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Freeorder News
explorers foundation, inc., leif smith
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There are beautiful, wild forces within us.
Let them turn the mills inside
and fill sacks that feed even heaven.
-Francis of Assisi
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Tracking the emergence of freeorder, as seen from this forge, in Denver, Colorado, USA.
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forge = “freeorder generator”
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The continuous creation of worldwide freeorder is the largest of open source projects, one to which every member of the human race is invited, each to make their own unique contribution at a scale fitting their capacity and interest.
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Forges are ventures (different from networks) intent on the emergence of freeorder. Forge = “freeorder generator”
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The 2014 New Media Consortium (NMC) Summer Conference - Portland, starts today through June 19.
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“The NMC Summer Conference is a one-of-a-kind event, attracting highly skilled professionals interested in the integration of emerging technologies into teaching, learning, and creative inquiry.” http://www.nmc.org/events/2014-summer-conference-portland -thanks to Paul Signorelli, and Pat Wagner
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The destruction of monies by greedy governments and their associates in business is no trivial matter. It is often eventually catastrophic. The solution is complete individual and group freedom to select among competitive monies, to use holdings of some monies to hedge against the risks of holding others, and to exit from association with any money provider who seems untrustworthy.
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‘A Bitcoin mining pool, called GHash and operated by an anonymous entity called CEX.io, just reached 51% of total network mining power today. Bitcoin is no longer decentralized. GHash can control Bitcoin transactions.
‘Is This Really Armageddon?
‘Yes, it is. GHash is in a position to exercise complete control over which transactions appear on the blockchain and which miners reap mining rewards. They could keep 100% of the mining profits to themselves if they so chose. Bitcoin is currently an expensive distributed database under the control of a single entity, albeit one whose maintenance requires constantly burning energy -- worst of all worlds.
‘Some people might say that this is a sensational claim. It's not. The main pillar of the Bitcoin narrative was decentralized trust. That narrative has now collapsed.’
- See more at: http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/13/time-for-a-hard-bitcoin-fork/#sthash.bAdJcQtO.dpuf
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‘Piketty’s method of doing economics involves frequent grand proclamations about “social justice” and economic “evolutions,” but he offers no analyses of the dynamics of individual decision-making, often referred to as “microeconomics,” that should be central to the issues he raises.’
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Isango Ensemble, Mozart’s Magic Flute, Oct 12, Broad Stage, Santa Monica, California
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“Isango Ensemble - The Magic Flute
SUN / OCT 12, 2014 / 4PM
From Sir Ian McKellen to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, everyone is raving about Isango Ensemble, the South African company making its Southern California debut at The Broad Stage. Without a string section in site, Mozart's fairy-tale opera about love and redemption is boldly re-imagined-South African style! Winner of the Olivier Award for "Best Musical Revival in London" and co-produced by Eric Abraham, Isango's The Magic Flute is a dizzying array of marimbas, swirling dancers, and brightly patterned costumes. The twenty singers, many of who come from Cape Town's surrounding townships, pack enough vocal energy to raise the roof, and leave you with "a rare sense of life-enhancing joy" (Sunday Times, UK). Be the first to experience this international box office hit when it makes its rare appearance stateside.
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Interview with writer Caleb Monroe on the relationship between magicians and spies. Caleb is writting a new illustrated book, Cloak (probably out in September 2014), telling stories about a magician-spy. There’s a lot in this interview about creative process and how to combine research with writing.
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Patrick E. McLean’s five-minute talk on Where Do Ideas Come From? - the source of the quotation from Francis of Assisi at the top of this page. Thanks to Lara Ewing Himber for introducing me to the work of McLean.
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There are beautiful, wild forces within us.
Let them turn the mills inside
and fill sacks that feed even heaven.
-Francis of Assisi
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Patrick Cox’s presentation, The Curse of the Achemist, is available at Mauldin Economics. Patrick is a remarkably interesting and capable researcher of advances in technology that may benefit us.
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Rising Tide Capital Inc.: “Our programs support women, minorities, immigrants and other traditionally marginalized populations to start and grow successful businesses. By investing in the entrepreneurial spirit that already exists in distressed communities, we can make a lasting difference.” There is an interview with founder, Alfa Demmellash, on their home page.
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Here's our [Startup Cities] complete statement on the El Salvador ZEDE proposal:
"The use of autonomous municipalities is an important technology for the economic growth and reform of countries like El Salvador. Pursuing reform with the Startup Cities approach is a big opportunity for countries around the world.
“It's important that we don't forget that a Startup City is more complex and includes more elements than traditional free zones. For us, the most important thing is that all governments involved maintain the integrity of the Startup Cities approach. Startup Cities are not zones only for business, nor are they 'zonas francas' focused on tax policy.
“Startup Cities need sufficient autonomy to experiment with law, security, social services, and administrative processes to empower the citizens of the nation. Competition and the creation of multiple zones is extremely important for the health and success of Startup Cities reform. More than one zone is necessary for the fundamental effects of the Startup Cities approach.
As always, we'll maintain our independence from the ZEDE projects while closely watching their progress. Our goal remains to maintain the integrity of the Startup Cities approach."
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Inequality: Static vs. Dynamic:
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Static inequality is bad. Dynamic inequality is good. Static inequality requires government power devoted to preserving the monopolistic advantages of a ruling class; dynamic inequality arises from widespread, diverse, unpredictable learning, resulting in continuous creative destruction and the reallocation of power and wealth characteristic of free markets. -leif
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Apple’s regulation of the quality of apps in the App Store begins with this clear statement of boundaries:
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Drug companies have begun to share their clinical trial data.
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The Australian quick fix to state protectionism -- mutual product recognition, followed by voluntary harmonization by mutual agreement -- provided a quick 5 to 7 per cent boost to interstate trade. It would be a natural and quick kick-start to realm union and inter-Anglosphere free trade.
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The real reason why the UK should leave the EU is not that it is bad per se, although on the balance it is. It is that it stands in the way of something better.
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British Eurosceptics would do well to examine how NAFTA works in some detail, both as a model for the UK's post-Brexit ties with Europe, and in consideration of post-Brexit NAFTA membership for the UK. It has achieved a very close cross-border integration between the US and Canada without a customs union or any of the harmonization measures that the EU deems essential for cross-border trade. This is partly because both the US and Canada had left many product standard issues up to voluntary coordination within the private sector, so much voluntary harmonization pre-existed NAFTA. It was post-9-11 security measures that started to reverse cross-border integration. Fine-tuning the relationship without needless erosion of sovereignty is an art, not a science, but it continues.
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Sooner or later an intelligent Eurosceptic message was going to start reaching British Asians and other non-European ethnic groups. After all it is natural for them to think of themselves as British, but self-evidently absurd to think of themselves as non-European Europeans. In any event, many of these immigrant-descended people would be the first to take advantage of closer ties and freer movement among Anglosphere nations, since they seem to be the most likely to have close relatives scattered throughout the great cities of the English-speaking world. In that they are natural Anglospherists.
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Excellent article by Yuval Levin, on solving social welfare problems, employing a freeorder point-of-view:
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The knowledge needed to solve great social problems is dispersed, fine grained, and impossible to gather at any single point or time. It is rich with contradictions that can be resolved only by experience. In this article, Yuval Levin explores what that means for the social welfare policies of the U.S. -leif
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K. Eric Drexler’s recent, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, is a fascinating & important book. Drexler asks us to compare these two statements:
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Digital information processing technologies employ nanoscale electronic devices that operate at high frequencies and produce patterns of bits.
APM-based [atomically precise manufacturing] materials processing technologies employ nanoscale mechanical devices that operate at high frequencies and produce patterns of atoms.
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Bruno Leoni: “The Italian law scholar Bruno Leoni was a champion of law over legislation. In his classic Freedom and the Law (1961), he presented the case for organic legal systems that adjust to human behavior and against legal systems that attempt to adjust human behavior to fit the needs and desires of the politically powerful.” http://www.cato.org/events/bruno-leoni-101
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Spencer Heath MacCallum: Papers of Spencer Heath to be domiciled at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala City . Heath’s book, Citadel, Market, and Altar … “Some Observations on the Nature of Public Enterprise,” McNally, 1942:
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The papers of Spencer Heath are being collected and edited by his grandson, Spencer Heath MacCallum, and will be domiciled at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala City, and a new edition of Heath’s visionary book, Citadel, Market, and Altar, is being prepared by MacCallum. Heath’s American Propeller Manufacturing Company propellers are part of the display at the exit of the Early Flight Gallery http://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/early-flight in the Mall Museum, at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.. One “Paragon” propleeer manufactured by Heath for use in WWI, is exhibited at the Air Museum at the Milwauke, Wisconsin airport.
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Spencer writes: “Interesting bit of trivia from Spencer Heath Archive Item 2733 that I've just transcribed: In Heath's will of 1934, regarding a large bequest he left to the Henry George movement, he specified that they should use these gifts "not for any teaching or agitation against private property in land.." I remember his telling me about this once. He hoped it would get them to thinking. Otherwise how could they spend the money.”
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Regarding Raymond V. McNally’s paper on public enterprise: “I was delighted to discover this apparently unpublished article among my granddad's papers. Amazing that it was actually written by a Georgist. We know from a reported comment by the director of the Henry George School that he understood Heath's ideas well, so he may have been a convert, perhaps the only one in all those years. The article has now been published in Libertarian Papers: Raymond V. McNally Archives
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— 26May14, Mon, Memorial Day —
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Team Rubicon: “Today, we take pause to remember our brothers and sisters who are no longer with us, lost in war or here at home. We remember them by continuing to serve. We remember them by helping the communities of Faulkner County, AR and Beaver Crossing, NE recover from the tornadoes that hit the South and Midwest. And today, we also give our thanks to you; for your generous support.”:
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Honoring the wisdom of grandmothers - Emi MacCallum’s art installation, Chihuahua, Mexico.
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History, 20th C.: idealists learn they are being used by tyranny: John R. Dos Passos, Emma Goldman, Arthur Koestler, Alexander Berkman, Whittaker Chambers, Paul Johnson (Stalin, Spain, gold):
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The emergence of freeorder will be, must be, driven by idealists (practical ones among them, we may hope). It is crucial to understand how idealists have been used, and consumed, by tyrants to build empires. This time we idealists have tools resistant to the spells cast by aspiring rulers.
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One of the great events in the emergence of freeorder was the discovery, during 1920-40, by intelligent and influential idealistic people that they were being cynically used by Communists, and in some cases by their Fascist blood brothers. Jim Bennett (America 3.0) recently returned from a visit to Hungary, where he visited a museum of tyranny with an exhibit titled, “The Year of Changing Clothes,” about the time during which astute and lucky Nazis became, by a change of mental and physical clothes, Communists. Either ideology fit them perfectly.
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Paul Johnson, on Stalin’s use of the Spanish Civil War to acquire gold & comment by Jim Bennett …
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“At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War , Spain had one of the world’s largest gold reserves, seven hundred tons worth $788 million (or £ 162 million). Stalin, instead of supplying arms on credit, as the Germans and Italians did to the nationalists, insisted on being paid in gold. In the end the Republicans handed over two-thirds of their gold to Stalin, who thus had no financial incentive to ensure they won, unlike the Germans and the Italians, who were owed over $500 million. Once Stalin was sure the Spanish government’s gold reserve was exhausted and their currency worthless, he lost interest in the war. It is a curious fact that Stalin, whose interest in economics was essentially theoretical, and who never bothered to open his own pay envelopes (hundreds of which were discovered in his desk drawers after his death in 1953), was always interested in gold. He regularly visited the vaults of the Soviet gold reserve in Moscow, just as the Daughters of the American Revolution conducted an annual inspection of Fort Knox.” -Johnson, Paul (2014-02-11). Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer (Kindle Locations 584-591).
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Jim Bennett’s comment: “Re Stalin and the Spanish gold, I would suggest adding the autobiography of Gen. Valentin Gonzalez, El Campesino, of Pete Seeger Spanish Civil War song fame. For anybody reasonably familiar with the history of Communism or the USSR there are no surprises in this autobiography. However I always had an interest in the Spanish Civil War and the author, Valentin Gonzalez, known as ‘El Campesino’, was one of the major figures on the Republican side. What I found most interesting, aside from his conclusion that Stalin had from the start expected the Republicans to lose, was the story of the major Spanish Communist figures in the USSR after the end of the war. Gonzalez himself got sent to the Gulag. These are all the heroes Pete Seeger always sings about. Of the four heroic generals Seeger mentioned, one, Enrique Lister, promptly had the other three sent to the Gulag on arrival in Spain in 1939.” -El Campesino, the book: http://archive.org/stream/elcampesinolifea007506mbp/elcampesinolifea007506mbp_djvu.txt"
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Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia.
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Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth.
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Whittaker Chambers, Witness — excruciatingly honest, beautifully written book . much about farming.
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The God that Failed, ed. Crossman, with lead essay by Arthur Koestler.
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Leon Louw was on whammedia yesterday speaking on “Creating a shareholder, home-owner democracy” in South Africa. Louw has been doing remarkable work in South Africa through his Free Market Foundation of South Africa (fmf): www.freemarketfoundation.com
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Also from fmf, “The dogma of our times,” by Frank Chodorov, a truly thoughtful man.
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The dogma of our times, Frank Chodorov
(This policy bulletin is an extract from the book Liberal Tide by Jim Peron, published in 2003 by the Institute for Liberal Values.) Section 4, Liberalism vs. socialism
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The present disposition is to liquidate any distinction between state and society, conceptually or institutionally. The state is society; the social order is indeed an appendage of the political establishment, depending on it for sustenance, health, education, communications, and all things coming under the head of “the pursuit of happiness”. In theory, taking college textbooks on economics and political science for authority, the integration is about as complete as words can make it. In the operation of human affairs, despite the fact that lip service is rendered to the concept of inherent personal rights, the tendency to call upon the state for the solution of all the problems of life shows how far we have abandoned the doctrine of rights, with its correlative of self-reliance, and have accepted the state as the reality of society. It is this actual integration, rather than the theory, that marks the twentieth century off from its predecessors.
One indication of how far the integration has gone is the disappearance of any discussion of the state as state – a discussion that engaged the best minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The inadequacies of a particular regime, or its personnel, are under constant attack, but there is no faultfinding with the institution itself. The state is all right, by common agreement, and it would work perfectly if the “right” people were at the helm. It does not occur to most critics of the New Deal that all its deficiencies are inherent in any state, under anybody’s guidance, or that when the political establishment garners enough power a demagogue will sprout. The idea that this power apparatus is indeed the enemy of society, that the interests of these institutions are in opposition, is simply unthinkable. If it is brought up, it is dismissed as “old-fashioned”, which it is: until the modern era, it was an axiom that the state bears constant watching, that pernicious proclivities are built into it.
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flow, zone: “It is the rapturous abandon of a virtuoso violinist's solo performance. Or an athlete pushing their body to the limit. Gen X-ers know it as ''being in the zone''. For those in the positive psychology movement, it is simply called ''flow''. In this state, nothing else matters. We are so immersed in what we are doing that time stops and we are completely in the moment.” -Jill Stark, The Syndey Morning Herald: Finding your flow
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See the writings of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Michael Saint Michael), now at Claremont Graduate University, in California.
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I used the word, magic, for something precisely or nearly the same in the explanation of Explorers Foundation on our home page: http://explorersfoundation.org
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I may replace magic with flow. It has now become a word in common use, but that was not the case years ago when I was groping for the right word.
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A novel about the beginning of the cold war: Armageddon, by Leon Uris, covers the Berlin Airlift, 1948-49, and the events leading to its undertaking.
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