The response of the people of Japan and the rest of the world to the disaster has been inspiring. It reinforces our conclusion from last week that, however horrifying the situation, there is something inherent in humanity itself that has the capacity to keep us coming back. As the ancient Romans said, Dum spiro, spero — while I breathe, I hope. All that is necessary is for human ingenuity to step in and develop new and creative solutions that seem insoluble under existing assumptions.
We are therefore doing our best to keep refining the concepts of the Just Third Way and continue our efforts to present the ideas to key figures and prime movers. Nothing can undo what has happened, but it might be possible to make the future better than the present grim outlook would suggest could be the case.
We are, of course, doing our best to present some intelligent commentary on the situation (which we hope to have ready next week), having spent a full week trying to grapple with the enormity of it all — thereby explaining, at least in part, the seeming triviality of the postings for the past week. In the meantime, we have the routine tasks involved in presenting the revolutionary ideas of the Just Third Way to the world:
• Dave Kelly will be the featured guest tomorrow on Russell Williams's The Challenge on WKND Gospel Radio, Hartford, Connecticut. To repeat the contact information from the station's press release, "Tune in every Saturday morning at 9 AM Eastern on WKND 1480 AM Windsor-Hartford, CT and online at www.goisradio.com/wknd. Call in and let your voice be heard at 860-218-2173 or 860-218-2174."
• CESJ had its monthly Executive Committee meeting on Wednesday. Most of the meeting was concerned with routine business and discussion and updates of projects in progress.
• Norman Kurland had a number of meetings this week revolving around the Harris Neck initiative. It appears that the prime movers are getting a better grasp of the scope of the Just Third Way, and its potential for overcoming what can seem otherwise like insurmountable problems.
• We received a copy of The Weekly Economist from Tokyo this morning containing an article by Misako Hida (written and submitted before the earthquake and tsunami) referencing CESJ on the need for both Japan and the U.S. to investigate new approaches to financing economic growth. Our resident Japanese experts have not yet had time to translate the article for us, but it may be that the article contains the seeds of a potential new approach to rebuilding after the disaster in a way that fosters direct ownership participation by all Japanese in the rebuilding and subsequent economic growth.
• Work proceeds on the rewriting of Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen. As regular readers of this blog are aware, we have made a number of breakthroughs in our understanding of money, credit, banking, and finance theory over the past two years. Combined with the rapidly changing world situation since 2004, a revision of CESJ's "blueprint for change" had become a virtual necessity. We hope to have the revision ready for 2012.
• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 50 different countries and 48 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, the UK, India, and the Philippines. People in Germany, Venezuela, Poland, Malaysia, and Hong Kong spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular posting this past week was once again "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property," followed by "Aristotle on Private Property," "The New Manifest Destiny," "Attaining Justice in the Arab World," and "Own or Be Owned."
Those are the happenings for this week, at least that we know about. If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we'll see that it gets into the next "issue." If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them to us to post for you. All comments are moderated anyway, so we'll see it before it goes up.
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