The
New Year is off to a good start, as you can see from this week’s news items. They illustrate the importance of outreach —
and persistence (as well as persistence and persistence, the first, second, and
third keys to gaining acceptance of revolutionary new ideas):
• The big news is that Norman
Kurland, president of the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ) got a
letter (below) published in the Washington
Post. This is not only good in and
of itself, but it shows how effective sending letters in to your local
newspaper can be — if you state the principles of the Just Third Way
accurately. (Most) newspapers really do
want something halfway intelligent they can publish.
• Norman Kurland’s letter was
picked up by the Perth
Herald-Tribune, which has an entire section dedicated to the Just Third
Way.
• The Perth Herald-Tribune also
published an article on the Just Third Way, “Just Third
Way: Linux of the Economic System.”
• Yesterday Norman Kurland met with
a prominent Trump supporter in Northern Virginia to sound him out on whether he
could help get us to Mr. Trump. Whatever
your feelings about the man, he is about to be sworn in as president of the
United States, and it would be better for everyone if his programs were based
on the Just Third Way. Of course, we’d
say the same thing if Clinton had won.
Regardless, if you want to help advance the Just Third Way, you might
consider helping us get in touch with our leadership . . . unless you think
they have particularly good ideas without
the Just Third Way. . . .
• CESJ’s oldest volunteer just
celebrated her 90th birthday yesterday! Although Jean’s been inactive for a while,
she still gives her full moral and mental support to the Just Third Way.
• Welche wonne! The “Bitcoin,” a currency with no standard of
value and nothing behind it (not even government debt) had a bad week. It’s entirely possible, of course, that
people might be starting to realize that a currency without an asset backing and
no fixed value might not be such a good idea after all. It’s rather like what one reads about in
Charles MacKay’s masterpiece, Extraordinary
Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841).
• CESJ’s latest book (makes a great
post-Christmas gift), 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.
• 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 are experiencing technical difficulties with tracking data from the
blog due to the format upgrade. We think
we fixed the problem this morning, but won’t know until Monday — corrections
and changes take twenty-four hours to appear, and we don’t have access on the
weekend. Our old data are that we have
had visitors from 57 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, Canada, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “A Dishonest Way to
Argue, I: Apples and Oranges,” “How to Make America Great Again,” “Book Review:
Field Guide for Heroes,” and “Minimum Wage Follies.”
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#