Ordinarily in the
summer we experience something of a lull in activity. That has not been the case this year. A number of projects and initiatives are
moving forward very well:
 |
| The presentations have experienced exponential growth. |
• This past Tuesday Dr. Norman G.
Kurland gave another talk on the Just Third Way over the internet to people in
Asia, the Pacific Rim, and Africa. More
than five times as many people attended the session, a 180% increase over last
week. As can be seen from the graph to
the right, participation has increased dramatically in just three sessions. The geographical breakdown was 20% from Australia,
18% from Hong Kong, 16% from Singapore, 10% from India, 8% from Taiwan, 8% from
New Zealand, 8% from Japan, 4% South Africa, 3% from Vietnam, 2% from South
Korea, 2% from Thailand, and 1% from China.
• Thursday night
Norman Kurland and Dawn Brohawn gave a talk at Fort Belvoir in Northern
Virginia on principles and applications of Justice-Based Management to the
Management 5500 course on “Institutional Learning.” Following the final presentations by the
graduate students, Norm gave a talk outlining the principles on the macro
scale, and Dawn spoke on applying the principles on the micro scale in an
institution. The talk went well,
although there were a few glitches with the PowerPoint presentation.
• On Friday (today)
there was a meeting with Kimberly and TK about “Justice Classrooms” as a way of
kickstarting the Justice University concept and reducing the cost of education
(see below for related news item). The fact
remains that education is both too expensive . . . and doesn’t really educate,
being for most people just very expensive job training for jobs that in many
cases don’t exist.
•According to a
recent study, the average debt load
on graduation is about $37,000 per student.
Add to that the fact that most students attend college on the false
premise that a “good education” (i.e.,
good test-taking — telling the professor what he or she wants to hear — and
suck-up skills) guarantee getting a “good job” . . . defining “good job” as a
position in which you tell the boss what he or she wants to hear and suck up to
anybody with power), and you have a certain recipe for lifelong debt slavery,
total penury, or both. Then consider
that the national debt is in the trillions, and per capita non-mortgage revolving
consumer debt is around $10,000. The
bottom line is that unless Capital Homesteading is implemented soon, and the
monetary and tax systems reformed along the necessary lines, things are only
going to get worse . . . and the United States economy is still considered one
of the sounder ones in the world. . . .
• Speaking of
education (sort of), we discovered recently while investigating the career of Adrien
Albert Marie Comte de Mun (1841-1914) that since 1911 the Encyclopedia Britannica has stated that de Mun advocated a form of
“Christian socialism.” On the
contrary! De Mun spent his entire career
fighting against socialism and Neo-Catholicism (considered by many to be the
same thing). Although a monarchist, de
Mun declared that he could accept the Third French Republic if it would respect
basic human rights, especially freedom of religion, and the dignity and
sovereignty of the human person. Pope
Leo XIII’s 1892 encyclical Au Milieu des
Sollicitudes, “On Allegiance to the Republic,” incorporates much of what de
Mun proposed, and the pope sent him a letter in 1893 thanking him for his
support and commending him on his work against socialism. De Mun a socialist? Not likely — but that doesn’t stop people
from taking the Encyclopedia Britannica
article as authoritative and using it as the basis for their conclusions.
 |
| "I'm smiling because of Smile for CESJ!" |
• 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.
• We have had
visitors from 24 different countries and 36 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the
United States, the Philippines, Canada, Australia, and India. The most popular postings this past week in
descending order were “Distributist Economist Erratum Three,” “News from the
Network, Vol. 10, No. 29,” “Distributist Economist Erratum Four &
Conclusion,” “Correcting a Few Distributist Non-Facts,” and “Distributist
Economist Errata One & Two.”
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#