A number of interesting developments
have happened this week. Of course,
interesting things happen every week, but don’t make for very interesting
reading. The results of networking and
politicking are newsworthy, but not the networking and politicking itself. . .
.
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| DOWn 270!! The world has ended!!!!! (Not.) |
So, if you’re tired of watching the
gyrations of the stock market (if you’re convinced they actually mean anything,
that is), entertain yourself with something more significant:
• We are still working out the details needed to launch a
major fundraising drive to get the resources to translate a number of
significant articles (e.g., “Pope
Francis and the Just Third Way”) and other material that present concepts
that are key to solving the increasing number of crises in the world. This will be geared toward obtaining grants
from foundations, and not from the general public, at least at this stage, and
not for at least a year and a half. This
will almost certainly be launched before the end of our fiscal year on
September 30, and we could be seeing results as early as January of 2016. Of particular interest will be CESJ
co-founder William J. Ferree’s key pamphlet Introduction to Social Justice
(1948), and the Just Third Way Edition of Fulton Sheen’s Freedom
Under God (1940). We’re starting
small, though, to test the waters, so to speak, and are looking initially at
more translations of “Pope Francis and the Just Third Way” and the paper on the
Greek debt crisis currently being edited by an official with the National Bank
of Poland, scheduled for publication in September.
• With the approach of Labor Day, Guy “The Fulton Sheen Guy”
Stevenson has once again made his pitch for “Capital Ownership Day.” As he says, “If we as a nation, were all
counting ‘capital ownership’ numbers every Friday (monthly, and quarterly), we
wouldn't need to keep any records on unemployment. Each year it gets harder and
harder to comprehend and hence to explain, all the reasons why we don't have a
Capital Ownership Day. Perhaps if we had a Department of Capital Ownership
instead of a Department of Labor; or a Federal Dept. with a dual mandate:
Expand Capital Ownership Now!” Guy, as
you probably know, spearheaded the republication of the Just Third Way Edition
of Fulton Sheen’s “long lost” classic, Freedom
Under God, and put in a great deal of time and effort tracking down the
various right holders, if any. We
discovered that Sheen had never owned the rights to the book, and that the
copyright had lapsed into the public domain January 1, 1968, accounting for the
fact that the work was practically unknown, even by the people promoting
Sheen’s cause for canonization! Guy also
tracked down the owner of the copyright of the photograph we used for the cover
— it is still owned by the photographer, who is still alive — and the
photographer was so pleased that someone actually bothered to ask permission to
use a photo everyone else was stealing that he let us use it for free! Guy also found contemporary newspaper stories
relating attacks on Sheen by certain Catholic academics, possibly explaining
why Sheen’s tremendous intellectual attainments and contributions to the
understanding of Catholic social teaching are so little appreciated today, and
people focus instead on his admittedly profound spirituality and magnetic
personality.
• We’ve been reaching out to a number of people in key
positions to strategize before attending the World Meeting of Families in a few
weeks. We believe the event offers a
very good chance both to present the Just Third Way as a potential means to
restore power to the Family and secure it against future intrusion and control
by the State.
• We saw the “meme” to the right this morning on FaceBook,
and felt compelled to add our own take on it in the comment section: “Your
Mama is so Keynesian she cooks huge inedible meals you can't eat so that she
has something leftover out of which to make the next meal that you can't eat so
that there is something out of which to make the next meal you can't eat, so
that . . .” This applies almost
as well to anyone stuck in the past savings paradigm. Trust us. This is absolutely hysterical if you're familiar with the Keynesian prescription for "full employment": produce economically useless goods not for consumption, but to generate savings to produce more economically useless goods not for . . . well, you get it.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 49 different countries and 49 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, Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
The most popular postings this past week were “Halloween Horror Special XIII:
Mean Green Mother from Outer Space,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,”
“Minimum Wage or Profit Sharing,” “The Population Bomb,” and “Aristotle on
Private Property.”
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#
