While we have some
bad news this week, we thought we’d start out with a little — or a lot — of
good news. Somewhat to our surprise, the
weekly talks given by Dr. Norman Kurland have proved phenomenally popular . . .
everywhere except in the United States, where many of these ideas
originated! There are more than twice as
many listeners tuning in from Russia than from the U.S. As for the Philippines, roughly a third of
the total listeners (numbering in the thousands now) come from that country:
• This past Monday Dr. Norman G.
Kurland gave another talk on the Just Third Way over the internet to people in thirty-two
countries in Asia, the Pacific Rim, the Middle East, and Africa. Nearly five times as many people attended the
session as last week, a more than 360% increase. As can be seen from the graph to the right,
participation has increased dramatically in just five sessions. Most of the participants, nearly 33%, came
from the Philippines, with the rest of the Pacific Rim countries not far behind. Interestingly, there were more than twice as
many listeners in Russia as in the United States.
• CESJ was saddened recently to
learn of the death of Leslie Dean Price of the CESJ Board of Counselors. Mr. Price was founder and Chairman of Equitech International, LLC, a Virginia-based systems integration firm whose mission is
to meet the challenge of R. Buckminster Fuller: “How do we make the world work
for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous
cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
The firm, made up of accomplished architects, engineers, scientists,
professional managers and a network of advanced technology companies, focuses
on the integration and commercialization of advanced proven technology
components to meet the world’s energy, water, waste disposal,
telecommunications, human dwelling and other life support and community needs.
Mr. Price held the position of
University Architect and Planner at Georgetown University for 20 years after
which he served as Counselor for Federal Relations to the university’s
President for 11 years. Among his most noteworthy accomplishments at
Georgetown was the preparation of the NEICES project, a 20-year comprehensive
hydrogen age master plan to enable the campus to become energy self-sufficient
by converting its medical waste, solid waste, and human waste into
hydrogen-based fuels to meet the university’s electricity, water, heating and
air conditioning needs. Components of the NEICES master plan that were
completed under Mr. Price’s guidance included: a 2.2 million gallon cryoaquatic
reservoir for reducing nighttime energy costs; the first successful 10-megawatt
clean coal atmospheric fluidized bed power generator; and the world’s largest
(300 KW) photovoltaic array. The latter became the linchpin of a national
consortium between the NEICES team, NASA, Jet Propulsion Lab and other major
players developing a stand-alone total energy system for lunar and space
projects, an 8-year experimental project completed at Edwards Air Force Base in
1995. He was also lead investigator for the development of the first
Advanced Fuel Cell Bus Project supported by the Federal Government, which
produced three near-zero-emission 30-foot buses.
Mr. Price worked with CESJ on
several major projects: the New Birth Project for the District of Columbia, the
establishment of the Institute for Economic and Social Justice at the
University of the District of Columbia, and the New Millennium Project in East
St. Louis, where he designed “Jubilee,” an advanced energy self-sufficient
satellite new town to incorporate all of the patented technologies developed by
Equitech.
Prior to coming to Georgetown, Mr.
Price had his own architectural firm in California where he was architect of
record for over 100 facilities from 1951-1968 and received several awards for
his advanced facility design and planning criteria. He was hired in 1968
to be Scientific Advisor and Superintendent for Advanced Hospital Systems for a
life sciences research and engineering division of North American Rockwell,
working with 200 specialists reassigned from the Apollo Programs to develop a
150-bed hospital as a robotics showcase. He graduated with honors from
the School of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley.
During World War II, as an infantry intelligence sergeant in Europe, he
survived Hitler’s attempted counter-offensive in the Ardennes, one of the great
battles of the war, costing 60,000 Allied lives and 250,000 German lives.
He was an accomplished artist, painter, sculptor, poet, and cornetist and was
the founder of the “Great Spirits Society.”
 |
| "Hmm. Should I contribute in a way that doesn't cost me a dime?" |
• 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 32 different countries and 42 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the
United States, Poland, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Ireland. The most popular postings this past week in
descending order were “A Few Essential Tweaks to Social Security,” “News from
the Network, Vol. 10, No. 31,” “The Social Security Tontine,” “How Not to Save
Social Security,” and “A Taxing Problem.”
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#
