by an office supply store that was using it while trying to find a buyer.
There is simply very, very little chance that a machine used by the military was stolen, so there must be another reason.
When someone offered to sell me a used Selectric in perhaps 1979, I immediately called IBM to see if it was stolen. I was told it was okay. By then it was a newer model that did not need as much adjustment. Even in 1979 these were expensive machines.
Bush's education improvements were fraud. Why would you expect something better in the case of his military service?
George W. Bush was an active alcoholic back then. See Method of Corruption #7 for a discussion of this. See the section just after that for a discussion of how his personality is exactly what you would expect from a recovered alcoholic.
Not meeting commitments is exactly what would be expected of an alcoholic.
The document is not similar to Word. MS Word is similar to the document, by design. They are both trying to be like a typesetting machine. They are both implementing a famous font.
The blurring of photocopying is different from the characteristic uneven baseline from an out-of-adjustment Selectric style machine.
The change in baseline from letter to letter is caused by the type ball rotating very fast and coming from different directions for different combinations of letters. The play in the mechanism that drives the ball causes the unevenness. It's not possible to get the same effect with MS Word; MS Word is a toy.
The blurring from photocopying is also consistent with the old-style Xerox machines, which had much poorer optics and much lower resolution than the Xerox machines of today. For some reason, the old toner would clump. That clumping is different from the loss of resolution caused by modern faxing.
MOD PARENT UP!
Look at this map of Cambodia. Notice that it is less than 180 miles (300 kilometers) from the end of the Mekong Delta to Cambodia.
Those who research these things say that the U.S. killed only 150,000 to 300,000 Cambodian people directly, if I remember correctly. (None of these people threatened the United States. Even if they knew where the U.S. was, they would not have had the money to go there.) However, the researchers say that it is sensible to estimate that the U.S. government is responsible for the deaths of perhaps 2,000,000 more that happened because of the resultant destabilization of the country.
The U.S. government was trying to hide its activities in Cambodia because officials feared the reaction of U.S. citizens. However, there were military activities in Cambodia long before Henry Kissinger was open about bombing there.
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24 wars since WW2: Creating fear so rich people can profit.
There's a funny self-consistency in my guess about the machine used to prepare the memos. Back then anyone writing and publishing computer user manuals really struggled with the publishing. Whenever something needed to look professional, we had it typeset. To do that, we did what is called "spec type". On one occasion I spent 11 hours specifying typesetting values for one particularly complicated page.
After you have spent many, many hours worrying about the look of type, you begin to be extremely sensitive to everything about it. (Either that, or you wouldn't be successful.)
Looking at the letters discussing preferential treatment for George W. Bush brings back strong memories. The Selectric was an unbelievably complicated machine that needed frequent service because it depended on everything being adjusted to extremely fine tolerances.
Anyone familiar with this can see something funny about the letters immediately. It's obvious to me. Whoever had the typing machine did not have the maintenance contract. It's easy to know this because the letters are not all level with the baseline. That's what would happen when the Selectric or other typing machine from the same family was not adjusted.
The funny self-consistency is this. It's easy to guess that they got the machine from the general's office after some civilian secretary there decided that the new machine was too complicated to learn. But, since an office of lower rank was not allowed to have such a machine, they did not have the maintenance contract. That could be why the baseline of the type is so messy.
Someone said that the letters were forgeries because they were obviously done with Microsoft Word. It is impossible to simulate the variation of baseline with Microsoft Word; Word is too basic a tool, it is not able to do many of the functions of real typesetting. People who are sensitive to the beauty of type certainly don't use MS Word.
I use Ventura Publisher. It is possible to vary the baseline in Ventura or in Quark Express. I've never had experience with Quark, but I've talked extensively with professional typesetters who do use it.
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24 wars since WW2: Creating fear so rich people can profit.