Darth Vader, “I’m altering the deal. Pray that I don’t alter it any further.”

I’m a leftist GenX whose served aboard 3 nuclear submarines, over a 20 year career. Ive slept between ballistic nuclear missiles, on top of torpedoes, mines, and tomahawk missiles early in my career, but later, switched to a standard bed (rack) on the boats…can I reflect and make a fuss?

I switched to Linux after my experience with Windows Millennium Edition. Many people have since referred to me as some sort of programming genius and hacker…I don’t know crap about any of that. I’ve simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I’ve had trouble. Using the mainstream distributions (I’m guessing) has kept me from having much trouble.

I think my kids may benefit, as my wife only uses Mac, I have 2 Ubuntus and a Mint, and the kids use Chromebooks at school. We have 2 iPad and a Galaxy tab in the house. 1 kid has an Android phone and the other an iPhone. My wife and I both have flagship Android phones.

Sometimes it’s fun to watch them debate over which systems they prefer, depending on the school projects they work on.

Or grandma, the widowed, retired elementary school teacher, whose deceased husband owned a neighborhood flower shop.

Him ruining the lives of his racist, nazi base is our best hope…they don’t do facts, data, common sense, or believe their eyes over the voices of the talking heads on their favorite news networks.

You make great points, but some of the dehumanizing advantages used in the Middle East would me much less affective here…Canadians are just north of us, and not on the other side of the world. Their customs, traditions, religions, and holidays are similar to ours, and they look just like us. I’d bet that a good number of Americans have Canadian relatives. I live in VA, and my neighbors wife has dual US/Canadian citizenship, as she’s originally from Canada.

I’m originally from Erie, PA - going up to Niagara Falls was a regular day trip we’d do several times per year. Funny enough, I’ve never been to the American side of the falls. I’ve seen it grow from a destination where you could simply parallel park your car next to the railing looking over the falls, to the tourist trap destination it is today.

The good thing about the education system is that no matter how they try to defend and dumb it down, our people still have to compete with the global, population. We can’t import all of our mental talent. Schoolmaster the only place where people gain an education. Kids are smart, resilient, and can often see past the ill-will of adults, no matter how many toys and candies they have.

The great thing about trump may be that he’s so fucking terrible, that he may end up pushing people (voters) to make better, more sensible decisions at the voting booth, more than any other politician possibly can. What he’s doing, is not only about values, ideas, and hate anymore. He’s actually affecting the bank accounts and livelihood of the people who voted for him, and nothing about any of his policies will result in them not being damaged in at least some way. He is so fucking terrible that he may actually be the catalyst to snap the US out of this “conservative populist march towards fascism.”

I just see a lot of our military not being into invading Canada. There is a lot of gray space between aggressively applying 100% to a mission and outright desertion. As a person who’s spent a career in the military - I don’t really know about the infantry-based guys, but the people I served with are not simple order-following automatons - regardless of oathes to follow orders…doing the wrong thing is doing the wrong thing.

Maybe I’m out to lunch, but I’d bet there would suddenly be a lot of broken equipment, and a lot of injured personnel, along with a demand that the children of our political leadership, be among the first of the “cannon-fodder” and “bullet-cushions” to cross into “enemy” territory. I’d also bet that you could say goodbye to our all-volunteer military recruitment numbers. Logistics would likely be another nightmare, as our civilian population would likely have to be violently forced to allow the military use of the roads to transport themselves north. Unlike our previous military campaigns and wars, where Allied ports were made available to mass our troops and supplies, there would be no friendly ports outside our own borders.

I’m not saying it couldn’t be done - our military is larger than the next 13 largest militaries combined, after all. I’m suggesting that between the troubles of invasions in themselves, we’d also be dealing with near civil war conditions within our own borders, massive resignations of key people, desertions & AWOLs, protests and civil disobedience, equipment sabotage, and voluntary military ascession falling off a cliff.

There are plenty of military members who would absolutely, with full faith and dedication, follow any order given to them. I’m sure that there are at least some members of our military who (for some reason) would love to invade Canada. But between the domestic troubles, the half-hearted effort of those who would appear to be participating, and the pain of going to war in the first place. Nah, trump is just sabre rattling…it won’t happen.

There were about 6 of us…you know, 5 making fun of me. We were offroading on trails in a wooded/forested area versus open mud/sand fields. As I was choosing directions on which trails to take, I used signals as was habit.

My first deployment in a fast-attack submarine, in the fall of 1991. We were working under British operational control, and they ordered us to cruise surfaced, in the North Sea. I was standing watch as a lookout, with another lookout and the Officer of the Deck (OOD), in the sail superstructure of the boat. We were wearing body harnesses and lanyards, clipped into the superstructure - normal procedure.

I was a sailor aboard USS SUNFISH (SSN549), a Sturgeon Class boat, where the sail superstructure was 25 feet tall. We were in 48 foot seas.

The 3 of us on watch that night were washed overboard more than 10 times each. Often all 3 of us at the same time… flung overboard, hanging by our lanyards, trying to roll around and grab onto the ladder rungs, or one another, to get back into the bridge pooka. None of us broke any bones or lost any teeth, but we were pretty battered and bruised by the end of it.

That was the first time I got to see the entire boat out of the water… at the top of the wave, I could see the stem planes, stabilizers, the end of the towed-array housing, and the propeller. At the bottom of each trough, we’d see just a tiny hole of sky, through the water, as it all crashed down upon us, and we all hold on, trying to stay inside the superstructure.

We pulled into the Navy Base at Rosyth Scotland the next afternoon. The windshield, booked in for surface operations, was completely missing, as well a the port running light. We sustained damage to our observation periscope and main communications antenna as well.

The experience was both scary and exhilarating.

Predictability is so much more important than being nice. Just follow the rules.

I’ve been made fun of, signaling while offroading.

I’ve heard that he’s 50/50 if the words are written with crayon.

The way of the future…VCRs went away. DVDRs went away, replaced with DVRs and membership streaming, where you can “buy” a movie on Amazon Prime, but if they lose the rights to the movie, so do you - oh well. Your Tesla will brick, if Elon gets mad at you, and your video games will stop working if “the man” unplugs the server. Oh, and dont get caught pulling out your old dusty VCR to record the Super Bowl to watch later…thats a copyright violation. The oligarchs want to make sure the plebes eventually own nothing. If the masters can take it all away, the peasants will do what they’re told, be quiet about it, and smile when in sight of the masters.

“We have many values, but the most valuable value to us is profit, far and away. As a business pursuing profit above all else, supporting this administration, and always being ready and willing to bootlick, anywhere, anytime, at a moments notice, was thought to be our best shot at the highest profitability possible for our members. Unfortunately, like most of the supporters of trump, his administration, and his best-picked people, we’re left embarrassed, and holding a (figurative) bag of shit, with nothing to show for it except for smelly hands. Sorry. Can we get a do-over?”

What! I’ve been waiting for my “trickle-down” check to come in the mail since 1990. I’m starting to think it’s never going to come. If it takes too much longer, I may have to reevaluate my faith in trickle-down economics. 🙄

Volleyball tournaments in Philadelphia, PA. My daughter plays for the 757 traveling team out of Virginia Beach, VA. So, crowds, uncomfortable chairs/seating, noise, cheering, eating out, hotel rooms, then the Sunday escape from Philly.

LOL! Other than in here and in person, I keep my political views to myself. I can’t believe the number of business people with political stickers on their trucks.

I have a Panasonic Toughbook CF-30 with Ubuntu on it. IIRC, it’s 18, and the specs don’t support upgrading it anymore with Ubuntu. I was thinking of going to Mint, but I haven’t really kept up with the various available Linux flavors, for the last few years. 2 of the 3 USBports have stopped working, but that’s a $30 part replacement. The wifi see,s really slow as well, but I’m not sure whether that’s a hardware or software issue.

I’ve owned a franchise business, which is HQ’d in Canada for 14 years now, and it’s been a great experience, in no small part, due to the great colleagues up there. There have been annual seminars/conferences the entire time, held in various locations throughout the US and Canada, so nobody has to travel excessively far. I’ve enjoyed the break of a solitary road trip for several of them. This year it’s only up in Canada or via Zoom. I was actually planning on visiting some friends in Western VA, then seeing some family in PA, then more family in SD - and to drop off some (too big/expensive to ship) stuff, followed by a visit to some family in ND, then finally to the conference in Calgary.

Based on how troublesome things have gotten with the “47 shades of orange” guy, I guess it’ll be better to just stay home, and certainly cheaper. The only thing worse than having to live under the shadow of a talking Orange Julius, would be to become the victim of a crime in Canada due to my VA tags (probably not that likely), or to have difficulty returning to the US.

I’d sure love to see Canada and the UK simply shut X down within their borders. There were some grumbling awhilemago, in the UK Parliament of naming Musk as an extremist, based on his ability to not only buy influence, but his ability through X to promote or censor speech as he likes, influencing elections, or even overthrowing governments.