“I don’t remember all the students in detail unless I’m prompted by something, but I always remember two types of students. One is the very excellent student, the type as a professor you feel honored to be working with. Someone with strong social values, compassion and intellect — the very rare person you never forget. And then you remember students like George Bush, those who are totally the opposite.”
–Yoshi Tsurumi, former professor, Harvard Business School

I’ve been holding out on the topic of the recently “discovered” memos regarding GWB’s National Guard service, mainly because I’d really like for everyone to stop talking about a war from 35 years ago and start talking about the war we’re in today.

However, the typewriter-collecting geek in me couldn’t leave it alone. It’s exciting when people are suddenly talking about typewriters and document forensics. (Okay, it’s exciting to me.) So I located the new memos, as well as samples of documents known to be authentic. (USA Today has made them all available.)

Now, as much as I know about typewriters, most of my knowlege is constrained to pre-WW2 manuals, and I’m really no expert on typefaces. There are plenty of others studying the memos’ typeface, so I decided to focus on the less-minute clues to be found in the documents’ writing style.

–The first thing I noticed is that the “new” memos have been photocopied repeatedly. These are probably fifth-generation copies. Small distortions, magnified in each successive copy, have made the typeface so fuzzy that IMO we’ll probably never be able to accurately identify what model typewriter created it. I believe this to be done on purpose to make positive identification more difficult. Photocopies of papers known to be authentic are much clearer and have obviously been copied fewer times, despite by their nature having been disseminated among far more people. (It’s also worth noting that the authentic memos show consistent dark areas in the lefthand margin where they were hole-punched for storage in binders. The new memos have no punch-holes.)

–Authentic memos use abbreviated months and years, with no leading “0″ before single digits, ie: “5 Sep 73″. This usage is consistent across different types of documents and different authors. The new memos do not abbreviate, ie “01 August 1972″. Likewise, titles such as “Lt Col” (authentic) are spelled “Lt. Colonel” (new). (Only on official reviews did Killian spell out the word “colonel”; even then, he omitted the “.” follwing “Lt”.) The questioned documents abbreviate “Fighter Interceptor Group” as “Ftr Intrcp Gp” (and once as “Grp”) whereas Killian and other officers (including Bush) consistently used “Ftr Intcp Gp”. Nowhere is “Group” abbreviated “Grp”.

–Killian’s signature is indented almost to the right-hand margin in the questioned documents. In the authentic documents it is left-justified. Why would he change the layout for these particular memos? Funny, but that layout does match MS Word’s “modified block” letter template…

–Although blurred, the typeface of the questioned document dated “18 August 1973″ appears to be different than that of an authentic document dated “5 Sep 73″. In turn, the “5 Sep 73″ typeface matches that of authentic documents dated prior to August, 1973. The typeface across all of the questioned documents appears to conform. Likewise, documents from the offices of Col Killian, Col Bobby Hodges, and Major William Harris use a uniform typeface. In the case of these papers, the copies are clear enough to tell that the documents were typed on different specimens of identical model typewriters, suggesting a basewide standard for typewriters. This casts further suspicion upon the new memos. The typeface in question may be reproducable using a certain typewriter of the era, and the Army may have had that typewriter in use, but whatever it was does not appear to have been in use on that base. (This whole part is a matter of conjecture, as again the quality of the questioned documents is too poor to judge their typeface with certainty.)

All of these clues, combined with what some of the other folks have uncovered, lead me to believe that the newly-discovered memos are fakes–bad fakes. Whoever made them didn’t even bother to make sure that they matched publicly-available Killian memos. The news networks seem to have become so dependant upon ratings-grabbing stories that they don’t bother to fact-check anymore. This is why I’m getting more and more of my news from the BBC and the Guardian.

Perhaps Don Foster can run the papers through his analyzing engine and submit his opinion for public consumption.

Also of note:
Expert Cited by CBS Says He Can’t Authenticate Papers

Typist Says Memos are Accurate but Fake

Stopped by Taco John’s. It appears they have a new mascot, a nameless sombrero-donned monkey. I couldn’t help but think of Taco Bell’s ridiculously successful, much-maligned chihuahua mascot of a few years ago. TB eventually dropped the dog partially over complaints from some members of the hispanic community that the chihuahua–whose catchphrase was a heavily accented “Yo quiero Taco Bell”–was a racial stereotype. Taco John’s, obviously wanting to avoid such a charge, chose…a monkey. The black guy behind the counter, noticing me staring at the monkey, said with a grin, “Isn’t he cute?”

I couldn’t help but wonder how cute he would find le monkey if it were being used to sell, say, fried chicken, with a word balloon coming out of his mouth saying, “Come ‘n’ git yo’self some Kentucky Friiiiied Chick’n!” No doubt something would be said about that! How about a chihuahua selling fried chicken? That would probably be ok, if a bit odd (though no more odd than using a monkey to hawk tacos). I guess it all comes down to context. Associating a monkey with tacos does not invoke the racial stereotype that would come from associating a monkey with fried chicken or watermelon. A chihuahua is a stereotype when it is associated with tacos, but not fried chicken. So, in a nutshell: chihuahua + tacos = bad, monkey + tacos = good, monkey + fried chicken = bad, chihuahua + fried chicken = good. However, one constant exists across all examples: food from any of those places = bad.

This is just about the coolest burial method I’ve seen. The body is placed in a biodegradable “coccoon”, in the fetal position, and buried. A tree is planted over the coccoon as a living memorial. One is reminded of the Peruvian mummies, placed in the fetal position within woven reed sacks. Given the proper conditions, the Italian “capsul mundi” could result in similar mummies for future generations to find.

Annoyingly, the page loads about as slowly as one of their trees grows.

Nipped from bOINGbOING.

Why isn’t any of this in the American papers? I suppose it’s easier to believe that we are undertaking some sort of noble mission when one doesn’t have to look at the product of our work and the streets slick with blood. Does anyone truly believe that Iraq is now a sovereign country when the American military rules the streets? Seeing this sort of thing sickens me. We’ve got a bunch of machine-gun wielding, scared, inexperienced kids in the middle of chaos, and their instinct is to shoot at anything that moves. The people in that picture looks like they’re just teenagers. I don’t see any weapons. Their clothes look like they might have come from J.C. Penny’s. At least 47 more civilians dead this morning because of another car bomb. Our government says we won’t leave Iraq until we’ve established “security”. Don’t they understand that our presence is why these civilian massacres are taking place? We’ve done whatever it was we came to do. It’s time for us to get out so the people of that country can go back to living instead of just surviving.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, boldly taking a stance where no other politician dared, has outlawed necrophilia. Two questions immediately spring to mind: 1) this wasn’t illegal before? 2) Is this going to become a campaign issue? “Vote Republican: the anti-necrophilia party.”

These hurricanes that have been power-washing Florida and the outlying islands are horrifying in the amount of destruction left in their path. But they look really cool from the air. NOAA has a wallpaper-worthy archive of high-resolution satellite photos from the last five seasons.

North Korea says that a huge explosion that resulted in a massive crater and a ‘peculiarly-shaped’ cloud was not the product of a nuclear test. North Korean officials say the blast, which occured on Nationalist Day, was the demolition of a mountain. Which begs the question: what kind of explosive does one use to blow up a mountain?

Add to the mystery reports that the White House recently received intelligence that North Korea was preparing its first nuclear test, and the fact that the 2.5 mile wide cloud appeared in an area close to known missile bases. Now, I’m no math whiz, but it seems to be that if satellite photos of Iraqi trucks carrying unknown cargo equals weapons of mass destruction, then one would think that the White House would be making a bigger deal out of this.

I don’t want to sound like an unpatriotic evil-doer here, but have you noticed that there are certain places in the world where the United States refuses to tread? GWB claims that we need to fight terrorists on their home turf so that we don’t have to fight them here. So why have we not gone into Israel to put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Why haven’t we gone into Russia to put an end to their spate of Chechnyan terrorist attacks? Why have we not “liberated” North Korea from their lunatic dictator? What do these countries have in common that differentiates them from others we’ve invaded liberated? They are all known to have nuclear weapons. So we’ll rush into a country which we know can’t hurt us very badly, but if they have a powerful army or nuclear weapons, we stay the hell away and persue “diplomatic” solutions. Remember when Bill Maher lost his show at ABC for calling the practice of lobbing missile from thousands of miles away “cowardly”? Well, I hate to tell you this, but only beating up on those smaller and weaker than us while conceding to those of equal strength is pretty damned cowardly.

The total of Americans killed in the 18-month-old war so far: 1,003¹

The total of Oregonians killed in the 18-month-old war so far: 23

Oregon Population: 3,559,596²

United States Population: 290,809,777

This means that Oregon represents 1.22% of the United States Population and yet 2.29% of all deaths in Iraq³.

So here comes my far-out conspiracy theory.

Oregon has kind of been a thorn for Ashcroft. He doesn’t seem to like the idea of our Death With Dignity Act⁴, perhaps in favor of a Death in a Foreign Country Under Horrible Circumstances Act. The State has managed to fight and finally overturn his attempt to block the act, and I think it is fair to say that he’s probably not too happy with this.

So, who’s to say that these guys don’t hold a grudge? That the disproportionate number of Oregonians sent, and subsequenty killed, in Iraq was not coincidental.
Maybe someone thinks that the best way to get back at Oregon is to kill it’s children.

It’s just a theory.

¹Iraq Coalition Casualty Count
²Figures taken from the 2003 US Census
³All numbers assume my math is right
⁴American Medical News article / Register Guard editorial

Quote of the day:
“I feel for those people, but I think some of their relative is still in our attic.”
–Barbara Vreeland, of Forest Grove, OR, who had an urn of cremation ashes crash through the roof of her house. The deceased’s family had been attempting to scatter the ashes from an airplane when they lost their grip on the urn while holding it out the plane’s window.