News from the Network, Vol. 4, No. 40

Much to our astonishment (not), we were chastised most severely for our report on the Occupy Wall Street's "Corporate Zombie Day" presented as "Part II: Zombie Bot Slaves from Mars" in our now-annual series of Halloween Horror Specials. Evidently, joining in the fun and making a joke about a joke is not sufficiently communitarian or solidaristic, or maybe the chastiser didn't realize it was a joke, having missed the reports that were aired on all the major networks, most local stations, Al Jazeera, Russian TV, NHK World (the Japanese channel in English), or the 16,200,000 matches that come up when you google "Zombies of Wall Street," and see that it was a straight reporting job — even down to the "Uh . . . uh . . . uh" (from the clip aired on NHK World).

That, or it's easier to demonstrate your own self-righteousness and judgmentalism, and gripe and bitch about somebody else's alleged insensitivity than it is actually to do something positive.

Consequently, to demonstrate our sensitivity and solidarity with the demonstrators (even though we still think they are demanding the wrong thing and demonstrating outside the wrong institution), we pledge not to see any humor in anything that the Occupy Wall Street movement might do for fun or to lighten the mood, at least for as long as we can remember, or the end of this sentence, whichever comes first.

Now, as a break from . . . whatever it was we were talking about, here is the Just Third Way news of the week:

• Norman and Marie Kurland met with Cong Mu, a Chinese journalist, who is negotiating with an academic press in China for the publication of the translation of Curing World Poverty (1994). Mr. Cong was in town (Washington, DC) for the day, but made time in his busy schedule to meet with CESJ's president before traveling to New York.

• On Monday, Universal Values Media, Inc., a for-profit publishing company that specializes in republishing "long lost" (or at least ignored) fiction that has some consistency with Just Third Way principles, received the proof copies of Blessed John Henry Newman's two novels, Loss and Gain (1848) and Callista (1855). While copies will not be available to the general public for another two weeks or so, UVM has graciously allowed CESJ members and supporters — and readers of this blog — to purchase advance publication copies in bulk (i.e., 10 or more copies per title) at 20% off the cover price of $20, plus shipping. Each volume features annotation to explain possibly obscure terms and concepts, and a foreword newly written for these editions. Enquire at "publications[you know what goes here]cesj.org" if you want to put in a bulk order. Be sure to include a street address for shipping so we can calculate the postage. If you want review copies, they're available in .pdf, and we'll send them on request.

• The same deal applies to most CESJ publications as well (be sure to note that Curing World Poverty is not a CESJ publication in the sense that CESJ is the publisher; the same deal applies, but filling orders is a bit more complicated). The list of CESJ publications can be found here. Also, Binary Economics is not a CESJ publication, and CESJ cannot handle bulk orders. (We'd probably forward any requests to the author, and let him worry about it.)

• UVM says that all its other publications are also available on the same terms, and can be found here. As is the case every October, Robert Hugh Benson's classic collection of horror short stories, A Mirror of Shallot, is (so far) this month's best-seller, with The Light Invisible ("mystical," not horror), a close second. We assume it's a reflection of the quality of UVM's editions that we've sold twice as many copies of Mirror this month in Great Britain, Benson's home turf, as we have in the U.S.

• Work proceeds apace on the Just Third Way edition of William Thomas Thornton's A Plea for Peasant Proprietors. The "value added" — the foreword, annotation, and appendices — is taking time to edit, and the cover has not yet been designed, but we hope to have it available for bulk purchase by the end of October, and for sales to the general public through retail channels by mid-November. If you want to help, see if you can dig up a photo or other image of Mr. Thornton for the back cover . . . preferably one for which CESJ does not have to pay (we are a non-profit, after all), and get it to us fast. We'll give credit for any permissions, of course, but we could use up to half a dozen different images to give us some choice. We'll settle for one, though.

• Michael D. Greaney, CESJ's Director of Research, has been asked to address the Virginia State Board of the Ancient Order of Hibernians at their quarterly meeting in October. He will be speaking on "William Thomas Thornton and the Just Third Way," emphasizing his research done to edit A Plea for Peasant Proprietorship. While this particular event is not open to the public, all CESJ speakers are available for presentations and interviews in most venues. (Actually, it's probably all venues, but there just might be one somewhere that we simply won't agree to . . . maybe Antarctica in August, or something. That would have to be a telephone presentation.)

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 53 different countries and 50 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, India, and Bulgaria. People in Poland, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, and the Netherlands Antilles spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular postings this past week were "News from the Network, Vol. 4, No. 36," "Aristotle on Private Property," "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property," "A Plea for Peasant Proprietors, Part I," and "A Plea for Peasant Proprietors, Part III."

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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