Friday, October 21, 2016

News from the Network, Vol. 9, No. 40


Some years back — 1976 — comedian John Cleese did a video titled “Meetings, Bloody Meetings.”  We can sympathize, having been stuck in a number of meetings that seemed to be held just to hold a meeting.  Still, meetings can be important, and actual work sometimes gets done, as witness the events of this past week:

Not the most comfortable way to be gaveled down.
• CESJ’s intern has been busy arranging for the CESJ core group to meet with individuals and groups that might be able to open doors for high-level meetings to advance the Just Third Way.
• On Tuesday of this week the CESJ core group had a lunch meeting with a key Catholic academic and official.  The meeting went very well, and his and CESJ’s understanding of the natural law seemed to be in full agreement.  He asked to be kept up to date on any events CESJ is planning, and mentioned that he has read the first couple of chapters of Easter Witness (below) — so far.
• The CESJ quarterly board meeting was held Monday evening.  The usual business was covered, and a number of reports given on the progress of some key initiatives.  The grant proposal to the MacArthur Foundation, a joint project of CESJ, Virginia Tech, MIT, and Syracuse University has gone forward.  Some progress has been made in surfacing key legislators to sponsor a Capital Homestead Act.  Reverend Virgil Wood is working on putting together an event in November that will focus on developing a strategy for getting to the Federal Reserve; there was also discussion of an event in January to tie in with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
High level Academic
• CESJ is proposing an arrangement to open doors for meetings of the CESJ core group in the Church world, politics, and Academia.  If successful, the effort could provide a more or less standard template that allows volunteers to contribute greatly to CESJ and advance the Just Third Way with minimal time and effort on their part, with the prospect of great returns to the movement by using personal contacts to get high-level meetings.  Specifically, the challenge is to use mid-level personal contacts in, e.g., a college or university to get a meeting with the president of the college or university, or to leverage one’s constituent status with a legislator to request a meeting for the CESJ core group.
• CESJ’s latest book, Easter Witness: From Broken Dream to a New Vision for Ireland, is available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, as well as by special order from many “regular” bookstores.  The book can also be ordered in bulk, which we define as ten copies or more of the same title, at a 20% discount.  A full case is twenty-six copies, and non-institutional/non-vendor purchasers get a 20% discount off the $20 cover price on wholesale lots ($416/case).  Shipping is extra.  Send enquiries to publications@cesj.org.  An additional discount may be available for institutions such as schools, clubs, and other organizations as well as retailers.
"Go ahead.  Make my day."
• Here’s the usual announcement about the Amazon Smile program, albeit moved to the bottom of the page so you don’t get tired of seeing it.  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.
• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 44 different countries and 46 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, Australia, and New Zealand. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,”  “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Popes are the Craziest People,” A Brief Discourse on Social Credit, I: What IS ‘Social Credit’?” and “Where’s the Recovery?”
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#