Eideard

New Jersey’s newest self-ordained censor

Rev. Cedric A. Miller has had it with what he says Facebook is doing to couples coming to him for help and is giving his married church leaders until Sunday to get off the social-network website or resign their posts.

Miller…said a large percentage of his counseling over the past year and a half has been for marital problems, including infidelity, stemming from Facebook…There was no problem when people just met with friends from high school in a platonic way.

But that has changed, he said, and now people are reigniting old passions and connecting with people who should stay in the past. He said a marriage can be going along fine when someone from the past breaks through and trouble begins.

“It’s to the point now that this Sunday, anyone in our church in a leadership position and who is married and is on Facebook has to resign their church position if they do not give up Facebook,” said Miller…

“The average citizen is going to see my action as controlling, not that I care about that,” Miller said. “I’m not concerned with being politically correct. I’m trying to save families and marriages…”

“I wouldn’t say Facebook is the problem,” said William Rosenblatt, an Ocean Township psychologist and therapist. “What I would say is we live in a rapidly changing world, and we are facing stresses and opportunities that we’ve never had to face before.

“Facebook doesn’t create dissatisfied marriages,” Rosenblatt continued. “People who are dissatisfied now have better means of creating support systems and networks that are much more vast, and it’s much easier to connect with people that way.

“I would see the pastor’s decree as sort of another example of how, when we as a group are faced with dramatic change, there are three paths people take,” Rosenblatt said.

“One path is we need to go back to the way things were, the conservative path,” he said. “Another group are those who just want to rush ahead and change everything. Then a third group says, let’s not paint this black and white. Let’s be mindful and thoughtful how we do this.”

Another “moderate” preacher in the community says Americans have a right to access to the Internet, but – “Any access to people unfiltered may not be good.”

Do you need a church-based “filter” governing what in the world you are allowed to read or see or hear?

UPDATED: The dude used to get off on 4-ways with his wife + another church “leader” and women from the church. Har!

Pope Benedict XVI has warned of an “aggressive anti-clericalism” in Spain which he said was akin to that experienced during the 1930s…

In case you aren’t aware of what he speaks, that was when the Catholic Church labored hard in the vineyards of the fascist dictator, Franco.

“The clash between faith and modernity is happening again, and it is very strong today,” he told reporters on the plane, quoted by AFP news agency.

He is due to celebrate an open-air Mass and then travel to Barcelona on Sunday…

Despite protests from the Church, the current Socialist government has ended obligatory religious education in state schools and legalised abortion on demand in a drive to secularise…

Only 14.4% of Spaniards regularly attend mass, and legal changes to allow divorce, gay marriage and abortion have caused concern to the Catholic Church…

But some shopkeepers are disappointed by the number of people coming to the city for the Papal visit.

“There are still no people, we’re very surprised,” one souvenir shop owner told AFP news agency.

The pope is probably wondering what happened to his cut of the sales, too.

In Barcelona, gay activists are calling for a kiss-in outside the Sagrada Familia when the Pope arrives to consecrate it.

Remember, when the Yanks say, “Jump!” – you ask “how high?”
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Plans by the British government to make significant cuts in defense spending have spurred concerns among American military experts about Britain’s ability to carry out its role as the United States’ most dependable ally.

The Brits used to use the term “batman” to describe a similar purpose within their imperial army. Americans are more likely to say “flunkey”.

A wrenching government spending review has pitted Britain’s army against its navy, spawned a series of leaks to the British media and raised the question of whether the military that emerges from the budget cuts — expected to be 10 percent to 20 percent of current outlays — will be a strategically agile force that can join the United States on major combat operations.

American and British officials said that they did not expect any cutbacks to curtail Britain’s capabilities to fight in Afghanistan over the next five years…

The ten or fifteen years after that might be a problem, though.

Mr. Fox told reporters later that, after any cuts, the British military would be able to respond to a broad array of threats and retain capabilities particularly valued by the Pentagon. He identified those as Britain’s Special Forces, its nuclear deterrent, its participation in the Joint Strike Fighter program and its ability to deploy substantial forces when needed.

While they joust with Israel to see who gets to be the 51st state, the various wings of the British government are working like little beavers to assure Uncle Sugar they need to stay on the death and destruction payroll.

In its strongest move since the sinking of a South Korean warship, the Obama administration has said that the United States would retain control of all military forces in the South during any conflict with North Korea, which has been widely blamed for the attack on the ship in March that killed 46 sailors…

The decision is somewhat symbolic; the United States was not slated to give up wartime control of South Korean troops until 2012, and the new agreement extends the deadline to 2015. But the agreement allowed Washington and Seoul to take some action after months of struggling for ways to punish the North — and attempt to deter it from further violence — without provoking the country’s erratic leader, Kim Jong-il, to launch new attacks…

Where’s the beef?

In addition, Mr. Obama vowed to seek Congressional ratification for a long-stalled free-trade agreement with South Korea — a possibly risky political move that could please businesses but upset unions and their allies in Congress.

In an apparent attempt to satisfy those groups, the administration said that in exchange for pushing the trade deal forward, Mr. Obama would ask the South to drop restrictions on auto and beef imports; the restrictions have been particularly unpopular with unions…

Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said he would support ratification as long as “the unscientific barriers Korea has erected against American beef” were removed.

Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, said he welcomed the decision. “I hope that this process will provide us an opportunity to address market access for autos and beef and increase the value of the trading relationship,” he said.

When either one of these creeps lets some concern for healthcare, unemployment, jobs and education slip past their political radar, pigs will be flying and lobbyists will be out of a job.

Want to save a buck and reduce the deficit – Mr. and Mrs. Tea Party? Bring The Troops Home!

She is general superior of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Sault Ste. Marie.

She has a…mission: to encourage women who may have felt a call by God to join a religious order to act. To pick up the phone and call the Sisters of St. Joseph. For help, she has hired one of Toronto’s top ad men, Terry O’Reilly, the popular host of CBC radio’s The Age of Persuasion.

It may be the first time a Canadian religious order has stepped into the pool of popular media for an ad campaign. Mostly, nuns have advertised in diocesan newspaper and other religious publications.

“The question everyone will ask is how do you live without sex?..”

“You live without sex, but not without love,” she says.

“I don’t feel unfulfilled. I feel I have a love relationship with God…”

O’Reilly’s team also had to address the poverty, chastity, obedience question. The ads they’re working on don’t get into details, he says…

“We are tapping into women who already feel these stirrings, who are already considering that kind of life…”

“They are young adults looking to live together in large numbers, to do things together – they are looking for community,” says Sister Maureen Baldwin, a member of the Congregation of Notre Dame and executive-director of the National Association of Vocation and Formation Directors.

I wonder if our Canadian readers feel that this is where they would direct young women – to have a meaningful life?

In fact, the question applies to all societies where religion continues to diminish. I hope.

Yukio Hatoyama at the Hiroshima Peace Museum
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The opposition Democratic party’s expected victory in Japan’s 30 August general election is creating a new element of uncertainty in the Asia-Pacific region, already unsettled by North Korea’s war drums and China’s assertiveness. The ruling conservative Liberal Democratic party (LDP) has held power for 52 of the past 53 years. It is the political linchpin of the US-Japan alliance. Now, largely due to lamentable domestic policy failures, opinion polls suggest it is all but dead in the water.

The centre-left Democratic party of Japan (DPJ), ahead by up to 20 points in some surveys, is committed, on paper at least, to a radical reappraisal of Japan’s postwar defence partnership with Washington. Its manifesto pledges to “re-examine the role of the US military in the security of the Asia-Pacific region and the significance of US bases in Japan”. Questions have been raised about the continuing presence of roughly 50,000 American troops on Japanese soil and more broadly, about Japan’s military support for US operations in Iraq and now in Afghanistan.

At the same time, DPJ leaders are advocating improved ties with former adversaries, notably China and South Korea, strained during the 2001-2006 premiership of Junichiro Koizumi. Party chief Yukio Hatoyama has vowed not to follow Koizumi in paying respects to Japan’s war dead at the Yasukini shrine in Tokyo, seen in Beijing as a symbol of unrepentant Japanese militarism.

Speaking in Tokyo today at a Thomson Reuters conference, Katsuya Okada, the DPJ’s second-in-command, said the party wanted an equal relationship with the Obama administration. “There are various issues of concern between Japan and the US. It is necessary … to work on changing systems based on trust,” he said. Japan lacked independence, he complained. “If Japan just follows what the US says, then I think as a sovereign nation that is very pathetic…”

Nor will the US voluntarily relax its close embrace, just because some new faces show up at Tokyo head office next month. According to Harvard professor Joseph Nye, Washington attaches high priority to its Japanese alliance, “a central feature of stability in east Asia”. Shared concerns ranging from China to trans-national pandemics, terrorism and the threats posed by failed states would bind the US and Japan more closely than ever in the 21st century, he predicted.

It’s a lesson other useful long-time US allies, such as Britain, have learned over the years. Whatever DPJ leaders may fondly think, there’s no escaping America when it doesn’t want to be escaped.

I happen to think Nye is wrong – and Tisdall has been stuck into reading his own copy and that of his peers in the British government just a bit too long.

I think the Japanese can come up with as much courage as, say, South Asian nations or Indochina.

UPDATE: The DPJ came up big winners.

A Baltimore circuit judge, who has three times been the subject of judicial disciplinary investigations, ordered a spectator to jail for 10 days for crying out “love you” to her handcuffed brother in the courtroom – and then reversed himself after a public defender spoke up on her behalf.

As Tamika Clevenger left a Baltimore courtroom Friday, she shouted, “Love you, Nick,” which set off Judge Alfred Nance. He ordered a sheriff to pull Clevenger from the hallway and found the 24-year-old in contempt.

Nance undid the sentence about a half-hour later at the request of Jill Trivas, a public defender who was in court for a different case but told Nance she felt that he had been too harsh.

“I respect Judge Nance a lot; he’s one of the judges here who will give you a fair trial,” Trivas said. “But it still upset me to see this girl get locked up. She had started to cry. She had children who were dependent upon her…”

Nance asked Clevenger her name and age, and then swiftly pronounced the punishment: “Ten days, Baltimore City Detention Center.”

“I didn’t do nothing,” a shocked Clevenger said…

Worried about her child at home, Clevenger began to cry.

“Your baby will be there” when you get out, Nance said. “You want me to send him to social services? I’ll send him [to jail] too.”

Maybe he doesn’t need judge-lessons; but, he certainly needs human being-lessons.

Stanley Milgram, the Guy Who Got the Ball Rolling

Nearly 50 years after one of the most controversial behavioral experiments in history, a social psychologist has found that people are still just as willing to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks to others when urged on by an authority figure.

Jerry M. Burger, PhD, replicated one of the famous obedience experiments of the late Stanley Milgram, PhD, and found that compliance rates in the replication were only slightly lower than those found by Milgram. And, like Milgram, he found no difference in the rates of obedience between men and women.

Burger’s findings are reported in the January issue of American Psychologist. The issue includes a special section reflecting on Milgram’s work 24 years after his death on Dec. 20, 1984, and analyzing Burger’s study.

“People learning about Milgram’s work often wonder whether results would be any different today,” said Burger, a professor at Santa Clara University. “Many point to the lessons of the Holocaust and argue that there is greater societal awareness of the dangers of blind obedience. But what I found is the same situational factors that affected obedience in Milgram’s experiments still operate today.”

I started not to blog this, figuring that most people would already be aware of Milgram’s work.  Then I thought, “Is that really true?”  Finally, I decided that it would be good in any case to affirm that somebody is still interested in the questions that Milgram raised. Yet, I can’t help despair that most people will look in the mirror and say, “Not me” instead of “What would I do?”