In the US? Democrats vs. Republicans.

According to the rest of the world, the US doesn’t have a left party. Democrats are right wing and Republicans are extremist right wing. The left is completely unrepresented in our government. Both major parties lean conservative (from a global perspective) and care more about helping major businesses and the rich elite than actually representing the people.

That’s why there’s a whole movement centered around “no war but class war.” The American people are not actually represented and are instead pitted against each other in this fake “red vs. blue” distraction so we don’t actually go after our political leaders, or weed out the source of the money behind the scenes that dictate their actions.

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.

Yes! The Two Towers novel ended with Frodo supposedly dead from Shelob, and Sam picking up the ring to finish the journey. It was almost halfway into Return of the King that we find out Frodo is still alive and Sam needs to rescue him!

That was such a great plot twist. I was kind of sad they didn’t follow that chain of events in the movies. The whole Shelob thing was resolved really quickly, about halfway into Return of the King.

After reading the books, I felt like the movies were rushed (yes, even the extended editions). You just didn’t get a sense for how long and arduous their journey was. It took Sam and Frodo a month just to get to Rivendell alone, and you truly felt like you were out hiking and camping with the hobbits for all that time.

In the movies, they just bump into friends and allies, spend a night at Bree (plus a couple nights out camping in the wild), run from the Nazgul, then they’re magically there at Rivendell. Doesn’t seem like it took more than a few days tops.

The whole journey to Mordor and back took a whole year. Imagine spending a whole year walking and camping across America and you might get a sense for how long it took them.

Honestly, The Lord of the Rings should’ve been a miniseries to properly flesh out the long journey. Even the extended editions cut lots of story and rushed the pacing to keep the story moving forward.

40-yr old male here, been retired since I was 38. (Collecting a military pension, plus 100% VA disability benefits) I’m usually awake until around 4-6 AM, then sleep until either noon or 1 PM. Unless I’m having a night of PTSD-induced insomnia, which strikes randomly. In which case, I might be awake until 10-11 AM, then crash for the rest of the day.

I’m a night owl and am at my most productive at night. Then I go to bed and usually don’t set an alarm so I can wake up naturally. After I wake, I might lie in bed for another hour or two, catching up on news or social media on my tablet. Then I’ll shower, grab some food, then plan out my day from there.

I’m drowning in hobbies and interests, and I have ADHD, which makes me hyperfocus on a dozen detailed tasks all at once. So there’s never a shortage of things to do each day. But I also don’t feel the need to be accomplished every day. Some days, you just need a day to rest and do nothing.

For some reason, this just sparked an ancient memory of the Geek Code, which was a sort of signature block you could append to your emails and online bios to show off how much of a geek you were in the geekiest fashion possible.

Goddamn I’m old.