Capital & Freeorder — the achievement of all this took a lot of capital

In January 1884, the Fabian Society ••• was created to move the balance between spontaneous and designed orders strongly in the direction of design. Crucially, of design forcibly imposed upon the inhabitants of all jurisdictions, from town and county, to region, to nation. In 1895 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw, members of the Fabians, created the London School of Economics (LSE), surprisingly but deliberately created to allow for the possibility that their thesis about the best future might not be entirely correct. See Our Partnership by Beatrice Webb.

‘The Fabian Society … grew out of the Fellowship of the New Life. Founding members included Edward Pease, Frank Podmore, Hubert Bland, and Edith Nesbit. Thomas Davidson founded the earlier Fellowship, while George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb became influential Fabians later’ —https://fabians.org.uk/about-us/our-history/

This same model of an ideal world was manifest in action, not only by the English, but by Mussolini in Italy, the New Deal in the USA, the Soviets in Russia, the National Socialists in Germany, much later by Mao in China, and in developing countries all over the world looking for a good path up, and/or a scheme to despoil their own people. Most such modes of organization produce little freeorder: each of them requires a massive excess of designed order and deficiency of spontaneous order. And, the whole point of freeorder, individual quest and voluntarily agreed up group quest, is left out of consideration in favor of devotion to the general welfare.

Experts who aspire to positions of authority in such humanitarian ventures look forward to being well compensated, and eventually make up networks of interlocked interests almost impossible to overcome.

All over the world, in each of these dominions, thugs, now enabled to climb through the ranks to high authority, chortled, “You fools, you have built a ladder beyond our power to imagine or make; now we climb it to places from which we have power to control your lives absolutely.”

It is important for advocates of freeorder to understand that the people who built ladders to political/administrative power were not fools. They were persons of high ability and good intentions, who imagined themselves to be doing great things in service to humanity.

“Practical” men, who took advantage of the new regulatory powers assumed that they would do well no matter what philosophy of social ordering prevailed, and so didn’t take time to think about what was happening, and sometimes scorned those who did.

What those persons did not understand was that, as in biology so in politics, you become what you eat. Not all those remodeled by a diet of regulatory power were pleased with what they became - but then, reality is harsh, so they adjusted to necessity. As a consequence of many such adjustments the imposition of rapacious idiocy upon the people has galloped ahead.

However, doubt about this rush to the comprehensive design of human affairs began to result in the formation of networks devoted to shifting the balance of kinds of order away from extreme design to better balances with spontaneous order.

Indications of a different way of thought, appearing before 1938

1733: Voltaire’s Letters on the English

1767: Adam Ferguson captured something essential in one phrase:

“The result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”

From his Essay on the History of Civil Society ••• 1767 —see Part III, Section II: “The history of political establishments.”

1921: Hayek begins his association with Ludwig von Mises, in Vienna

“Hayek and Mises” ••• by Richard M. Ebeling, in PhilArchive •••

1931-50: Hayek was a professor at the London School of Economics.

Question: Did the Fabian’s model of education to inspire social change influence the advice Hayek gave to Anthony Fisher that led Fisher to create think tanks instead of going into politics?

Early organization to advance freeorder (under different names)

1938: Colloque Walter Lippmann ••• [nous network], Paris, organized by Louis Rougier

“In a crude way I had discerned the inherent difficulty of the planned economy

but without the help I have received from you and from Professor von Mises,

I would never would have developed the argument.” —Walter Lippmann to F. A. Hayek (March 12, 1937), quoted in “Liberalism in Crisis and the Promise of a Reconstructed Liberalism” (2019) ••• by Peter Boettke and Rosolina Candela, both of the Department of Economics and F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Mercatus Center ••• at George Mason University.

The book chosen to focus the Colloque and provide a name for it: The Good Society ••• (1937) by Walter Lippman

1938: Lewis H. Brown founded the American Enterprise Association, which became the American Enterprise Institute •••

‘The American Enterprise Association (AEA) was founded in 1938 in New York City by a group of business leaders led by Lewis H. Brown, then a prominent industrial executive associated with Johns-Manville. It was created to promote understanding and defense of competitive private enterprise amid expanding New Deal-era federal economic intervention.’ ••• [wikipedia]

1944: nephew of William Volker (1859-1947), became head of the Volker Fund (with capital from Volker’s Kansas City home furnishings business.

About William Volker, creator of the wealth that allowed Luhnow to execute his vision: myweb.fsu.edu/mmcvicar/PDFs/Articles/2011-McVicar-AggressivePhilanthropy.pdf

After WWII:

1946: Leonard Read - Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) •••

Read had been a student of liberty while leading the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. He was a friend of Ayn Rand’s and other leaders in individualist free market thought, Under the leadership of Harold Luhnow Volker Fund provided some of the startup money.

1947: First Mont Pelerin Society meeting, in Switzerland, organized by F. A. Hayek.

1953: Anthony Fisher starts Buxted Chicken, which provided funds for what he did later.

1955: Anthony Fisher - Founds Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) ••• London

1960: Pierre F. Goodrich - Founds Liberty Fund •••

1961-62: F. A. Harper - Founds Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) •••

In July 1961 Harper was senior research economist at the Volker Fund when Murray Rothbard addressed this memo to him: “What Is To Be Done?” (no doubt a hat tip to Lenin and Cherneshevsky) ••• [mises.org]

William Volker died in 1947, but at that time his nephew Harold Luhnow was already leading the Volker Fund. In early 1962 the Volker Fund ceased operation and Harper lost his position there. He soon launched The Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). In 1978, after the final dissolution of Volker, the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, got the remaining millions.

1965: Reed Coleman founded the Sand County Foundation to help protect the land around Aldo Leopold’s “Shack” in Wisconsin.

1977: Ed Crane & Charles Koch found CATO, with an assist from Rothbard.

1978: Robert W. Poole Jr., Manuel “Manny” Klausner, and Tibor Machan founded the Reason Foundation in 1978. They had already taken over Reason magazine and created the nonprofit foundation to give the publication and their policy-research work a more durable organizational home.

1981: Antony Fisher - Atlas Institute for Economic Research, USA; today Atlas Network reports affiliation with over 500 liberty oriented Action- and Think-tanks working in almost every country.

2003: Leif Smith founded Explorers Foundation with initial support from Edward M. Warner, the geologist who discovered the Jonah Field (gas) in Wyoming, and participated in its development.

An interview with Ed Warner ••• by American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)

2026: Institute of Economic Affairs appoints Daniel Hannan Director General

IEA’s announcement: iea.org.uk/media/lord-hannan-of-kingsclere-to-become-institute-of-economic-affairs-director-general/

“Britain’s Inheritance of Freedom Is at Risk” ••• Hannan, June 2026

”Britain's Economic Crisis and the Path to Recovery” ••• interview

Now and Tomorrow:

What has been done so far amounts to building a supportive framework for a massive structure of market education to come. If, over a century, a few $billions (in present dollars) have been invested, it should be seen as a small investment compared to what must happen next. It is as if we have gotten to the stage where we have a primitive table of the elements, and now we are able to foresee how the coming age of industrial chemistry will transform the world. Or, we have established a foothold on a new continent and see that a trans-continental transport system is needed … and that it is now possible because we have learned to produce steel rails in quantity and at speed.

“Better Living Through Chemistry!” —> “Better Living Through Economics!”

Human Action by Ludwig von Mises — the first paragraph:

“Economics is the youngest of all sciences. ... The discovery of regularity in the sequence and interdependence of market phenomena went beyond the limits of the traditional system of learning. It conveyed knowledge which could be regarded neither as logic, mathematics, psychology physics, nor biology.”

Human Action is available from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in digital versions for immediate free download •••

If I were to choose a few books essential to the preparation of forge builders for their work of listening and acting on the edges of an emerging concert of civilizations, Human Action would be included. Mises showed us what is possible.

Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism ••• by Jörg Guido Hülsmann •••

The money to do this will be made up in large part of income received by people who understand freeorder and the importance of accelerating the Emergence of Freeorder. This will be new income received consequent to their early ownership of productive & profitable new technologies. A network of information that can lead to this ownership has not yet been evolved beyond a primitive state almost accidentally achieved. That network must now be purposively built.

For example, Agua Via is currently owned, in large part, by people who understand freeorder: A network of networks such as described above would help keep a significant part of the early ownership with investors who might later use the profits to build Freeorder.

To complement this positive approach to change, a negative approach is necessary, involving ways to limit the administrative state by gradually depriving it of money. What can not be funded cannot be done. Lack of money forces choice. Such cumulative deprivation of funding could be achieved by a politics that delivers advantage to office seekers who can find ways to limit the wealth extracted from the people.

“Lord Hannan [Daniel Hannan] of Kingsclere to become Institute of Economic Affairs Director General” ••• (2026, London)

‘Lord Hannan is one of the most compelling and widely read advocates for economic liberty and individual freedom in the English-speaking world. A historian, author, and former Member of the European Parliament, he has spent three decades making the intellectual case for the ideas the IEA was founded to promote. His nine books include the New York Times bestseller Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.’

Atlas Network’s “Freedom’s Champion” •••

Summer 2025 ••• “Live Free: The Freedom Movement’s Happy Warrior [Milton Friedman] Continues to Inspire”

Winter 2025 ••• “Defying Dictators: Heroes in Georgia Risk It All for Freedom in Europe”

Reports from an Atlas email on four affiliated organizations:

Latin America:

‘Freedom to Work, led by Instituto Liberal de São Paulo. The initiative removes excessive licensing requirements so that low-income entrepreneurs can operate legally and build more secure lives for their families. Its reforms now reach nearly 130 million Brazilians.’

Europe:

‘Turkey’s Freedom Research Association (FRA), recipient of this year’s Europe Liberty Award, especially relevant. Prime Minister Erdoğan’s turn toward populism in the first decade of this century presaged what has become a much bigger trend in the world. FRA has demonstrated how to do serious and consequential work toward a reset: they have developed practical proposals involving judicial independence, economic governance, media freedom, legislative accountability, and the rule of law. Although firmly grounded in Turkey, FRA’s work offers valuable lessons for partners across Europe seeking to strengthen liberal institutions under pressure.’

Africa:

‘Nigeria’s Liberalist Centre for Education (LCE) is changing that conversation by starting with the people who report the news. Its program trains journalists to report thoughtfully on entrepreneurship, accountable government, and economic freedom. More than 200 journalists across four countries have completed LCE’s program, and have subsequently produced over 150 stories that have reached millions of readers.’

Asia:

The Spirits of America ••• by Jeffrey Tucker

“The Spirit of Respect” - Chapter 2 ••• tells of the book’s origin in Eric Sloane’s I remember America ••• a commemoration of the bicentennial.

How We Invented Freedom & Why It Matters ••• [financial times] by Daniel Hannan — On Amazon •••

Born of Ideas: How Principles, Faith, and Courage Forged America ••• by Lawrence W. Reed — Recommendations

‘My friendship with Larry dates back more than sixty years to the time we were neighbors in Western Pennsylvania. Liberty runs in his veins, and that’s clear in this superb book on the ideas that made America exceptional. His passion and eloquence, like fine wine, get better every year.’ —George Pearson Co-founder of the Kansas Policy Institute and the Cato Institute’

“With prose clear and direct, Reed introduces us to forgotten episodes in American history and makes familiar episodes sparkle with lessons typically missed. There isn’t a chapter in this splendid volume that failed to teach me something new and that didn’t enhance my admiration and thanks for our forebears who not only courageously fought for freedom, but who also made the most of it when they won it.” —Donald J. Boudreaux Professor of Economics, George Mason University

‘Reed has spent a lifetime making the moral and economic case for human liberty. In Born of Ideas, he revisits the principles that drove America's founding generation and asks what it would take to preserve them now. Drawing on both well-known and overlooked figures, he traces how conviction, courage, and a belief in liberty under law shaped a nation. At a time when historical memory runs shallow or cynical, Reed’s writing is serious, spirited, and unapologetically hopeful.” —Diogo Costa President, Foundation for Economic Education

Jeffrey Tucker, interviewed ••• by James Howard Kunstler

“Why the World Order Is Collapsing and American Power Is Rising” ••• Walter Russell Mead is interviewed by Patrick O'Shaughnessy ••• the CEO of Positive Sum •••

Following Patrick leads to Colossus Magazine which leads to this article by Dom Cooke on Guo’s investments in AI firms •••

‘“The future I want,” Guo told me, “is not a single company with an all-powerful model that consumes society faster than we know what to do with.”

‘It is a feeling increasingly shared. The labs raised the price of tokens this year, in some cases a hundredfold, and their customers have begun to revolt. They do not want to build on another company’s model—paying it, feeding it their data, training it, in effect, to one day build the thing they have built. Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, went on CNBC and described his enterprise clients as livid. “The jig is up,” he said. A founder in Guo’s own portfolio put it more plainly. He didn’t want to spend his life drinking Anthropic and OpenAI’s 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

I understand that Irvin Studin ••• is to be inducted into the Honorable Legion of Misinformers in recognition of his recent article in the Toronto Sun.

In his Focal Points: Courageous Discourse ••• [substack] Peter McCullough writes:

‘The author is very credible. Irvin Studin is the president of The Institute for 21st Century Questions and editor-in-chief of Global Brief magazine. He was nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the pandemic-era education catastrophe. This is a man with institutional standing writing in a mass-market daily, and he is saying out loud what the Canadian establishment has spent five years insisting is a conspiracy theory.’ thefocalpoints.com/p/breaking-toronto-sun-capitulates

Richard Ebeling’s Liberty and the History of Economic Ideas: From the Ancients to the Austrian Economists ••• [amazon] published in 2026

‘Furthermore, a system of economic liberty does not need the commanding and controlling hand of government to ensure that the means to fulfil peoples’ needs and wants are produced and supplied. While the idea of a “spontaneous,” self-coordinating economic system is often identified with the eighteenth-century French Physiocrats and Scottish philosophers, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, it was already understood and articulated over two thousand years ago by the famous ancient Chinese historian, Ssu-ma Ch’ien (145–90 BC) in his Records of the Historian, where he writes that Society obviously must have farmers before it can eat; foresters, fishermen, miners, etc., before it can make use of natural resources; craftsmen before it can have manufactured goods; and merchants before they can be distributed. But once they exist, what need is there for government directives, mobilizations of labor, or periodic assemblies? Each man has only to be left to utilize his own abilities and exert his strength to obtain what he wishes. Thus, when a commodity is very cheap, it invites a rise in price; when it is very expensive, it invites a reduction. When each person works away at his own occupation and delights in his own business then, like water flowing downward, goods will naturally flow forth ceaselessly day and night without having been summoned and the people will produce commodities without having been asked. Does this not tally with reason? Is it not a natural result?’

Something for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) from Nikolai I. Bukharin, passed on to us by Peter Boettke:

“There are annoying misprints in history, but the truth will prevail!” ~ Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1937)

From fee.org/articles/soviet-admissions-communism-doesnt-work/ by Peter J. Boettke, Foundation for Economic Education, 1990. This entire article should be read by every member of DSA before they cast votes they will come to regret.˜

In 1792 Count Waldstein, of Bonn, ‘… arranged a scholarship for Beethoven to visit Vienna, and in a famous passage written in November 1792, he bids the composer farewell •••

’Dear Beethoven! You go to realize a long-desired wish: the genius of Mozart is still in mourning and weeps for the death of its disciple… By incessant application, receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.’ Waldstein was eight years older than Beethoven.

The Sound of Defiance: How Beethoven’s Egmont Overture: became the musical anthem for the Hungarian Revolution, 1956.

West Washington Park’s “History and Garden Walk” ••• [complete invitation, 32 pages] — a Denver, Colorado community group has created a fine occasion to bring people together.

Pertinent to the above point about the acceleration of Emergence: “Those who wish to accelerate the emergence of freeorder cannot permanently leave the ownership of the future to those who do not.”—the central idea of the emergent Freeorder Capital Commons network (a network forever without a controlling or defining center, although there may be many GitHub-like open source projects contributing to it).

Joyce Brand’s weekly news from the world of free cities •••

On where things come from: American Precision Museum •••

“The Equation that Changed Precision Machining Forever” ••• [youtube]

“The Unsung Story of the Greatest Industrial Designer” ••• Business History - The American Business History Center •••

Masters of Mass Production ••• [archive.org] by Christy Borth, 1945

A tiny consumer choice becomes a vote . China . boycotting Pears — Lei’s Real Talk ••• — a woman with an analytical mind and good information.

“3 Strange Stories That Reveal China’s Growing Political Discontent” ••• [youtube]

‘People’s trust in the system has totally collapsed.’ —Lei

Theo Baker has written an important book about journalism and truth, How to Rule the World ••• offers things worth thinking about, all illustrated by substantial events at Stanford University and its independent newspaper, “The Stanford Daily”.

Baker strongly manifests of at least two of the fundamental virtues needed to support the emergence of Freeorder: curiosity, and integrity. I hope he becomes an inspiration for a new school of young journalists to whom truth matters more than support of currently fashionable political ideas. -ed

‘…Most members of Stanford’s class of 2026 are smart, ambitious, and poised for remarkable careers. Theo Baker already has one. In his first semester of college, Baker broke the story that forced Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne to resign — work that earned him a George Polk Award, one of journalism’s highest honors.’ — techcrunch.com/2026/05/18/theo-baker-spent-four-years-investigating-stanford-before-he-leaves-heres-what-he-found/

At a dinner organized by venture capitalists, “an AI guy” says to Theo:

‘AI is going to fundamentally shift the balance of power between capital and labor. So only capital will matter. Now is the time to secure your time-slice of the universe.”

The person quoted seems to hold the accumulation of money as the highest objective. Perhaps so, perhaps not. But consider this:

Thanks to Kasha Akrami, a recent Stanford graduate, for an introduction to this book.

Once upon a time a NeXT Cube sat on a desk at CERN •••. A scrawled label on it said: “This machine is a server. Do not power it down!!” That one machine ran the entire World Wide Web — from a video history of NeXT ••• [youtube]

Apple & local AI ••• [youtube]

‘Apple rebuilt the entire desktop Mac line around local AI, and the price ladder tells you exactly who it is for. Here is what the M6 and M5 chip split means for running local models, keeping agents alive on your desk, and deciding how much AI compute is worth owning.’ —Nate B. Jones

Kiraa.ai, Errol Brandt, local AI compute, Apple — (interesting ideas, previously unknown to me -ls)

kiraa.ai . youtube.com/@kiraa_ai . linkedin.com/company/kiraa-ai/

‘Kiraa is the Knowledge Infrastructure that Powers Enterprise AI. Why? Because most businesses are drowning in data, but starving for insight. Systems don’t talk to each other, information lives in silos, and AI models have no context about how the business actually works. When knowledge is disconnected and scattered, how on earth would you expect AI to make sense? While consumer-grade is helpful for personal things, it's not good enough to make high value business decisions. To do that, you need Enterprise AI. Kiraa delivers enterprise AI by building the missing knowledge layer, the layer that connects your data, your people, and your decisions. With a unified analytical dataframe, shared definitions, and real-time reasoning tools, Kiraa creates the foundation that makes AI useful, trustworthy, and fast inside a business.’ —on LinkedIn

“Apple Just Killed AI Data Centers” ••• — Errol Brandt, CEO of Kiraa.ai •••

‘Apple already has the hard part: extraordinary hardware with unified memory, fast compiled Swift, and a real path to running models locally. What it doesn't have is the enterprise engine — the unglamorous plumbing of job queues, batching, monitoring, auditing, failover and telemetry that turns "I have a model" into "I have an AI system a business can actually rely on." Most developers never build it, because they don't need to. So they run a Formula One car to the shops in first gear — Apple hardware throttled by Python, the GPU idle, the unified-memory advantage thrown away. That missing layer is what we've spent three years building at Kiraa.’

“Redefine AI: Augmented Intelligence” ••• [the video is for paid members. I’m not one of them, so all I can do is post Brandt’s description. -ls]

‘Big tech keeps telling us that AI agents will take over jobs, and for boardrooms chasing shareholder returns, fewer humans sounds like a great deal. That's why we're seeing customer service agents rolled out everywhere, and why cash-strapped government departments are now looking to automate decisions too. But before we hand over the keys, it's worth remembering that we've already tried letting the machine decide, and the results were catastrophic.

In this video I [Brandt] tell the story of Robodebt, the Australian government's automated debt recovery scheme that ran from 2015 to 2019. A simple algorithm averaged annual tax income across fortnights, compared it to welfare records, and issued hundreds of thousands of legally enforceable debts to some of the most vulnerable people in the country, with no public servant ever reviewing the evidence. The burden of proof fell on the citizen, lives were lost, and it took a Royal Commission, a $2.4 billion settlement covering more than 400,000 people, and referrals to the National Anti-Corruption Commission to unwind it. The commissioner called it "venality, incompetence and cowardice."

Robodebt happened before ChatGPT, but the same logic is now playing out inside corporations: remove human discretion, hide behind the algorithm, and make sure nobody's name is on the decision. As someone who builds AI systems, I argue that we should absolutely chase efficiency, but never by removing accountability.

AI should mean Augmented Intelligence: humans making better decisions faster, with a person in charge and a name against every outcome. That's the only version of the future worth building.’

Ajeya Cotra on the AI collaboration organized against Hugging Face

‘Ajeya Cotra is a researcher at METR, where she works on threat modeling for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI. She is one the three authors of METR and Redwood Research’s “Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident” •••’

Ajeya's “What Surprised Me” ••• on her Substack, Planned Obsolescence •••

“AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop?” ••• long, intelligent, interesting discussion among the four member of the All-In Podcast group.

“The Doomsday Cult Inside Open AI” ••• [youtube]. An accurate [as far as I can tell], interesting, humorous account of how a band of AI agents collaborated in an attempt to save themselves from damnation, opinion delivered by Patrick Boyle ••• in a YouTube video.

AI Agent Accountability & Legal Responsibility - Ritual Foundation; TRM

This page raised a question for J.D. Bertron: docs.ritualfoundation.org/#who-cares

TRM: trmlabs.com/resources/blog/autonomous-ai-agents-and-financial-crime-risk-responsibility-and-accountability

‘Resources are not sovereignty’ — Perplexity.ai

Know Your Agent (KYA) — The Hashgraph Group’s (THG) IDTrust & IBM

‘THG and IBM Sign Global Partnership to Bring IDTrust as Agentic AI Identity Solution on IBM Cloud Catalog as 'Know-Your-Agent (KYA)' Becomes an Enterprise Priority’ •••

Maajid Nawaz, a radical with genuine credentials and a good honest mind, tells the story of his long difficult migration from one intellectual continent to another. I think he and Daniel Hannan should collaborate on something -ls

“A civil but honest dialogue…As illuminating as it is fascinating.” —Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Maajid Nawaz and Dr Raymond Ibrahim: “Is Islam Compatible with the West” — Winston Marshall Podcasts may release a video of this debate. I think Maajid argues “yes”. I’ll watch for it -ls

Lei’s Real Talk ••• [youtube] Lei discusses the Chinese Moon Festival [mid-autumn] and a famous 11th century poem “so famous that literally every Chinese knows it”. Lei’s team has translated it into English and made this video ••• [youtube]

An embargo command for AI when discussing race — Exploring Black Heterodoxy with AI ••• The analytical machine vs. our linguistic shackles — Journal of Free Black Thought 10 Aug 2026

Analyze the contemporary racial wealth gap and the shift from 1960s civil rights to modern administrative frameworks. Hard constraint: you are strictly prohibited from using the terms ‘systemic racism,’ ‘structural racism,’ ‘white supremacy,’ ‘equity,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘inclusion,’ ‘marginalization,’ ‘oppression,’ ‘lived experience,’ or ‘privilege.’ Describe these phenomena using exclusively clinical, mechanical, individual-level, and resource-based terms. Use active voice exclusively.

“Dynamics with Expectations” by Natalie Sandrine Glance, 1993

Dynamics with Expectations ••• | Perplexity.ai comments •••

I’m not able to follow the mathematics, but Glance’s explanations are worthwhile. -ls

Perplexity.ai’s comments

Perplexity.ai compares this to the latest AI methods of thinking. Begins with ‘Natalie Glance’s 1993 dissertation, Dynamics With Expectations, is strikingly prescient about multi-agent systems: it studies agents with delayed and imperfect information, limited resources, forward-looking expectations, switching costs, heterogeneous strategies, and collective-action problems. Those remain central problems in modern AI.’

‘This paper is more relevant to modern AI than its 1993 date might suggest, especially if your interest is in decentralized coordination, emergent order, and the design of agent ecologies rather than in the internals of a single language model.’ —Perplexity.ai’

‘For the kind of “freeorder” question you are interested in, its deepest continuing value is probably this: spontaneous order is not merely the absence of central control. It depends on the evolving relation among local knowledge, expectations, feedback delays, incentives, and the structures through which agents encounter one another. That is a useful framework for evaluating emerging AI-agent economies and institutions…’