Freeorder Capital Commons — an idea in evolution

Those who wish to preserve freeorder cannot permanently leave the ownership of the future to those who do not. — this is the reason for Freeorder Capital Commons.

Freeorder Capital Commons is a leaderless emergent network of networks.

Participation in this network is managed on the model of the 1921 Club •••

Leaderless, dynamic, self-correcting, multiple sources of reputation holding, collaborative, competitive, effective.

Rapid Emergence of Freeorder requires a large increase in the number of ∮forge (integrating forges)

See the note, toward the end of this page, on Anthony Fisher’s Buxted Chickens, an instance of the retention of ownership in a significant wealth producing innovation that became a source of income used to advance liberty.

There are two such instances currently connected with this ∮forge. Let me know if you would like to become an owner. Contact info is on this page or just txt the number found above. -ls

‘So when I first encountered the term “Chitlin’ Circuit” in the pages of Lewis Walker and Benjamin Wilson’s book Black Eden: The Idlewild Community, something clicked sideways in my head before it clicked into place.

I had to sit with the idea that this humble, discarded food had lent its name to an entire underground infrastructure of Black American genius. That collision between the domestic and the historic, between my grandmother’s stove and Duke Ellington’s tour bus, is where this essay begins.’ —dms

‘The curiosity surrounding my father’s family roots in Alabama has been quietly stirring within me for months, and here was a book rooted in the very soil I had been trying to understand. As I moved through the pages of this extraordinary 338-page work by journalists Carol Jenkins and Elizabeth Gardner Hines, the history of Black Alabama stopped being abstract and became intimate.’ —dm scott

Max Borders, “The Nazi Had a Point” ••• & “The Molecule at the End of Politics”

‘Philosopher Carl Schmitt called liberalism out, and rightly so. Despite his Nazi past, we have to take Schmitt’s ideas seriously—not so much because he welcomed conflict, though he did, but because he believed that a political order that refuses to identify its enemies will eventually be destroyed. That implies that if you fail to know your enemies, you and your way of life risk being vanquished.’

Comment: Fierce conflicts within "The Republic of Science" (see Polanyi) occur frequently and to the ultimate advantage of all of us. Although there is strong desire to prevail, to defeat opposition, shared by all parties to the conflict, what is missing that would make the conflict political in Schmitt's sense is intent to physically dominate the loser. The essence of politics is struggle to control the use of force, to acquire and maintain the ability to threaten physical constraint or harm to those who disagree. We should refuse to use the word "political" to describe all disagreement — to fail to do so is to blur distinction between civil disagreement and war. Unlimited politics is essentially a war of all against all. -ls

Max writes: “Pluralism cannot extend unlimited legal protection and rights to those who organize to abolish legal protection and rights.”

The Rise and Fall of Western Civilisation ••• Professor James Hankins: “I quit Harvard to teach the truth.”

Professor Hankins is interviewed by Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster of Triggernometry •••

Ayan Hirsi Ali ••• — Essays from her substack, Restoring the West •••

“The BBC Betrayed Britain—and Britain Is Walking Away” •••

‘Years of scandal, selective journalism, and ideological activism have shattered the public trust that once made the BBC indispensable.’

'“The Dearbornization of America” •••

‘Five conditions turned Dearborn into a Muslim-majority enclave. Other American cities are following the same course’

Ted Nugent posted this about the unvaccinated, on X, 25 Aug 26

Nugent is reported to have: sold over 12.9 million albums … four albums sold over 2 million copies each.

Open by Design: Hiero and the Future of Trust ••• 14 May 26

Hiero is 41 million lines of code donated by Hedera to the Linux Foundation Distributed Trust. This is a good illustration of freeorder thinking. -ed

May Chan, CEO of HashPack, on HOL Online, Agentic Economy at about 17:30 •••

Virginia Postrel: thoughts on constitutions governing AI

‘I was invited to San Francisco to join a small group discussion of Claude’s constitution. Our group of five guests included Tyler Cowen, who wrote a post about his experience and recommendations and posted a followup email from a reader. I concur with his characterization of the discussion as “high quality” and with the general direction of his recommendations. There was a consensus, including from some of the Anthropic representatives, that Claude’s constitution as it currently exists is too Philosopher King and not sufficiently bottom-up. Participants also frequently noted Claude’s lack of learning from social interactions, a fundamental element in human learning, including the formation of moral norms.’

My question (ls): How apply the definition of freeorder to the governance of AIs?

freeorder is quest-enabling balances among spontaneous and designed orders.

Where quest is taken to indicate adventure emotionally significant to humans, singularly and together in given, found, and made collectives. We speak of collaborative composition of the symphony of humanity, a symphony of symphonies, or perhaps, “a concert of civilizations” … in which each of us may be happy to be a note, rightly sounded in place and time.

The tacit knowing of humanity is a forever beyond the reach of AI which rests on words and selective instrument readings. The sum of all wordless tacit knowing dwarfs everything written. That limit may yield to another if ever comes a time when computation and biology are fully one. -ls

The Tacit Dimension by Michael Polanyi

Elinor Ostrom: “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems” ••• published in 2010

Thanks to Mercatus Center ••• for publishing this remarkable essay.

I have copied Ostrom’s article to Explorers Foundation’s archive because I couldn’t find any way to simply present it on screen without having it instead automatically download into a “Downloads” folder (directory) without appearing on screen. Mercatus, please let me know if it’s not ok to have this on our computer. -ls

See also “Polycentricity: From Polanyi to Ostrom, and Beyond” ••• [ssrn] by Paul Dragos Aligica, George Mason University - Mercatus Center, and Vlad Tarko, University of Arizona - Department of Political Economy and Moral Science

‘The article overviews and elaborates the concept of polycentricity, defined as a structural feature of social systems of many decision centers having limited and autonomous prerogatives and operating under an overarching set of rules. The article starts by introducing the concept as it was advanced by Michael Polanyi and developed by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It continues introducing possible instances of polycentricity as well as related notions, as part of an attempt to further elaborate the concept through a concept design approach that systematically applies the logic of necessary and sufficient conditions. The article concludes by arguing that the polycentricity conceptual framework is not only a robust analytical structure for the study of complex social phenomena, but is also a challenging method of drawing non-ad hoc analogies between different types of self-organizing complex social systems.’

The Regulation of Medical Research and Practice

Question: Could regulation be improved by polycentricity? Anyone (or a representative) seeking medical information or treatment would consult their own preferred regulatory authority. Beyond the usual laws against fraud there would be no need for a monopoly of governmentally enforced regulation of anything medical. This would solve the problem of regulatory capture and corruption. Perfectly? No. But today’s political methods are catastrophic.

Brownstone Institute: “No More Secrets: This past week, President Trump issued a sensible executive order on the childhood vaccine schedule, one that shaves off unnecessary injections and plays it safer.” — 16 Aug 26

‘The growing skepticism toward Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Government, Big Media, and all associated with this gang is not partisan anymore. What used to be a concern of the New Left is now denounced as an obsession of the New Right, as if any of this makes any sense. What they will not admit is that regular people from all walks of life have joined the struggle to end this industrial hegemony and its drive for biological colonialism.’

Gayle Pergamit ••• and her Agua Via ••• colleagues now make up the Environmental Advisory Board of Healthspan Action Coalition (HSAC) ••• Overview ••• — see their Leadership page (about 50% down).

‘The Translational Longevity Summit is a five-day convergence of the world's leading minds in longevity science, regenerative medicine, patient advocacy, and clinical innovation’

Gayle Pergamit is scheduled to speak on the critical importance of improving the quality of water.

‘Three works on soulcraft have come down to us from antiquity under Aristotle’s name: the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics, and the Great Ethics (a.k.a. Magna Moralia). Scholars dispute the authenticity of the Great Ethics, which paradoxically is much shorter than the others, but the first two are accepted as authentic. For my “prelude and fugue” about Aristotle, I’ve been translating the Eudemian Ethics (the lesser-known “little brother” of the Nicomachean Ethics) in order to better understand Aristotle’s perspective on the good life. To make this work-in-progress accessible to interested readers, I’ve decided to publish it serially here, which means I’ll post one short chapter a week for the next 79 weeks (typically on Mondays). These will be my draft translations, subject to change as I harmonize and improve my renderings of the Greek text. I hope that some folks will find this to be a useful exercise. Although I’ll refrain from providing explanatory notes on each chapter, questions and comments are welcome.’

‘In the sacred precinct on the island of Delos, he who declared his opinion, distinguishing what’s good and what’s beautiful and what’s enjoyable as not all existing in the same thing, inscribed the following verse at the entryway to the temple of Leto:

An Aristotelian Glossary ••• by Peter Saint-Andre

Roger Kimball: “What Schopenhauer Got Wrong ••• The gloomy German saw deeply into life’s tragedy. He tended to overlook its joy” 31 Aug 2026

‘Seeing an elderly friend or relative on his death bed is a sobering experience. At first, you might think it confirms Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of life. If you step back, however, you see that, sad though such spectacles are, they serve in the end to reaffirm the beauty of life, of which evanescence is an inextricable element. I tried to say something about this limitation of Schopenhauer’s teaching in this review essay.’

See also Aspects of Wagner ••• [amazon] by Brian Magee

Schiff’s lectures ••• (illustrated on piano) about each of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas.

Thanks to The Guardian ••• for keeping these endlessly fascinating talks on their website!

Carrie-Anne Biondi: “Harry Potter, Howard Roark, Albert Camus, and Viktor Frankl: On What Suffering Cannot Touch” •••

‘What is your Patronus? For those not familiar with the fictional Harry Potter universe, a Patronus is a charm you cast for summoning your guardian spirit animal. It protects you from Dementors, which are demented torturers that symbolize depression and despair. Victims of Dementors suffer a fate worse than death, namely, having their souls sucked out of them, leaving them as nothing more than a quivering husk of a human being.

Mahyar Tousi (Iran>London>Florida), a recent refugee from the U.K. now broadcasting from a Tousi.tv studio in Florida, is an essential source of information and insight, especially about Iran. His views are in close alignment with Freeorder.

Sarah Paine (24 years at Naval War College)

“Why Putin and Xi can't escape geography” •••

‘In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine lays out the geopolitical framework that has shaped global power for two thousand years: the divide between continental empires that pursue security through territorial conquest (China, Russia) and maritime powers that pursue prosperity through trade (Britain, the US). Recorded first in Paine's 2025 series, this is the framework that all her other lectures build on.’

China is favoring the “Recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector” — I have never heard this simple description before! Crony capitalism, yes; but crony sector, no. A lesson in effective naming.

Martin Armstrong: How Europe Destroyed Itself & What Comes Next •••

Armstrong describes himself as a trader, not an economist. That seems to name an important difference.

Alan Macfarlane: “Why Chinese youth are turning to an 84-year-old Cambridge professor for support” ••• by Caroline Lin, South China Post, 15 Aug 26

Books by Alan Macfarlane •••

‘This year’s theme, Dismantling Dictatorship, reflected a simple truth: authoritarian regimes are built on fear, myth, and captured institutions, but they can be dismantled through courage, truth, and deliberate action.’

“Pavel Durov in Conversation with Thor Halvorssen” •••

Peter Robinson, interview ••• Supreme Court Clarence Thomas regarding Thomas Sowell

‘When Associate Justice to the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas first encountered Thomas Sowell’s work as a young law student, he rejected it.

Transaction Privacy, Governability, and Trust - in Distributed Ledger systems

Carl Mikael Björn ••• comments on “Nothing to see here” ••• a post on Hedera’s “The Consensus” ••• on LinkedIn

‘What stood out to me is that transaction privacy solves a very specific problem. It determines who can see information. Institutions also need to understand how commitments come into existence. Over the years, I’ve found that the difficult questions rarely appear after settlement. They appear beforehand. Who had the authority to initiate the transaction? What conditions had to be satisfied? What assumptions was the decision based on? If those assumptions changed, who could still intervene before the transaction became irreversible? That was one of the observations that led me to develop Governable Trust Architecture. Cryptography can protect confidentiality exceptionally well. Governability is about preserving an organisation’s ability to understand, direct and intervene as decisions emerge across people, software, institutions and increasingly autonomous systems. I don’t see these as competing ideas. They solve different problems. Privacy protects information. Governability protects an institution’s ability to exercise authority over the commitments it makes. I suspect both will become increasingly important as tokenised financial infrastructure moves into mainstream institutional use.’

What’s Not Broken — a book that should exist

Key question: Why is X not broken? Example:

Why is Interstate-70 open through Glenwood Canyon?

The Glenwood Recovery Series, Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT)

Some say “Government produces nothing.” Watch and see what you think.

The above example happens to be about a government provided service, but the question of why something is not broken applies to everything.

Take any simple thing you depend on without giving it thought, and ask “Why is this not broken?” Trace the chain of things that must happen if that thing is to keep working. When I do this, astonishment never ends.

Milton Friedman — “The Power of Choice”, a video

The Power of Choice: The Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman

Free to Choose Network •••

An obscure pattern in the emergence of Freeorder: Kropotkin, Inessa Armand, Beatrice Webb, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Anthony Fisher

Memoirs of a Revolutionist ••• by Peter Kropotkin

Lenin’s Mistress: The Life of Inessa Armand ••• [archive.org] by Michael Pearson

To properly recognize Armand the word Comrade might have been used rather than Mistress. Her intelligence, vision, ability to inspire and organize, and artistic sensibility were of high order. She was perhaps the most powerful woman in revolutionary Russia. “Mistress” might sell books but it fails otherwise.

Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership, 1948 ••• [archive.org]

The ideal of the London School of Economics, more tuned to accurate description than to dogmatic theory, left room for people like Hayek who were not in agreement with their own collectivist principles. There are remarkable passages in Beatrice Webb’s memoirs that illustrate her devotion to truth, and her subtle understanding that what she accepted as truth was shaped and limited by many factors beyond her control. See especially her entry for July 1884 beginning on page 117.

Ludwig von Mises gave Hayek the foundation of economic understanding to allow him to resist the overwhelming forces advocating compulsory organization of society by experts that dominated Britain, and Europe in the 1930s.

Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 ••• [amazon] by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjorge Klausinger

An explanation of Hayek’s employment by the London School of Economics will be found in chapter 16.

Anthony Fisher, Champion of Liberty ••• [amazon] by Gerald Frost — “The first biography of Sir Antony Fisher - Battle of Britain hero, chicken farmer, self-made millionaire and founder of massively influential free-market think tanks around the world.”

F. A. Harper, an economics professor who had left Cornell after his classroom use of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom met with disapproval, met Fisher at FEE in 1952, and took him to the Cornell Department of Agricultural Economics to introduce him to advanced chicken farming. Fisher was inspired and returned to England to create Buxted Chickens, a company which earned the capital to found the Institute of Economic Studies in London in 1955. See Anthony Fisher, Champion of Liberty

Foreword by Milton Friedman •••

Condensed as a free 45-page pdf ••• published by Institute of Economic Affairs now on the website of Mannkal Economic Education Foundation, Australia

A Turning Point? Bill Maher’s “Real Time”, Friday, August 31, 2026: “New Rule: Commie By Your Name | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)” •••

The vaccine industry has largely escaped scrutiny because of the belief that “vaccines are safe and effective”—a slogan that treats every vaccine as an identical good and discourages any examination of how vaccines are actually made or how sharply their individual risks and benefits differ.

Here I will review the foundational principles of vaccine design and the clinical implications that I believe are essential for understanding why these products so often fail to live up to their promises and have major safety issues.

Building upon this, I will show how the actual risks and benefits of a vaccine can be calculated (something medicine almost never computes) and why many commonly administered ones rest on very shaky ground that makes it hard to ever justify giving them to anyone.

I will also review numerous core principles of immunology that virtually never enter the vaccine discussion and help to explain why vaccines cause so many different immunological issues.

With this framework, I will provide a guide to assist you in determining the risks and benefit of each vaccine on the CDC schedule and tools for identifying the most toxic and unnecessary ones.

Medicine’s religious focus on vaccines has covered up the fact many safe natural alternatives to vaccines exist which can prevent a variety of complex illnesses. Likewise, much in the same way a few vaccines have been used to treat challenging chronic conditions (e.g., cancer, diabetes, shingles, fibromyalgia), forgotten natural therapies have been as well that both eliminate chronic debilitating illnesses, and provide completely safe methods to make populations immune to problematic infectious diseases.

See mwd’s substack for articles on the use of DMSO for healing: The Forgotten Side of Medicine •••

Example: “DMSO Heals the Lungs and Cures Chronic Respiratory Diseases:

Markets Permit the Fine-Grained Competitive Distribution of Risk

No one party need assume an entire risk burden. It can be broken into small parts, each separately priced. The distribution of risk should be seen as a constantly emerging chaotic order (Dee Hock’s Chaord •••), or, in many cases, a freeorder (when the test of service to quest is satisfactory).

Edward Dowd: ‘Absolutely Surreal: Anthropic CEO's Wife & "Sounding Board" Once Pitched a Visionary Porn Company to Jeffrey Epstein’ •••

‘Strip out the AI-related spending and what does U.S. growth look like? Not pretty. The stock market’s concentration in a handful of AI-adjacent names has reached levels that would have been called reckless in any prior cycle. Semiconductors alone are a comically large slice of the indices. We’re told this time is different because the technology is transformative. Fair enough, I happen to believe the underlying tech is powerful and will eventually deliver real productivity. Just like the internet did but the internet also produced a multi-year capital destruction event first, after which the real winners emerged from the wreckage in the aftermath.’

Lindy Li: Someone who will become important in U.S. politics

Interviewed by Dave Rubin, 26 Aug 2026

“Dave Rubin's Political Awakening” ••• interviewed by Alex Manning and Nick Gillespie of Reason, 29 Mar 2017

“Tulsi Gabbard Unlocked a CIA Vault …” •••

James Howard Kunstler interviews Jeffrey Tucker, and Mel K

Shannon Ewing, articles from Sodality •••

Small Rooms: The Revolution will not be reel’ed

Refrain the Reflex: On generosity and the imperative pause

How Do You Sense Your Own Integrity: Faint breadcrumbs toward resting in our best selves (voice only)

Transition Soup: For everyone whose ground is moving

Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, “Real Food, Real Health” ••• a day with Brownstone Institute at Polyface Farm

A remarkable convergence of character and mind is occurring here, as foreseen in my essay, “Thoughts on Wizards” ••• -ls

*—— Elements of Freeorder - fragments of a book in progress ——*

The Pursuit of Resonance, a word used to name “the expectation of magic”

Referencing Peter Saint-Andre’s translation of Aristotle, I.1, above:

The pursuit of resonance is the key to fulfillment, because, it engages Being in ways that could not be foreseen. As quest pulls threads out of what’s hidden within & without (of self) into the light of awareness a story continues to grow. To live a never ending story so integrally made is an important part of fulfillment. And, utilization of freeorder, consciously or not, is key to the fruitful pursuit of resonance (the expectation of magic, i.e. where a time of magic later becomes a perfect story element). -ls

Welded Plates

Engines of Emergence … ∮forge (hundreds of them) . a network fabric . sparse connections, but millions of them … creates a loom of looms: weaving a fabric of expectations in multi-dimensional spaces … inviting travelers to compose stories … and share them …