What with Trump and
Kim Jong Un “exchanging insults,” earthquakes in Mexico, hurricanes in Puerto
Rico, Texas, and Florida, it doesn’t seem as if there is very much good news to
report from anywhere. Still, we’ve
managed to round up a few items that might help make your day a little brighter,
or at least bearable:
• The Just Third Way Hour. The
broadcast of The Just Third Way Hour has been so successful that we’re reformatting
it, possibly under a new title, but shifting the emphasis to North America, where
we think it will do very well in the extremely competitive U.S. and Canadian
market. The first show in the new series
is already “in the can” (that’s show biz talk for recorded and edited, ready
for broadcast), but we don’t have a readily accessible link available yet. We expect to have everything up and running
next week. CESJ’s new intern, Bryan V.,
is very excited about hosting and producing a show with such a unique message,
and believes it will appeal to a broad spectrum of listeners, especially (but
not confined to) “Millennials.” The
yeoman effort by Tom P. in initiating the idea and carrying on with the special
broadcast for the Pacific Rim and the Indian Ocean areas is greatly
appreciated, and will continue — the whole project would have gone nowhere
without his work — and it provides the leverage for something tailored more for
the “North American crowd.”
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| CESJ & BYU: party animals. |
• Not Exactly Earthshaking, But. . . . . The
“Real Thing” has come to Brigham Young University. (And they thought they already had the real “Real Thing.”) Students (and possibly professors and
administration staff) can now buy caffeinated soft drinks on campus instead of
smuggling them in. They now have
official sanction for waking up with a headache, not feeling right until they
scarf down that morning cola, and getting twitchy after an eight-hour stint
without a fix. Sometimes change isn’t
good, bad, or even remarkable. It’s just
. . . change.
• CESJ Annual Event. The CESJ “Annual
Event” is tomorrow, in Arlington, Virginia, postponed from April due to a
number of factors over which we had little or no control. The event will be at CESJ headquarters, and a
number of people are expected from around the country.
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| CESJ co-founder Fr. Wm. Ferree |
• New Publication Projects. In
addition to the ongoing revamping of Capital
Homesteading for Every Citizen (mostly to update the financial projections
and clarify some of the monetary and banking theory), the “Father Ferree
Compendium” is advancing, as well as preliminary work on Curing World Poverty. Also
in the works is a “Paradigm Paper” on the Banking Principle, a discourse on
common currencies and the essential principles to which a common global reserve
currency must adhere (among the primary of which are a fixed standard with
asset backing, elasticity, and NO backing with government
debt), and perhaps even a compendium of the writings of Judge Peter S. Grosscup.
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| Hereclius: the first Homestead Act? |
• The “First Homestead Act” . . . Sort Of. One possibility we’ve been considering at the
suggestion of another publisher is a book on what may be considered the first “Homestead
Act.” This was not the legislation
pushed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, but an initiative of the Byzantine Emperor
Heraclius, who reigned from 610 to 641, after deposing a bloodthirsty tyrant
named Phocas who had brought the Empire to the brink of total disaster. Heraclius seems to have reformed and
reorganized the entire Empire (or what was left of it), primarily by creating
almost at one stroke a large middle class and a huge “National Guard” that
could be mobilized quickly by granting land and an annual stipend to soldiers
in perpetuity in return for hereditary military service. The story is virtually unknown today, and
should make for interesting and informative reading. Any modern leader could do the same thing to “combat”
the increasingly bad economic situation and “declare war” on world poverty by
opening up “settlement” of the virtually unlimited commercial and industrial
frontier, not just limiting it to land, in the process ending much of the basis
for conflict between nations and peoples today.
Perhaps what the world really needs today is an “Economic Crusade” that
mobilizes resources to wage peace and make a better life for everyone instead
of to wage war..
• Amazon Smile Program. 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 30 different countries and 44 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the
United States, India, Australia, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. The most popular postings this past week in
descending order were “Philosophies at War,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private
Property,” “Is Education the Answer?” “The Rise of Socialism,” and “Greece on
the Skids.”
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#