News from the Network, Vol. 5, No. 13

Everyone seems to be obsessed with the gigantic Lotto jackpot. After all, how would you like to come into half a billion dollars suddenly? Naturally, in addition to all the hoopla, there are also a multitude of stories in the media about how miserable sudden wealth can make you.

Well, we have a solution to both winning and losing the Lotto, even one with such a big payout. If you lose, it proves that you wasted your time and should have been working on bringing Capital Homesteading to the attention of prime movers and door openers who can get us to prime movers. That way, it won't matter if you didn't win. You'll be able to accumulate enough capital assets to provide you with a reasonable income without winning the lottery. And you could send the money you would have spent on lottery tickets to CESJ as a donation to support the advancement and adoption of Capital Homesteading. (You knew that was coming.)

If you win? Support the Coalition for Capital Homesteading by using your new access to other people of wealth and power to sway them to support Capital Homesteading and cut the rest of us in on a good thing without taking anything away from you. Imagine: future lottery winners wouldn't have to hide or change their phone numbers or anything, because there'd be nothing to envy them for. Isn't that worth a little of you effort?

What if you don't play the lottery? Well, then join the rest of us in working for Capital Homesteading, anyway (such as joining us at the Federal Reserve Building in Washington, DC, on Friday, April 20, 2012 from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm) and participate in initiatives such as the following news items:

• "Catholic Teaching and the Elections," by CESJ's Director of Research, Michael D. Greaney, will appear in the April 2012 issue of Inside the Vatican magazine. The editor/publisher has assured us that subscriptions ordered before April 1, 2012 will include this issue. That gives you two days (today and tomorrow) to subscribe by visiting the Inside the Vatican website (and tell them why you're subscribing, which will encourage them to accept future articles). We don't know if you can order just a single issue, but you can always ask. As you might expect, the article mentions the fact that none of the candidates are pushing an economic agenda consistent with either reality or Capital Homesteading.

• PJ and Eileen in the U.K. are back in action, and sending e-mails and letters to key people in government and the House of Commons about the potential of Capital Homesteading for turning around the economy. He has so far received a response from Ed Miliband, who heads the opposition Labour Party, and whose representative has encouraged PJ in his endeavor.

• Guy S. in Iowa has been taking extreme advantage of the new "gadgets" on this blog, especially the Facebook "share" gadget that allows you to send a link to a posting or even the homepage of the blog to all your friends. This appears to be better than the "e-mail follower" gadget, because if you sign up for that, you only get the daily updates, whereas if you actually visit the blog, you can "share" and "tweet" the posting to you friends, increasing the number of visitors to the blog and making it come up more often in internet searches (we think).

• We have been asked to contribute some articles on military history to the revived Catholic Men's Quarterly. We'll keep you posted as to when/if they appear, and to what degree we manage to work in the Just Third Way perspective.

• We recently submitted an article to Social Justice Review, the official journal of the Central Bureau of the Catholic Central Union of America in St. Louis, Missouri. The article is based on the "Blind Leading the Blind" postings from earlier this week.  And, yes, you can subscribe to the Social Justice Review, too.

• Despite the fact that at present three Catholic magazines are publishing Just Third Way material, CESJ is not a Catholic organization, nor is the Just Third Way a Catholic movement. It is open to everyone who shares the basic natural law orientation found in the philosophy of Aristotle, Aquinas, Maimonides and Ibn Khaldûn. If you'd like to see the Just Third Way in other venues, feel free to open the door and introduce an editor or publisher to the CESJ website and this blog.  You can also help arrange for interviews of Norman Kurland on local radio stations, many of which are always in need of interesting guests.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 54 different countries and 49 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 Argentina, the Netherlands Antilles, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Ireland spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular postings this past week were "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property," "Aristotle on Private Property," "The Crimes of Mitt Romney," "How I Would Lead the World Bank," and "Why Did Nixon Take the Dollar Off the Gold Standard?"

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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