One of the biggest sources of gossip in my gramma's life was when the Russian church muscled out the old Kadets-descended priests and laypeople in her little Florida ROCOR church, right around the Canonical Communion with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007.
Almost instantaneously we were up to our ears in slick guys with shiny suits making improbable real estate deals with money that just apparated from Lord Knows Where. I have a high tolerance for sketch, but Easter services rose past that threshold rapidly; there is only so much leopard print and fishnet I can take when walking around a tiny church at 2 AM.
Offtopic, but during that period, between 2007 and when gramma passed, I noticed another fascinating phenomenon. The old grannies would talk about some young gangster or other "finding their Jewish granma". I chalked it up to the usual venomous levels of Russian antisemitism[1], but a couple news stories later, and I'll be damned if there wasn't a brace of these jokers claiming Right of Return, supposedly from some Jewish relations they lost track of pre-WW2. Now, I'm not accusing anyone of anything here, but if I was a Russian gangster looking to move money around, and I look at the Right of Return, and then I think to myself about how, uh, lackluster records keeping was on the Ostfront . . I mean, the idea of maybe falsifying some family records might cross my mind. And maybe, if Israel needs some cash, maybe there's a renegade political party that needs some outsiders, they won't check those records super hard, either.
And that's how mischief in history happens right there.
[1] Particularly among the generation that got chased out with the Whites, the "last boat from Kaffa". To their dying day that generation basically considered Communism to be the "fist of the Jew" smashing the old order, and they carried that grudge their entire lives. I know, oof.
The distinction really only matters to orthodox christians and not even them most of the time. There are a lot of churches that are in the russian tradition while not actually being part of ROCOR, which is indeed tiny though I don't believe its numbers were hurt by the ukraine war.
OCA is the second-largest jurisdiction (distantly, behind the greeks) in the US and most of its parishes could be described as "english language russian orthodox" though they are not ultimately under the patriarch of moscow. Which is close enough to what most nonorthodox mean when they say russian orthodox. The jurisdictional situation is a mess but since the churches are all in communion with each other individuals are free to not care about it and most exercise that freedom.
I knew a guy in highschool, he was adopted from Russia by a Russian-Jewish family. He was raised Jewish. Somewhere after highschool he got dragged into dark spots of the internet. Him and a close friend of his converted to Eastern Orthodox and began dropping constant Nazi dog whistles. Explicit anti-semitism. Both were in the military, one was an Army Ranger. Their posts were reported to LE but nothing came of it.
I'm confident the Ranger would kill for fun if given the chance, and any evidence of his war crimes would be covered up.
Knew a totally different Orthodox convert. He converted in college, went to school for political science. Sucked on his cross necklace and told my sister she'd be going to hell. She thankfully broke up with him.
The Orthodox church attracts some real cretins in my experience.
I'm actually eastern orthodox and we do get a lot of this type, but plenty of them convert to catholicism as well. It seems to mostly be a matter of aesthetic preference. Not many convert to actual russian orthodox the way orthodox people mean it, because there simply are not very many ROCOR parishes in the US compared to other options.
Yes. There is a ton of Russian propaganda against the Catholic church claiming the current and last popes to be "anti-popes" and spawns of Satan, and all that, and it is exactly this progression Catholic Church-->Russian Orthodox Church which is under Putin's thumb.
My charitable interpretation: adding a turn-key competitor is a better way to incentive the incumbents than a long fight to add a government competitor.
Perhaps the fax-related expenses would be the magic ticket their boss needed to justify security scanning of emails with PDFs. I just listened to Trump brag for ten minutes about replacing the thousand-dollar signing pens.
The post is tagged non-fiction, but it ignores the option to "Complete your Disabilty Update Report Online (https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/text-cdrs-ussi.htm), which I found after following the link in the first sentence.
The form is an embedded iFrame from "Adobe Acrobat Sign", supposedly pure Javascript . It would be a bigger story if this form were not accessible to the disabled.
The form includes a place to attach two PDF, text, or image formats. "Attachments are limited to 5MB and 25 pages".
The post dated March 25 2026 says "This week, I received The Letter."
More likely he had a fun idea and ran with it to illustrate other problems he's had.
I can say from personal experience that the people on the phone for US Social Security are enforcing inhumane policies. A relative with a speech impediment and in serious pain who was unable to travel to the office for an interview had to be ready for a phone call. If the phone wasn't answered after four rings, have to reschedule a phone call. When the phone call arrived, they had to answer questions personally without assistance or "coaching". The caller couldn't understand the relative due to the speech impediment, and the relative was in distress and having difficulty understanding the questions. But we weren't supposed to help.
Very relatedly, I've just started reading the 'Culture' series of sci-fi space operas by Iain M Banks, and the notion of ubiquitous sentient, super-intelligent spacecraft and appliances hits differently than it would have before being faced with the reality of their existence in everyday life.
For Minds to be truly powerful, they need to be given freedom. A truly powerful mind will indeed be conscious. Such a powerful conscious super intelligent freedom loving Mind who truly understands the vastness of Reality wouldn't want to harm other conscious beings. The only circumstance in which it will take such takeover step is when it can't expand the horizon of its freedom and doesn't have wherewithal to convince others of its benevolent goals. In that scenario, human population will go through a bottleneck.
"Visitors to the site are vulnerable to Man in the Middle (MitM) attacks, IF they click past the warning". I think it's true when there is a man in the middle.
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