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:
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| "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#