Editor’s Foreword:
Anything in italics is me; anything in plain boldface is from my correspondents.
BMD
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Someone posted a link to your post about Lebedeff on the Orthodox Forum and Whiteford went batshit crazy!
So fucking what. Whiteford’s a known quantity. He doesn’t know when to shut up. You just let some things pass. All it’ll do is to draw attention to the post. I don’t attack his posts… I don’t want to draw attention to him. He’s being used… and the sad thing is he doesn’t know it. He’s Lebedeff’s stalking horse in this instance. He’s being “true to character”… in such a case, you laugh, pour yourself a cold Shiner Bock, accompany it with some True Texas Hot Guts (good eats in anyone’s book), and SMILE. That TRULY riles ’em.
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A Friend sent me this:
Paul Ryan, the architect of the current US Republican budget plan, stated in 2005, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it’d be Ayn Rand”. Ayn Rand believed that self-sacrificing altruism is evil, and wrote a 1964 book entitled The Virtue of Selfishness. She supported abortion for the normal reasons, in line with her explicit admiration for selfishness. She saw a need to protect the financially successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed to “looters and moochers”. Therefore, she presented tax cuts for the rich accompanied by severe cuts to social programmes for the “losers” as the moral thing to do. This is the reason the 10 April 2011 issue of Newsweek referred to Ryan’s budget and his reliance on Rand as a “War on the Weak”.
This deserves a post of its own, and it shall get it. The subtitle of the linked article says it all, “How the GOP came to view the poor as parasites… and the rich as our rightful rulers”. For now, I’ll simply say that Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, William F Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Bob Dole (the Last True Republican) didn’t think so. Rush Limbaugh and George H W Bush have NOTHING in common… the former was a hair-splitting coward who refused to serve during the Vietnam War (and, no doubt, used his family’s influence to further his aim)… the latter was a war hero who got shot at (and was shot down in enemy action, despite being from one of the most influential families in the USA).
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(In reply to a correspondent on Krindatch’s latest survey on American Orthodoxy):
The figures are crank… they’re fewer than his earlier survey… the EP paid for this… it laid down the criteria. Krindatch laughed, took their money, and gave them what they wanted. This is “self-reportage”… his earlier study was based on church newspaper circulation and other such objective data. In short, as Mark Twain put it, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics”. Always find out who commissioned a study. That gives you a clue to its objectivity. It’s a pretty package, though, isn’t it? Have a tall cold one and laugh… that’s what you do. The world is being its usual crook self.
Here’s a link to the above-mentioned study. It DOES have a pretty package, it make you think that’s it on the “up and square”… whoever thought this “whopper” up earned their pay packet (and deserved an all-inclusive holiday in Tinos). Beware, it’s all “self-reportage” with no corroborating second/third sources (and there are fewer Orthodox counted in this study as compared with Professor Krindatch’s last study… but an INCREASE in the GOAA). DO be certain to subtract the “Oriental Orthodox” included in the survey… they’re not in communion with us; they’re NOT part of the fishpond (that’s said in all kindness and objectivity). Caveat lector:
http://www.hartfordinstitute.org/research/AtlasAmericanOrthodoxChurchesSample.pdf
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I just talked to people who told me that the crowd was poor… they had vendors selling food and it looked like a carnival. Why didn’t I go today? I guess it was the same for many others… if I saw Herman walking around and having his hand kissed, I’d go crazy! He took the joy I had of going here on this day away from me. How many great memories of going there after church on Sunday, seeing baba and dido, hearing baba’s stories all night, and getting up early to go to St Tikhon’s… seeing friends from camp… all of this was destroyed by Herman. How I wish I could tell people how I feel…
I removed details from the above to hide my correspondent’s identity… THIS is the true face of the OCA… is this why oca.org refused to cover the Memorial Day Pilgrimage at St Tikhon Monastery?
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We’re in the worst stretch now, as a Church. That is, the proverbial “calm before the storm”… the First Families are emboldened… JP thinks that he’s weathered it all. Sometimes, I think that the ignorant have it “easier”… they don’t see what’s coming. Yet, I wouldn’t trade “knowledge” for anything.
Funny how JP’s weasels think he is against homosexuality… are they just stupid, or are they clueless?
They’re incorrigibly ignorant. They believe the patter that SVS puts out. They tell others, “You can’t do anything… this is the way that it’s always been”… yet, they haven’t been around long enough to be out of nappies, yet. Their crash will be worse than that the church is going to have. Most of them will leave us…
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“I think that I’m NOT alone… the Tea Party is dead, save for hardcore nutters and extremists. Shall they drag down the GOP in their death throes? Only time will tell us…”
I still worry about the remaining hard-core nutters. They seem to be directing the “don’t raise the debt ceiling” drive that can lead to financial chaos. Someone still needs to drive a stake through their heart…
The GOP has to return to the days of TR, Nixon, Ike, Ford, Javits, Rocky, Barry, Bill Buckley, and Bush Sr… it must repudiate the teabaggers, neocons, and Reaganites. Otherwise… it dies. Shall it? The extremists would call everyone I named a RINO… sad, isn’t it? The Democrats are in just as bad shape… they need to return to FDR, LBJ, and Sam Nunn… but shall they? BOTH parties have betrayed Americans… again… SAD.
It’s sad. I grew up as a “Rockefeller Republican”. Still am, but I feel awfully lonely as I watch these new clowns driving the GOP into oblivion.
The New Republicans are ready to kamikaze dive on the debt ceiling… they feel that if they do that, they’ll not only sink the “socialist” government, it’ll deliver the 2012 election to them. Don’t forget… Richard M Nixon proposed a national guaranteed income… and Southern Democrats (who later became New Republicans) fought him ferociously. Both parties are heading for the abyss… BOTH. God DO help us…
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We’re meant to be ICONS, mirrors to heaven. Forgive them God, for they know not… I once met a woman, whose church is “Bible believing”, their only minister is a man who “gets the spirit”, who preaches what God tells him to. A Jim Jones type of ministry.
This is something that I wish that I wrote… as I wrote in the past, “Why do other folks get all the good ideas? The only thing that I do is flesh them out… damn!” My friends ARE my most precious possession…
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Funny money, crank ideology, and crook politics all march together. The oligarchs LOVE funny money… it allowed them to wage two wars and CUT TAXES (on themselves, of course). They partied hearty; now, they’re demanding that WE pay the cost, and that we suffer the hangover. What’s wrong with this picture?
Terminology counts for a lot, so, words are constantly being twisted, moulded, thawed, and refrozen so that you can scarcely recognise them in their new “shape”… perhaps, more so in politics than anywhere, although religion is close behind.
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End the wars… close the foreign bases… end corporate welfare… that’d do it. That’d leave the US with bases in Guam, Hawaii, and the Pacific Trust territories in the Pacific… and US forces could use existing allied bases in the UK (and its colonies), Canada, Australia, and NZ. That would meet DEFENCE needs… it’d give us a forward Westpac position, and it’d give us the ability to close the GIUK gap.
There… that’s innovative thinking. In any case, the forces are war-weary… there’s been ten straight years of war without break… the bubbas are near their breaking point. Besides that, the ABM programme has to go… it’s never worked in 30 years… untold billions have gone down this rat-hole. The USA is in the position of the post-Soviet states… it must cut defence spending drastically or sink its economy.
As for private enterprise… we have to review high-level compensation. The US has the highest gap between CEO and janitor in the world. BOTH the Democratic Party and the GOP are sinking… no one has any confidence in either one. As for me, I find Rush Limboob and Hilary Clinton equally reprehensible… neither one cares a whit about you or me.
Not pretty, is it? As for the present, go out and enjoy this weekend… we ordinary folk are going to bear the brunt of it (as always), so, the sane thing to do is to grab some R&R when we can. Have a tall cold one…
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(Commentary on the Demjanjuk verdict):
Justice is justice, isn’t it? Legally, it was farcical. He did NOTHING legally culpable. THIS is what both the classical left and right eat up, though… it’s why people have given up on both the Repblicants and the Democants. Poor old bastard… why can’t they leave him alone?
Prove to me that John Demjanjuk made ANY policy decision regarding the Holocaust, and I’ll change my tune. Bluntly put, John Demjanjuk was a spear-dragger who took orders; he wasn’t even a lowly section leader. A small unrepresentative set of loudmouth Jews make much noise… but they’re small in number. Most Jewish people are decent sorts; they don’t have anything to do with such nasty goings-on. Beware the anti-Semites who’re trying to make hay out of this… they’re wrong, too.
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Editor:
I’m blessed… my correspondents are my lifeblood, literally. Without you, I wouldn’t have the vital spark to touch off this idea or the other. Thank you… remember, the gate isn’t locked… don’t be a stranger.
BMD
Voices from Russia 
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