27 September 2014. Fatso at the Centre at the Blunder’s Behest… Gets Slight Photo Op… NOTHING ELSE

Fatso on the extreme right (he does figure in a SMALL way in only two other images)

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HH with the main honoree, Polar explorer A N Chilingarov, who received the Order of St Sergei. Fatso? He received nothing… but watch the konvertsy lap this up…

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There’s much Sturm und Drang about Fatso at the Centre (see here for the MP coverage). It’s nothing but the Blunder‘s doing… it shows that the Blunder is up to his old tricks. This doesn’t mean that HH is honouring Fatso… after all, California Fats received no award, and ten other people did receive high Church awards. The main focus in Russian media coverage was A N Chilingarov, and rightly so… Artur Nikolayevich is a polar explorer, public figure, Doctor of Sciences, and a government official… compared to him, Fatso’s nothing but a worthless California Dreamer. Oh, yes…Varsonofy Sudakov and V A Chaplin were no-shows… there were none of the usual and expected heavy-hitters at this affair. A Cabineteer opined:

His Russian must be improving, but I wonder how he can afford to travel to Russia?  I doubt that the OCA would’ve sent him.

I replied:

He got the money from Potapov… who got it from Langley. I’d not trust Fatso… he’s tight with Vlad Berzansky Jr (VB calls Fatso “Johnny”)… of course, all the konvertsy will salivate on command.

This signifies NOTHING. There wasn’t a big deal on this one… this had the Blunder’s fingerprints all over it. HH is NOT going to upset the OCA apple cart. This was to show the EP that the Centre considers the OCA a canonical Local Church, nothing more. Paffso didn’t merit an award, nor was he receive a prominent part to play in the proceedings. I think that this was a gin-up on the part of Potapov and the Blunder, along with the fact that Fats was tight with Yustinian Ovchinnikov, y’ know, the MP bishop recently caught in nasty doings. One of my Moscow friends said:

He knows all the poofters in the American Church… they called him in to grill him on his gay pals. They don’t want another Yustinian.

That’s what’s out there… however, remember, Fatso protected such equivocal sorts in the Church as Peterson, Ray Velencia, Isidore Brittain, and Storheim… now, if shitbirds of a feather flock together (and they do)… you can catch my drift. This is no rehab of the Fats… it’s another move in the Great Game between the EP and the MP. The Centre doesn’t want a return to Paffhausen’s Great Circus and Comedy Show any more than the OCA SOBs (Synod of Bishops, that is) do. However, he’s a useful pawn in the poker game over the 2016 Dixie Fry (no done deal, kids). Stay tuned… I’ll betcha that HH will do something with Mollard soon, to keep up appearances…

BMD

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27 September 2014. Latest Sitrep Map from the Front…

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27 September 2014. “Thanks, But No Thanks”… OCA Rains on EP-Sponsored “Canonical Restructuring” Parade

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We’ve all heard the wind from the so-called “Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America”. This group is nothing but an EP-sponsored “talk-shop”. A notional “Proposal for Canonical Administrative Restructuring” surfaced from this social networking group (for such is what it is)… the EP groups are for it, everyone else is underwhelmed and less than enthusiastic about it… even the OCA! Read this for the OCA response to it… let’s boil it down to a sentence… “No way, no how, no Bart in our Town”. I think that the real reason the Centre shitcanned Fatso (for he did lose the Mandate of Heaven, no doubt on that score) is that they weren’t sure on how he’d react in re Bart and his pretensions to being the “Orthodox Pope”. Mollard is much more malleable and controllable… as the Centre showed by its showering of awards upon his party when he made his ad limina visit (for that is what it was, kids)… something that it NEVER did for Fatso and his drooling pack of konvertsy admirers. As a Cabineteer wrote me:

Sounds like the OCA is finished…. still insisting that its autocephaly is relevant…

I quite agree, but expect the OCA to linger on life-support for at least two more years, for it suits the Centre’s purposes. I believe that the Centre is using the OCA (and the pliable Mollard) to fuck up Bart’s planned Dixie Fry in 2016. You see, the Centre, Serbia, Poland, Czechia/Slovakia, and Bulgaria will insist that the OCA receive a seat at the “all-Orthodox Sobor” as a full discrete independent voting member. Bart won’t give in on that point… that’s clear. It’s also clear that HH will use this to scupper the assembly… and probably convene a Sobor of his own, maybe, at the newly refurbished Novy Ierusalime Monastery. HH wants to force Bart to come out openly as a Vatican puppet… and the OCA is one of his “cards” to make him do so. That is, the OCA has usefulness for the Centre now, and up until 2016. After the scuttling of the “all-Orthodox Sobor”, all bets are off. None of the OCA sorts have ANY cred at the Centre. By the way, Fatso and Dickie Wood had no real cred or tread at the Centre… if they had, firstly, Fatso would still be in charge and, secondly, Dickie wouldn’t be suspended. Both were pals of Tikhon Shevkunov, quite another thing entirely. For instance, Dickie’s getting no support from any real powers like Varsonofy Sudakov or V A Chaplin. The most that he’s getting is posts on questionable sites such as Portal-Credo and posts on oligarch-friendly venues (as Tikhon Shevkunov is part of M A Gelman‘s circle at the Vanil Restoran). Fatso has no real support at the Centre at all… if he did, his petition to enter the ROCOR would’ve been a done deal, and it wasn’t.

Besides, the status quo suits most normal people in the OCA quite well… as one told me:

Mollard’s our choice… no, he isn’t competent… no, he isn’t a leader… no, he isn’t inspiring. But he’s our choice… we need peace, and that’s that, as you say. Mollard won’t rock the boat and he’ll give us peace. Nothing else matters at this point. In any case, we had to stop Dahulich. As I said, Mollard’s our guy, not because we like him, but because he’s going to leave us alone.

That says it all… however, isn’t the LACK of news refreshing? Remember the old saying, “Happy is the land that has no history”… indeed…

I’m constantly learning… boy, I’ve learned much in the past seven years… what I see doesn’t speak well for the long-term survival of the OCA… however, in the near-term, it’s a done deal, and that’s that.

BMD

27 September 2014. A Point to Ponder from I A Ilyin…

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You can’t help but love your Motherland; if you don’t love it, this means that you haven’t found it and that you really don’t have one. You must seek out your Motherland with your soul… with an unbound soul, full of the love of beauty; you can’t see it without knowing it, but if you do find it and know it, it’s impossible not to fall in love with it.

I A Ilyin

On the Essence of Justice

1919

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In the midst of a raging Civil War, Ilyin stipulated that the “Sense of Justice” was an intrinsic property of the human soul, which manifests itself as a feeling of respect for the law and the rule of law. Ilyin posited that the person has a special moral sense… of righteousness, justice, responsibility, and freedom. The absence of such feelings generates a civic void, one that inevitably becomes an uncivil morass. If one finds the Motherland, one finds the strength to take upon themselves this burden of responsibility… ergo, if one refuses to find the Motherland, if one refuses the Sense of Justice, one has no strength, no reality, and no moral compass. One sees this in Rush Limbaugh, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rod Dreher. The last-named is particularly egregious… he refuses to settle down and to have a real objective Motherland, ergo, he not only has no Sense of Justice, he has no standard of humanity whatsoever (where is he from? Is he from Brooklyn, Texas, the District, or Louisiana? He’s a rootless and soulless avatar of his own making… a figure more to be pitied than hated). If you don’t have a Motherland, you can’t have the World, either. Before you can love the Abstract, you must love the Concrete… and that is always a specific place, a Homely Home, as the Brits say. I live in the Northeast, and the only way I’ll leave it is in a box, toes up… I mean it. It gives me grounding and nurture. That’s why I pity those like Dreher… he’s sold off his real inheritance for mere and fleeting financial gain. Silly wabbit… there’s no place like Home… when will he realise that and stop his peripatetic wandering (not only in geography, but in spirituality, too)?

BMD