cobysev

American here, currently traveling through the (boring) state of Nebraska.

I just checked Google Maps from my Android tablet app. It shows Lake America for me:

[…] their support for Trump.

That was one guy (their CEO) expressing his personal support for one thing Trump did. Proton released a statement claiming that their company as a whole does not support any political stance or affiliation.

Proton haters (and anti-privacy groups) blew it up into a whole ordeal to try and discredit Proton as a service. But it was literally just one dude being an out-of-touch idiot on his own personal account.

I’m not saying Proton is perfect, but it’s one of the better privacy services out there today, so of course governments, politicians, and anti-privacy organizations are looking to tear them down. They don’t want true privacy; they need the illusion of privacy, while maintaining their back doors into everyone’s business.

A little over a decade ago, I was stationed at a base in the US, working on a huge IT helpdesk that catered to bases across an entire region of the world. We had two TVs in the room, one on each side wall. They were always muted with subtitles, but one was always on Fox News and the other was always on CNN.

It was interesting seeing major news reporting from both sides of the aisle (back when CNN was very left-leaning). We shared our helpdesk with a civilian IT company and they would regularly unmute the Fox News side after-hours. So during nightshift, we unfortunately got a bit more exposure to right-wing media.

The front wall of the room had a bunch of large monitors with live network maps and status charts for all our bases. At night, I would connect to one of those large monitors and stream movies to it. It usually distracted my shift away from the news.

In my military service, we saw Republicans praise us publicly, but then turn around and cut all our benefits and funding behind the scenes. The only reason military members still have any benefits are because of Democrats blocking Republicans. Otherwise, we’d be borderline slaves; nothing but warm bodies for the government to throw at our enemies. (If you serve in the Army or Marines, you’re practically that already)

My uncle retired from the US Air Force in the mid-'90s. Because he retired, he was automatically given free medical and dental for the rest of his life. He never earned any disability rating from the VA, but they’re covering him completely. His civilian spouse also got free medical and dental for life, just for being married to him.

I retired in 2022 from the US Air Force. They told me I would only get medical coverage for any disabilities the VA approved a claim on. Everything else, I’d have to get my own separate civilian medical insurance to cover. My wife had to serve herself and earn her own disability ratings to get any medical coverage. That retirement benefit has been extremely neutered in the past couple decades, thanks to Republicans trying to end VA coverage for veterans.

I was serving in the US military the first time Trump got elected. It was an awful time for us military folks. He tried (and failed) to ban trans people from serving during that term. This was after we had announced free trans surgery for service members, so a bunch of people had already outed themselves.

I remember when he almost started WWIII by getting into a fight with Kim Jong Un online. He decided he was gonna fly to North Korea and give him a piece of his mind.

NO ONE goes to North Korea. No sitting president has ever gone there. They’re one of the most dangerous and isolated countries in the world. The citizens live in poverty because the government controls who gets to eat. Most citizens are members of their military, because military members and their families get extra rations. They mostly survive on imports from China, because their land isn’t suited to grow enough food for their own population.

Regardless, they’re isolated from the rest of the world, so all they know is whatever their state media tells them, and they’re heavily brainwashed. They’re taught that the rest of the world is suffering worse than they are and that they should be grateful to live in one of the most advanced civilizations on the planet. Keep in mind, they live like paupers from the 1950s.

They’re also taught that the Kim family are essentially immortal gods who descended from the mountains to help them. Yes, Kim Il Sung, their original leader, is still the “Supreme Leader” of North Korea. When he died, the population was informed that he’s just moved to a higher plane of existence so he can better serve the nation. His son Kim Jong Il took over his seat on the mortal plane, and when he passed away, it was the same story. Now his son, Kim Jong Un is the current mortal leader, and getting into a spat with Trump.

Trump refused to listen to his aides and went to North Korea anyway. ‘Good,’ we thought. 'He won’t be our problem for much longer.’ But unfortunately, something we didn’t expect happened. They became best friends.

Trump returned home raving about how incredible of a guy Kim Jong Un was and how efficiently he ran his country. He immediately started comparing the US to that dictatorship and asking for changes to make things like North Korea.

Fortunately for us, our government at the time was a majority Democrat government, so checks and balances stopped Trump from doing a lot of awful things. He bitched and moaned all the time, but he rarely got his way. So his first term was pretty uneventful.

Then he lost the election to Biden and refused to quit. He spouted all that nonsense about “stolen elections” and swore to run again. I was coming up on retirement eligibility and decided to take that option. I retired in the middle of the Biden administration.

And I’m so glad I did. I thankfully never had to exercise my refusal to obey orders during my service, but I’d definitely take advantage of that right during this current administration if I was still serving. A lot of us weren’t happy with Trump, and I still have buddies in the service who feel trapped and can’t get out of their enlistment without breaking laws and going to jail. It’s a dark time, but there are still plenty of allies in the military and I’m glad to see public recognition of that starting to show.

Alt + 0151 (on the num pad)

Or just press Ctrl + Alt + -