This week we again have some very
interesting news items, so we’ll get straight to them:
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| "Why should I smile? YOU didn't!" |
• Amazon Smile
program. To participate in the
Amazon Smile program for CESJ, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift
through. Once you’ve typed (or copied
and pasted) “Center for Economic and
Social Justice Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you
will be taken to the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• Effective outreach need not be lengthy. Rob Woodman recently sent a “feeler” to
someone prominent in the campaign of one of the presidential hopefuls. The pitch was short and to the point: “We
have a plan that will serve to fund all of [CANDIDATE’S NAME] programs without
taking a dime from the rich. This is not a joke. It is a road map to the
peaceful and just "Second American Revolution" that [CANDIDATE’S
NAME] and the rest of us so desire. We believe that if adopted and presented by
the candidate [HIM OR HER] self, it will catapult [HIM OR HER]into the White
House.” The rest of the message was
carefully selected links to the CESJ website tailored to the candidate’s
interests.
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| "Buy my searchable books. (And then read them the usual way)" |
• The Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, which is working with Justice University, has developed
a searchable database of the books of Mortimer Adler. As Max Weismann says, “This project
has been a dream of mine even before Dr. Adler and I founded the Center
25 years ago. We all know how wonderful
paper books are for reading, but they are not good for searching. In
the past fifty years, I have spent hundreds of hours searching books
and their indexes. Imagine having a
searchable file of Dr. Adler’s books. You will be able to quickly find
and read or copy what he said about any given word, phrase, idea/topic or
person. Imagine again, if when you want to read or pull a quote out of a book
that you read some time ago, you could let your computer search it
out rather than having to thumb through the books and indexes. This will also give you the opportunity to
easily share Dr. Adler’s edifying insights with other persons in your
life. All books are in the PDF format @
$10 donation each with the exceptions noted.” To order, go to the Center’s
“Store.” This may be the best deal
you get all year. Since Max is one of the organizers of Justice University, and the head of JU's Philosophy Department, we figure this counts as a Justice University program.
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| Dr. Norman A. Bailey |
• Dr. Norman A. Bailey recently published an article in Globes: Israel’s Business Arena, “The
Choice: Rage and Fear, or Envy and Resentment,” about the upcoming U.S.
presidential election. It begins, “There
is a bitter joke in the US that every two years the American people are asked
to choose between the stupid party and the evil party, which is which depending
on whether you are a Democrat or a Republican.
This year is different. The Trump/Cruz/Sanders phenomenon indicates that
the electoral contest is now between the party of rage and fear (Republican)
and the party of envy and resentment (Democrat). What is behind this transformation of the
political scene, not only in the US but in Europe as well, when as recently as
the turn of the century things looked so optimistic?” For the rest of the article,
follow the link.
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| Michael Davitt, cir. 1875. |
• During our research on the background of the Easter Rising
in Dublin in 1916 from a Just Third Way perspective, we found solid proof that
the agrarian socialist Henry George (1839-1897) engineered a serious division
among the leadership of the Irish National Land League in the early 1880s,
weakening the organization in its struggle to secure rights for Irish tenant
farmers. George persuaded Michael Davitt
(1846-1906), founder of the League, to abandon his commitment to peasant proprietorship,
the program espoused by League president Charles Stewart Parnell
(1846-1891). Davitt announced during a
speech when he shared the platform with George that he would in the future
advocate nationalization of land instead of widespread ownership, widespread
private ownership of land having been a keystone of the Irish Nationalist
movement since before the beginning of the Home Rule movement founded by Isaac
Butt (1813-1879). Ironically, Davitt had
persuaded Parnell to become president of the League in part because Davitt
promised to promote “Home Rule” and peasant proprietorship. In a startling paradox, many of today’s
neo-Chestertonians and neo-distributists accept the theories of Henry George,
even though Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) held up the Irish Land Act of
1903 (the Wyndham Act), which finally established a peasant proprietorship in
Ireland, as a model to follow. George’s
theories were also, in part, the basis of “Fabian socialism,” a “New Age” body
of thought that advocated the complete abolition of private property in all
forms of capital and integrated concepts from Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy, or
(as Chesterton called it) “Esoteric Buddhism.”
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 50 different countries and 52 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 United Kingdom, Canada, India, and the Netherlands. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Socialist Delusions,
Capitalist Illusions, VI: Where Does the Money Come From?” “The Purpose of
Production,” “Socialist Delusions, Capitalist Illusions, III: Life, Liberty,
and Property.”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least those 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, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#
