The situation in Greece has been resolved. Again. Not. It doesn't make any difference, anyway. With France and Germany agreeing to bail out Greece, the day of reckoning has been postponed until the next crisis, scheduled for next week, pops up. The stock market is up again (at least this hour), clearly indicating the gamblers are feeling secure enough to bet our money in the usual heads-they-win-tails-the-government bails-them-out gambit. Okay, so maybe we shouldn't call Wall Street a gambling casino. In a real casino it's the people who play who stand to lose. On Wall Street, the losers are those who don't play.
Anyway, here're the news items from this week:
• Out of the blue this past week we heard from a journalist in China who is interested in agenting the Chinese translation of Curing World Poverty. The journalist, whom Norman Kurland met at last year's Caux Roundtable Conference in Beijing, had not been in touch for almost a year, but had read through the book and described it as "very lucky" that it had come to his notice at this particular time. "Luck" seems to have a much "stronger" meaning in Oriental cultures, so the journalist's interest might be very, er, lucky.
• The CESJ Fellows from Africa had their final session yesterday. Both made serious commitments to follow up on introducing the powers-that-be in Mauritania and Niger to the possibilities of the Just Third Way. We gave both of them complimentary CESJ memberships. Perhaps this is some sort of African reverse hospitality, but the celebratory lunch we had planned for them was replaced by a celebratory lunch they planned for us.
• We are interviewing a prospective intern from Turkey next week, a doctoral candidate who is interested in binary economics as a challenge to the prevailing "economic orthodoxy."
• We have finished the draft of a defense of Supporting Life in response to some concerns expressed by a potential reviewer. We plan on having the response given the once-over by a professor moral theology just to make certain we're on solid ground. Now, if we could just be sure that the reviewer would change his mind yet again about giving a positive review now that we've answered all the (expressed) concerns . . . .
• We're asking all readers of this blog to go to Amazon and post (positive) reviews of the CESJ publications you've read. Maybe just a sentence or two, but 1) make sure you really read the book, and 2) give it five (5) stars.
• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 50 different countries and 42 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, and India. People in Venezuela, Greece, Honduras, Canada and Nigeria 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 first two postings on "Economic Recovery," and "Finding the Right Negatives."
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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