Posted on 09/11/2006 11:51:13 AM PDT by future F22 pilot
His lifetime includes the Kennedy/Johnson Administration which lied us into a half-million man commitment to Vietnam, and then lost the confidence of his own party, which said "Never mind." Lots of those men were draftees, and over 50,000 men came back in coffins. Not to mention all the Vietnamese. By the time Nixon got in, it was essentially impossible to sustain victory politically in America. And so there were huge reprisals by the communists after the US Congress controlled by the Democrats pulled the plug on military support for South Vietnam.And his lifetime includes the Carter Administration which lost a major ally and gained a major adversary in Iran. And brought us very high unemployment and very high inflation simultaneously. And the military in terrible shape and with very low morale. Ronald Reagan was a great president because he got the country going again, whipped inflation, and transcended Communism. And got oil prices down. IOW, he was a great president because he fixed most of the problems Carter left him.
And then there was the Clinton Administration which fried the dozens of Branch Davidians at Waco, shipped little Elian to Cuba, spied on 900 Republicans by getting their FBI files out without having any intention of considering hiring them into the White House (the only justification for those files, otherwise looking at one of them was a felony), prosecuted the head of the WH Travel Office on politically motivated trumped-up charges, went into court (in the Paula Jones matter) with the intent of seeing that the judge did not understand the facts of his case (which in his position was wrong even if he had not actually lied under oath), violated campaign finance laws, and other things too numerous to be able to recall all at once. Oh yes, and Monica, too.
Even if you thought that "Bush lied, people died" Johnson was ten times worse. Bush is making a strong bid to create an ally in Iraq, in contrast to Carter losing one in Iran. And no administration in history has been so close to lawless as the Clinton Administration (who was so bad that it was years after he left office before I could bring myself to capitalize the term "clinton administration." No other president has ever had that "distinction").
Johnson, Carter and Clinton… the axis of weasels.
I believe the administration does know, he actually woked at the school a few years ago. I imagine they are keeping a very close watch on him.
Many typewriters could do half-spacing; on a typical such unit, pressing and holding the spacebar would shift the carriage a half-space leftward; releasing the spacebar would shift it another half space. Any characters typed while the spacebar was held would appear half a space to the right of where the first such character would have appeared without the spacebar (the carriage won't move while the spacebar is held, so if multiple characters must be typed that are shifted by half a space from normal positioning, the space bar must be released and re-pressed between them.
Take a thoughtful approach and use a well-reasoned argument and most libs are incensed, so go that route. Or try to cure the teach altogether and have her read Atlas Shrugged.
BTTT
I don't think I ever encountered that feature, and I took a typing course in high school. Nevertheless . . .(the carriage won't move while the spacebar is held, so if multiple characters must be typed that are shifted by half a space from normal positioning, the space bar must be released and re-pressed between them.
. . .But I'm glad to be corrected if in fact it was even possible to perfectly center an odd number of characters perfectly with a monospace typewriter.
- Not all typewriters even had that feature, and an Air National Guard unit operates hand-me-down airplanes and I presume would not have the latest, greatest office equipment either.
- Not all typists would trouble to use that feature - which would essentially slow a touch-typist secretary down to the speed of a hunt-and-peck user - for a putative "CYA memo" which was not intended to see the light of day, and
- Col. Killian wouldn't have relished the thought of submitting such a memo - speaking of his willingness to violate a law - to a secretary for typing, and Killian himself didn't type (according to his family - and also, in my experience, it was typical of professionals of his era to consider typing to be beneath them, "unprofessional"). Such a person would hardly be likely to even know about such a feature as shifting half a space with the space bar and pecking a key with the space bar depressed. Let alone to actually use it, character by character, just to get perfection in the centering of a line, in a memo he hoped never to use.
But of course the bottom line is that it would be difficult bordering on impossible to duplicate the layout of Microsoft Word even in the highly improbable event that a memo was typed in 1972 on a machine which actually was physically capable of doing it. And - especially considering that the Air Force used 8" wide paper rather than the standard 8.5" wide sheets for which Word's default settings apply - the chance that someone would accidentally produce the identical layout to that of Word's default is truly infinitesimal. I'd convict someone of murder on weaker evidence than that. Beyond a reasonable doubt, those "memos" were made on Word and therefore many years after their putative date. Almost certainly, base on the fact that they were copies of copies of copies of copies, they would have gotten "in the wild" and come to the attention of Al Gore if they had been created before 2001.
Those counterfeit "memos" were created for the 2004 election by an incompetent con artist. And taken at face value, or at least as close enough to face value to fool the public, by con artists at CBS News who desperately wanted them to be genuine.
That is a great post. Thanks!
Given that colleges are (by all accounts) positively infested with baby boomer leftists, going to a school with a conservative student body for moral support while you take on one lefty teacher might be considered ideal training. After you debate this one, especially with backup from FR, you will be prepareed to handle the live ammunition case in college. Without this practice, you could find yourself flummoxed by an onslaught of leftist negativity not only among the professor but also among the student body.And that is IMHO a sound reason to avoid resorting to going running to Mommy now, when you have so much other support behind you. If he's not threatening your grades for disagreeing with his politics - and it sounds like he's hardly in a position to do so in this case - I'd say it's all to the good.
Just be aware of the fact that it is extremely difficult for someone to change their mind, especially after they have taken a position publicly. And that means that the chances of his admitting that he was wrong are IMHO vanishingly small.
I'm quite enjoying this debate, and if I need anymore help I will be sure to drop by.
Thank you so much, I think is probably the best online community I have seen.
By all means do report back from time to time; all the responses to your post are from people who would love to hear that their suggestions have helped you succeed in debate with a leftie.Also documents proving bias of the MSM would also be helpful.For myself I find that I enjoy writing suggestions for a student; a college student asked for a short definition of "conservative", and that was an interesting challenge for me. The only trouble is that I get absorbed in a problem like that, and take long enough at it that I risk being the last poster on the thread. I'm relieved to hear from you after the time I took composing reply #40. I think I was the only one to address your
request.
The ANG documents are clearly forgeries, and I was not in any way shape or form trying to imply the opposite. On the other hand, I think typewriters are neat and think people should know more about their cool features.
While I'm hardly an expert on typewriters, I used to be somewhat intrigued by them in my youth. Half-spacing ability seems pretty common on manual typewriters (not sure about electrics). I've not looked at how it's actually implemented, but there are many ways that it could be accomplished pretty easily.
For example, if there were a drum whose perimeter moved somewhere around six times as fast as the carriage (easily within the realm of plausible gearing), there could be three rows of pegs. The pegs in each row would be spaced as shown:
O O O O O -- "Normal" position
O O O O O O O O O -- "Typing" position
O O O O -- "Spacebar" position
A catch would move vertically in response to keypresses or the spacebar; the catch would normally be in the "Normal" position, but most keys would push it to the "Typing" position (allowing the carriage to advance only very slightly); releasing the key would allow the catch to return to "normal" position (allowing the carriage to advance to the next character). The space bar would push the catch further, to the "spacebar" position. This would allow the carriage to advance by just over half a character position, where it would remain until the spacebar and all other keys were released. There are many ways to do pretty much the same thing mechanically; the key observation is that many manual typewriters whose spacebar makes a "lub dub" sound allow it to be used in this fashion.
In the interests of keeping everyone under 30 in the know, we should point out that a "typewriter" is like a computer with a direct attached printer except with no screen, disk, mouse, cards or CPU.
;)
You were very clear.One characteristic of typewriters which our young whippersnappers such as future f22 pilot might not understand is their unforgiving nature. Their only information storage was the surface of the paper; if you made a mistake you had to correct it, and although by 1972 I think we had whiteout (white "paint" in a nailpolish-like bottle), I'm not sure that the white paper stuff that you use to erase a typed character with by striking it onto the erroneous character with that same key was available quite that early.
In any event, errors were a major nuisance rather than a wave of the hand as they are on a word processor program. Which was another reason why professionals (read, "college-educated men") disdained operation of a typewriter as work for secretaries (read, "high-school educated women"). That is very much the way things were back then.
A lot of typewriters, furthermore, could be used indefinitely without mains power or batteries, since the user could recharge their energy reserves by sliding a lever 6-8" to the right after typing each line of text. Those old typewriters also included a feature to vary the darkness of text based upon the strength with which a key was hit, although punctuation marks often seemed oversensitive. Were this technology available today, written communications could be much more expressive than is achievable with straight text.
I did my HS homework on a Royal (that I had unjam the typbar from time to time on).
And yes, the power supply was my fingers.
Did it have a lub-dub spacebar?
Yeah, I thunk so. But it was so many years ago -- it might have been a duba-luba spacebar.
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