5 August 2011. After Eight Days, the OCA Main Website and Stokoe Have Posted NOTHING on l’Affaire Wood…

“If not me, and you… then, who?” If we want to salvage the legacy of Leonty Turkevich and Antony Bartoshevich… we’re going to have to fight the konvertsy and First Families for it. It won’t be easy… are you with me?

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Last Thursday, on 28 July 2011, oca.org posted a spare notice saying that Dickie Wood was out as OCA Representative to the MP, with no detail given whatsoever. It’s now eight days since that barebones announcement, and the OCA has released… NO FURHTER INFORMATION. NOTHING AT ALL. Paffhausen promised that the secrecy of Herman Swaiko was at an end… indeed, Herman’s sort of reluctant stonewalling is over… JP replaced it with a defiant, juvenile, and petulant refusal to answer any questions at all. There’s been NOTHING official released on what the charges against Dickie are, on his whereabouts (is he still in the RF… is he in the USA… or, is he somewhere else?), or on his actual health. I’d tell “Parishioner” at “OCA Pravda” that they’re chock fulla beans. They’re defending an absolutistic, unruly, and tantrum-throwing adolescent-minded cretin… then, again, “Parishioner” is, probably, one of those blustering Episkie wannabes who has the goddamned gall to lecture their betters (I fought the good fight in the ‘90s against the Ustinovshchyna; I lost, but I’m not ashamed that I fought, even though I was defeated). There are many of us who bear scars that prove our loyalty… we’re not narcissistic snot-nosed kids who run away.

Paffhausen has had a full week to give his version of events. He’s refused… let that sink in, kids. He REFUSED to tell you ANYTHING. At the same time, he’s had his surrogates launch simultaneous attacks on Mark Stokoe and Lyonyo Kishkovsky. Indeed, I wonder where Moriak stands in all of this… is he going to do his duty as a bishop, uphold Vladyki Job’s oikonomia, and protect Mark from the mob? Or, is he going to punk out, prove himself a craven coward, and throw Mark to the lions? If it’s the latter, he’ll prove himself a foe of both God and man. That’s why you can’t trust any of the SVS crowd… they’re supporting El Gordo in this (at least, for now)… that means that you must be very sceptical about such people as Nina Dimas, Peter Bouteneff, Paul Meyendorff, John and Kate Behr, or Chad Hatfield (remember how he took an honorary degree from Nashotah House with Fathausen’s blessing?), they’re snakes who’ll switch sides in an instant… and never, ever, forget that all of them support the Iliff cover-up and want to bury the truth of the matter concerning it (don’t forget, Eric’s “suicide” led to the dropping of the lawsuit against SVS… ask yourself, “Cui bono?”… connect the dots).

You know what to do… send them NO MONEY. If you do, you’re a fool. In a related vein, I’ve heard people say many good things regarding Mel Pleska, but he’s been silent concerning this latest contretemps. I’d say, “Vladyki, where do you stand? If you support Fathausen, you’re my enemy, and the opponent of everything Christian… I say that to your face. I say that signing my own name… I’m not a gibbering and nasty-minded coward like the ‘OCA Truth’ crowd. Where do you stand, sir? Either you speak up about this untoward secrecy, or you reveal yourself as nothing but another self-serving, pietistic, and hypocritical cleric. As a bishop, you’ve the responsibility to “speak with the voice of the crane”… if you don’t, you forfeit all rights to any ‘respect’ or ‘honour’, and, again, I say that to your face. Only a friend would speak to you like this, sir… but I’ve no illusions… we’ll find out your true colours, won’t we? Act… or take the consequence, sir”.

If you’re not enraged at Fathausen’s contumacious secrecy, at his exercise of Star Chamber–style “justice”… I stand against you… so do many others. The true face of the konvertsy crowd is coming out… it’s ugly, isn’t it? They were vindictive, ruthless, and pushy oddballs in the PECUSA/TEC, so, why should we be surprised that they’re the same amongst us?

We have a Church to fight for… IN THE NAME OF LIFE!

Barbara-Marie Drezhlo

Friday 5 August 2011

Albany NY

Editor’s Update:

A friend sent me this:

“Parishioner” at “OCA Truth” is Jesse Cone from St Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas TX … he bloviates (your word) about JP and homosexuality, but says nothing about gay clergy like Edwin Norris at St Seraphim… an ex-Episcopalian… one of those converts who has to tell everybody how to be Orthodox. Someone told me not to be surprised if Dickie doesn’t make it out of hospital… wouldn’t that be something!

The pot calls the kettle black, eh… oh, well, what else did you expect?

BMD

Editor’s Further Update:

Another communication came in, kids:

Jesse Cone’s close to Rod Dreher, who’s another convert who loves to tell us how to be Orthodox and who’s bought the JP line full-throttle… he’s part of Fester’s crowd, and started OCA Truth, a real worm.

Rod Dreher… oh, my! I wish that Mark Shea and Agent 99 see this and make Dreher’s day “hot” for him! After all, Dreher lectured RCs on the failings of the Catholic bishops… now, one sees that Dreher SMILES at JP’s fagorama! Our fallen world’s certainly NOT boring…

BMD

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5 August 2011. Good Sense from England on the Teabagger Fanatics

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Editor’s Foreword:

We’ve reached the point where one has to take much in the censored American media with a good deal of scepticism. It’s “self-censorship” to be sure, but it means that the Corporate Media (both “Left” and “Right”) air only the news that they think is useful to the present political duopoly. Here’s something from England that should make you think. Ponder this… the Teabaggers want to dismantle all governmental social welfare programmes… to preserve the lowest tax-rates in the developed world on the oligarchs and corporations. I stand against that… I state openly that all those who support the Tea Party’s policies are servants of Anti-Christ; they fly the black banner of Nihilism (“Mammon is our God, and Ayn Rand is His Prophet!”). I don’t care how much they bleat about “Jayzuss”… that only deepens their godless imposture… it mitigates their repulsive self-centred rapacious greed not one little bit. We Orthodox should attend to the antics of the former Episkies… they’re the most pre-eminent advocates of such Satanic cruelty and rot amongst us. Note well that the “OCA Truth” trolls refuse to sign their proper names… “Parishioner” should sign their real name. I do… they don’t… that tells you who’s credible and who’s not, doesn’t it?

BMD

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The Wilful Ignorance That’s Dragged the US to the Brink

The Tea Party version of the American Revolution isn’t just fundamentalist. It’s also Disneyfied, sentimentalised, and whitewashed…

Here’s a monumental historical irony… a moment in the origins of the United States that every American schoolchild learns to view with pride, the Boston Tea Party, has now become a symbol of our (inter)national shame. In one sense, it’s difficult to know what to say in response to the utter irrationality of the Tea Party’s self-destructive decision to sabotage the American political process… and, thus, its own country’s economy, and the global economy. Last week, whilst the US government was locked in stalemate and risked defaulting on its national debt for the first time in its history (and, thus, also defying the Constitution that Tea Partiers supposedly hold sacred, which declares in the 14th Amendment that it’s illegal for Congress to default), Michele Bachmann instructed her followers not to listen to those who attempted to “scare” them with untruths that the US would default if it didn’t raise the debt ceiling. Which, of course, that’s precisely what it would’ve done. However, the Tea Party’s never let facts get in the way of its belief system, and, now, that belief system is genuinely threatening the wellbeing of the nation they claim to love.

Mottos are supposed to express a philosophy, insofar as the Tea Party can be said to have anything so exalted as a philosophy, their motto’s quite telling. They’re one of the most inaccurately named movements in American political history, but that inaccuracy is itself emblematic of the party’s adamantine ignorance. Any American schoolchild can tell you the motto of the historical Boston Tea Party from which they take their name and, they mistakenly believe, their inspiration, “No taxation without representation”. Impatient with those extra two words, evidently, the Tea Party has truncated this proposition to something simpler, “No taxation”. Never mind that the US has one of the lowest levels of taxation in the developed world, matched only by Mexico and Chile (are these the nations the Tea Party would like to emulate?). Never mind that the nation’s actual Founding Fathers were perfectly prepared to pay taxes… they just thought those taxes should purchase them a democratic voice in their own government.

The motto that came out of the Constitutional Convention was not, “In God We Trust”, it was E Pluribus Unum, ”Out of many, one”. The phrase “In God We Trust” emerged from the American Civil War, but it wasn’t put on US currency until the Cold War, in 1955. The following year, the same year he signed the Civil Rights bill into law, Eisenhower made it the nation’s motto. In other words, “In God We Trust” is an act of revisionist history and retrospective religiosity, reinserting religion into our national history. Nevertheless, the attempt to create one from many has led to Civil War more than once (the American Revolution was a civil war), and parts of the South regularly seceding (the South and other states threatened to walk out of the Constitutional Congress, did secede in the 1860s, and revolted again in 1948, with the so-called “Dixiecrats”). Texas was forever threatening to secede. The Tea Party could secede with my blessing… E Pluribus Unum is clearly not a motto that they’re prepared to embrace… despite their supposed reverence for the Founding Fathers and the American Constitution.

Anyone who followed last year’s midterms and knew anything about American history already realised this. Tea Party candidates kept invoking semi-mythical figures such as Paul Revere, who wasn’t a Founding Father at all… in fact, most of Revere’s supposed story was a legend written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1860 to rouse popular sentiment on behalf of the Union cause in the Civil War… in other words, to maintain the spirit of E Pluribus Unum and fight against divisive polarisation. Tea Partiers love mentioning Thomas Paine because they think they share his Common Sense (otherwise known as a sense held in common), but they haven’t bothered to read it, and are clearly unfamiliar with essays such as “Public Good”, in which Paine wrote that, especially whilst at war (as America currently is, of course), “To have a clear idea of taxation is necessary to every country, and the more funds we can discover and organise, the less will be the hope of the enemy”.

As Harvard historian Jill Lepore argued last year in her brilliant The Whites of their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History, none of the people voting for the Tea Party candidates knows any of this because they haven’t studied American history since grade school, when all American schoolchildren learn a simplified cartoon version of the American Revolution (which we would never call the “War of Independence”). It’s a Sesame Street version of the American constitution and politics, a myth that is being treated as the alpha and omega of our political and legal reality. This is one reason why it has a quasi-religious aspect… it’s a myth of genesis; it’s a creation myth about America that’s just as simple as the idea that God created man and woman… the Founding Fathers created America. The Tea Party version of the American Revolution isn’t just fundamentalist. It’s also Disneyfied, sentimentalised, and whitewashed. It rests on a naïve, solipsistic, and exceptionalist faith that for America it will all work out in the end, because America is “the greatest nation in the world”. They take solace in tautology… America is great… this they know… because Fox News tells them so.

Their goal, as others have said, is to roll back the clock a century and more. In 1892, when the robber baron and corrupt financier Jay Gould died, Mark Twain wrote a scathing epitaph, Gould, he said, “reversed the commercial morals of the United States. He had put a blight upon them from which they have never recovered, and from which they will not recover for as much as a century to come. Jay Gould was the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country”. It’s been a century and we’ve surely not recovered, but we’ve managed to create an even mightier disaster. It remains to be seen whether we’ll recover, but it’s long past time to stop making declarations of independence. We need to get back to work forming a more perfect union… or any union at all.

2 August 2011

Sarah Churchwell

Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia

The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/sarah-churchwell-the-wilful-ignorance-that-has-dragged-the-us-to-the-brink-2330179.html

5 August 2011. Sad to Say, One of My Contacts Handed Out My E-Mail Address to a Third Party… That Ain’t Kosher!

I got an e-mail out of the blue from one of the Orthodox Forum regulars. However, I hadn’t given them my e-mail address, nor did I give permission for anyone to pass out my e-mail address to this third party. I find that disrespect of the highest sort… its crude and low. Here’s what I wrote to the party concerned (they claimed that “a friend” had sent on my e-mail address to them):

Who was your “friend?” I NEVER hand out e-mail addresses to third parties… your e-mail address is your personal property… I RAPE you if I give it out. It’s as LOW as googling private people… I NEVER give out e-mail addresses to third parties… I NEVER google anyone. That’s how you show respect to another’s privacy. This goes for everyone… there’s much too much “sharing” of personal information. I’d NEVER ask a third party for your e-mail address… EVER. I respect you… therefore, I’d NEVER ask anyone about your personal info… there’s much too much “slackness” regarding this. THIS is why we all live in fish-bowls, now. Ponder this… if your “friend” shared my info easily, they’re just as free and easy about you, too. I wouldn’t trust such people… do think on that. I’m not angry… just disgusted. Your friend had no right to hand out my info… you had no right to ask it. It’s not “right”… if you meditate on it, you know that I’m right. We’ve truly fallen low…

Two of my friends said:

I have communicated with them in the past, but I don’t give anyone’s e-mail out… that’s not cool…

I didnt give it to them, but they may have been included in an e-mail which was also sent to you…This would mean they had to look for your address, which is kind of creepy.

This person was trying to pass on crook information in re Dickie. Of course, I’m not going to publicise it. Frankly, it read like a press release written by Dickie himself and/or one of his surrogates. The curtain has fallen on Dickie… the fun and games are over. Yet, it does prove one thing… people do read this site, and they care enough to try to influence me to post this or that, or, they try to influence me by sending me this or that. This isn’t the way to introduce yourself to someone else. I’m livid that someone cared so little about me and had so much disrespect to my privacy that they promiscuously handed out my e-mail address to another without the courtesy of asking me first. I’d NEVER do that… I’d go to gaol, first… and I mean that, literally. Either you hold people’s personal info sacrosanct or you hold that it’s public knowledge. I live by the first maxim… what about you?

Barbara-Marie Drezhlo

Friday 5 August 2011

Albany NY