Swagnarok

During President Obama's first term the CIA, the latest in a very long series of failures by an organization that is often lionized in pop culture, it has been revealed that the agency had scores of its agents compromised in places like Iran, China (where thirty agents were subsequently murdered by the regime), and North Korea. The breach started in Iran, which used fricking Google to track down covert CIA websites used for communications, and then they helped China do the same, and then began aggressively exposing agents in other countries as well.

You can read about it here:

The biggest event of the year that nobody's talking about.

In response the War in Donbass and the annexation of the Crimea, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has asked the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (the highest authority in Eastern Orthodoxy) for autocephalous status.

This request was granted. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is now recognized as being independent of the Moscow Patriarchate. In response, the Russian Orthodox Church has severed ties with Constantinople.

That is, Russia has excommunicated itself from the global Eastern Orthodox community (though it's possible that this situation could be resolved soon). There are two ways of looking at this:

1. This is a good thing for the West. Russia's just suffered a majority propaganda loss; the Eastern Orthodox populations of Georgia, Serbia, Belarus, Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, and so on might have in the past seen Russia as the protector of Orthodoxy. However, now that Russia is cut off from such, this might spur them to keep away from Russia and find new partners.

2. This is a bad thing for the West. Moscow is trying to assert its dominance over Constantinople and thus over all of Eastern Orthodoxy, something that it last tried with limited success from 1448-1589. Should he succeed, the gains for Putin would be massive.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh is, at the time of posting, testifying before the Senate. At the opening of such he issued a lengthy statement defending his reputation and repudiating the allegations levied by Mrs. Ford.

This statement can be read here:

Kavanaugh is extremely lucky in that he was able to provide extensive documentation of his day-to-day whereabouts in his high school years in the form of calendars, which served also as diaries. The calendars should be enough to prove that Kavanaugh was never at the party that is at the core of Mrs. Ford's accusation. He has been investigated by the FBI already on 6 different occasions, all of which were standard background checks. None turned up any dirt on the man Brett Kavanaugh.

I don't know how this is ultimately going to turn out. But I have a feeling that most Americans are skeptical of the allegations. In the comments section of a recent Yahoo article about Kavanaugh (this was yesterday), the comments were pro-Kavanaugh at least 10 to 1, even though normally the majority of commentators for this media outlet are rabidly anti-Trump.

So at this time I am *very cautiously* optimistic that justice will prevail and Mr. Kavanaugh will get his seat on the highest Court of this land that he so rightly deserves. Then again, only time will tell.

The vote on his confirmation is scheduled for tomorrow at 9:30 AM.

If you're not well-established on here socially, then PM me and provide me your name and a link to your Facebook profile (I may require that you accept a Facebook friend request from me). You'll be put on a "list", and if you stop posting for a long time then I'll check out your Facebook profile to see if you're still alive. If I observe by looking at your profile that you've died, then I will notify the DART community. If you stop posting but you appear to still be alive then from time to time I'll go back and check. Because I'm just some guy on the internet doing this, it may be the case that there's some delay in between when you die and when I find out about this and notify the DDO community. Also, you can be pretty much guaranteed no matter who you are that if your death occurs more than, say, 5-10 years from now then I won't bother to check for this, much less notify anyone.

If you've made virtually zero effort to participate here in any meaningful way (for example, your total count is 10 posts) then I'll be especially likely not to follow through on my obligations here towards you. But maybe. Who knows.

All such information disclosed to me in confidence will remain confident. If the Admin has a problem with this idea then he's free to just shut it down now and delete this thread. Otherwise, think of this as insurance of sorts that should you just suddenly die this fact won't go completely unnoticed by the DART community. I say "DART" community but this extends to whatever website this general bloc of people might one day migrate to, such as perhaps back to DDO or to some third party site.

I'm currently on what could be my last semester of college, provided that I don't fail or drop anything. If I fail a single class, I won't meet the requirements to graduate, and I'll have to take another full semester in Spring 2019.

If I'm not mistaken, I'm taking fewer hours this semester than ever before (12 a week). But as one class is the big capstone for history majors and another is apparently at the level of a law school course, that doesn't mean a whole lot. Of the remaining two, one is ridiculously easy, like freshman-level stuff.

And then there's the art class. Having to write case briefs and a 20 page senior thesis paper is quite annoying, but neither of these things have actually driven me to the point of rage as of yet. Art class, on the other hand, has.

I'm not lying or exaggerating: with the possible exception of one other guy in the class, I am the single worst student there. Everyone else just goes ahead and makes these amazing sketches of cow skulls (which is pretty much all we've drawn in the class so far) whereas I keep spewing out these sh*tty doodles of the same. I've done it over and over and over and over and over again, and I'm not getting a lick better, whereas everyone else apparently is. And apparently, it's even harder whenever you try it with a brush and ink, but for everyone else the change in tools just seems to raise the quality of what they're drawing.

Again, it I fail this class then I'll have to do another whole semester. But there doesn't seem to be anything I can do to keep from failing. Soon enough the teacher's inevitably going to lose his patience with my near-total lack of progress and then he's gonna start marking me up, until finally I'm gonna get awarded an F. It's not as though I'm not trying, but...

Alright, I never bothered to do this in the past, and I don't know how well this little experiment will work out.

There is not a shred of doubt in my mind that the press works tirelessly to help the Democratic Party win elections by painting President Trump, the GOP, and conservatives in the most negative light humanly possible. In this thread, I will attempt to provide proof of this, and perhaps convince a few people in the process.

They're small, but they can be hitched to a truck and moved anywhere. The owner of the trailer doesn't have to own the land that the trailer's on. Instead, he/she can just opt to pay rent. The price of the mobile home itself would be about 1/4th the same price of a conventional (and, to be fair, considerably larger) home. According to one source, a mobile home manufactured c. 2014 would have an average lifespan of about 30-55 years, and I will not discount the possibility of construction design improvements in coming decades increasing this figure somewhat. In any case, a person who bought their moved out and bought a mobile home of their own at 18 would find that he'd likely only have to purchase and move into a new house once more in the span of his life, barring damage incurred from close proximity to natural disasters and whatnot.

It would serve to make housing significantly more affordable in America if mobile homes became more popular, and, perhaps equally importantly, it'd allow for greater flexibility in the jobs market: in today's climate, many Americans are reluctant to move into a new house because they're not sure they'll be able to sell the old one, which would straddle them with extreme debt. So they may turn down more lucrative job opportunities elsewhere in the state/country. If all you needed was a moving truck and a new trailer park somewhere, I suspect we'd have a much more dynamic economy.

A big barrier to this is the sordid reputation associated with trailer parks: they're thought of as low-income housing units, where you'd be surrounded by distasteful and even dangerous neighbors. If the image of trailer parks could be rehabilitated so that it was a socially acceptable option for the middle class, that'd solve the problem I think. Also, the government could work with manufacturers of homes to design a model of more "serious" mobile homes which are better insulated, ventilated, and energy-efficient.

Thoughts?