cobysev

I mean, I am the source. This was my personal experience while serving in the military.

But if you want official reports to back up what I experienced, here’s you go:

Intelligence officials withheld sensitive information from Trump while he was in office because they feared the ‘damage’ he could do if he knew.

I was working in an Intelligence unit when Trump was president (not the one directly briefing him) and it’s all anyone talked about at the time. They had to be extremely careful what information they shared with him because he would just go and post details on his social media accounts.

My unit had to change a lot of their missions and coordination because Trump would expose our secrets online. It ruined a lot of ongoing missions we had planned, and we had to scrap and rebuild a lot of our programs after he blabbed about them.

Trump fires top US general in unprecedented Pentagon shakeup

This was more recent, after I retired. But he basically fired our top military leaders, then made his own suggestions for replacements, completing ignoring the official promotion system we have in place.

He didn’t want people with years of experience and exemplary service to lead our military, he just wants his own loyalists in charge so he can control the military. He nominated highly unqualified people for the positions, with the only seemingly common quality being that they were loyal to Trump.

He was also annoyed at how hard it was to replace key people and wanted to circumvent official processes so he can hire and fire people at will, like his old businesses.

I retired from the US military 3 years ago. Yes, they can refuse unlawful orders. If I was still serving, I’d be abusing the hell out of that regulation right now.

During Trump’s last presidency, our intelligence community actually held back a lot of details in his intelligence briefings because we knew he couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut. He has a top secret clearance, not because he could be trusted with it, but because it was a requirement for his job. And he also reversed our decision to withhold clearances from sketchy members of our government, so a lot of untrustworthy people also got access to our sensitive data, and thanks to that, we had a lot of compromised missions during his first tenure as president.

But we also had a majority Democrat government, which kept him in check. This time around, he’s attempting to replace everyone he can with his “yes men” so he gets no push-back. He’s even been trying to replace military generals with his own loyalists. If he can control the military, he can basically stage a coup overnight and no one will be able to stop him.

Things are getting really dangerous right now, so that regulation about refusing unlawful orders is very important, and I hope our current military members are willing to exercise it as needed.

SQL is the language. Its name is also an acronym, for “Structured Query Language.”

They’re both acronyms, so yes? You always write acronyms in upper case.

Structured Query Language (SQL)

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

Some exceptions to the rule exist, like “Database” is usually abbreviated as Db in acronyms. For instance, IMDb (Internet Movie Database).

Although considering database is a singular word, it makes sense to lower-case the middle letter of the word, as it wouldn’t be capitalized in the spelled-out word anyway.

EDIT: On a related note (and one that will really show my age), I always capitalize the i in “Internet.”

When I was a kid, and before the Internet was publicly accessible, we referred to a collection of internetworked computers as an “internet.”

Then the “World Wide Web” (WWW) became a big deal in the mid-'90s, which was the first publicly accessible internet of computers and servers. It was super primitive and took like 10 minutes just to load a small image on a mostly-text webpage. We referred to this new global internet as “The Internet.” This was the biggest and most ambitious attempt at building an interconnected series of computers, so we called it The Internet (capital “i”) to differentiate it from a regular internet.

Fast forward several decades… for so long, the Internet has been such a commonly used term to refer to the World Wide Web. It’s completely taken over the word; we don’t really refer to small computer networks as internets anymore. So there’s no point in differentiating between the two.

But I remember, and I still keep up the old habit of capitalizing when I’m referring to THE Internet, versus a smaller network of computers.

Personally, I prefer this comparison:

when I went to France I wanted the opportunity to practise it.

My wife’s biggest frustration in France was that she wanted to practice her French, but everyone picked up on her American accent and immediately switched to English. She rarely got more than a sentence out.

My experience being stationed in Germany with the US military, about 30 mins from the French border:

A coworker of mine complained about his visit to Paris because every single French person he tried to speak to either ignored him, turned their nose up at him, or was just rude to him. He only spoke English and they all seemed offended when he tried to get their attention in English.

My wife and I took several years of French in high school, and whereas neither of us could hold a proper conversation, we knew enough to ask directions, order from a menu, or request help.

Every time we started off a conversation in French, the French people would immediately switch to English and help us out. They were very kind to us.

We learned that if you make an effort to speak their language, most French people are very helpful. But if you just assume they’ll speak English, they’re likely to be offended and won’t help you out.

One time in Berlin, my wife tried to speak German to a guy at a tourist shop and he immediately switched into French. Apparently, my wife has a heavy French accent to her German. She was able to finish the conversation in French.

Reminds me of this article I read yesterday:

Adopt a Red State: How Democrats Can Expose Republican Cowards

Glad to see Tim Walz is taking this approach.

Ken Cheng is a satire account, poking fun at the ridiculous “business first, personal welfare second” bootlickers on LinkedIn.

The fact that people can’t tell if he’s satirizing or being serious is kind of a sad glimpse into our capitalist society today.

These kind of anime shows are targeted at the folks who tend to be big anime fans. It’s escapism, showing a world where even they can land the best girl in the school. It’s not meant to be realistic.