July 2006

Webcam: Last fall there was an illegal memorial of 2,000 crosses installed behind Worcester City Hall to commemorate the first 2,000 US troops killed in the latest Iraq War. I used the City Hall Webcam to make a 4-minute movie in Windows Media format (wmv). The movie is now available as Quicktime and MPEG-4.
Read the rest of this entry »

When I was at Taizé 2 years ago, there was a Polish girl there; I think her name is a Polish diminutive of “Anna”. She kept eating cookies at the reception. I said to her: “you do not look like someone who had eaten a lot of cookies”, and she said “thank you”. She was studying law, would like to be a lawyer in the European Commission, and was upset that the proposed European constitution did not include a reference to God in the preamble. On this note, His Holiness John Paul II wrote Ecclesia in Europa.

If you thought George and Jeb were dodgy, check out the twin president–prime minister combo in Poland. I am not sure how happy I would be about this if I were a Solidarność member (and I would likely have been one, had I been Polish at that juncture). (But then, Bulgaria had an ex-king for a prime minister until last year.)

The Guardian‘s “tabloid” G2 section today is called Specjalny Polski G2. The Oxonian historian Norman Davies wrote several books on Poland. Our friends Stale Urine had a Polish anthem in their Fourteen Points.

I’m at the South Bend Catholic Worker.

The community here occupies a rectory and two houses. There are a handful of guests (homeless and otherwise) and one or two Catholic Workers in each building.

The South Bend Tribune happens to have interviewed a couple of the Catholic Workers for an article in today’s paper about Deus Caritas Est:

There is a difference, [Mike Baxter] says, between “bourgeois do-goodiness” and truly seeking to “love thy neighbor.” When striving toward the latter, “you end up wanting and having to rearrange your life.”

Among other news I can share, seeing as it’s blogged elsewhere, Ms. Brenna Cussen is back from giving some talks at the Ekklesia Project, where her presentation was one of the “highlights.”

Mike Baxter and Brenna Cussen. South Bend Tribune photo/Su Anderson.

Just got word that Worcester has taken down the signs for their much-criticized “anti-panhandling” campaign.

More details when this is confirmed.

One of the more popular posts on Pie and Coffee is the one with Mike Ciul’s check designs for people who don’t like money.

Mike finally had some checks printed with his designs; click the picture below for a closer look.

Capitalism is a pyramid scheme/The love of money is the root of all evil

Here’s an article in the L.A. Times about day laborers in a Southern California suburb (near where my wife’s parents live) demanding $15.00/hour minimum wages. Pretty cool that they’re able to organize like that, although there is a relevant point made by a dissenting worker that the wages should be tied more to the type of work. Banding together for one minimum wage is strong; perhaps if they wanted to implement some sort of graduated scale for the type of work, they could draw up and approve a relatively simple wage schedule that still ensures good pay.

Rudi Cilibrasi recently came to visit me from Amsterdam. On a punt gently chauffeured by a budding political-economist, in the serene surroundings of Oxford, we had fun talking about hoarding gold and the imminent collapse of world economy, amongst other things; and I found myself saying radical things like “houses and land should not have prices”. But more practically:

In the last few years, I have found more and more affinity with Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Chinese revolution of 1911. Read the rest of this entry »

The Telegram’s Matt Stone is digging into the Worcester Public Library’s stupid lending practices that have gotten it sued.

No bombshells in these reports, but it’s good to see that investigations are in progress. Mr Stone has looked at lending policies of other Massachusetts libraries, and the sloppiness of the Worcester library’s policy.

One sentence I noticed in the most recent article:

Social service agencies have largely been satisfied with the policy, [head librarian] Ms. Johnson said.

Mr Stone notes that at least two of the agencies affected by the policy had no idea it existed.

The Catholic Worker shelter, also on the list, was never contacted about the policy, either before or after it was enacted, as far as anyone there remembers.

If you would like to raise money directly for St.
Joseph’s Church (and the good work they are doing) in
Nyala, Darfur, please email me at brennacussen@yahoo.com.

Kids that go to the school the church provides. Photos by Brenna Cussen, December 2004.

Me and Fr. Denima, who helped start a women’s economic
cooperative at the church. December, 2004.

I’m in Philly, catching up on my Internet reading. An interesting statement in the Globe’s coverage of the Worcester library getting sued for dissing the homeless:

[Head librarian Penny] Johnson said she did not have data on how many books had been lost over the years to homeless patrons, but said the policy had helped curb the problem.

It’s a good guess that the library is losing lots of books to homeless patrons. But before you turn guesswork into a policy, you need to gather some actual facts.

(As Kevin notes at Indymedia, in meetings earlier this year the library quoted stats on book losses to activists. What happened to this data since then?)