1. The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician →

    In the July/August 2001 issue of the late, great magazine Lingua Franca, James Ryerson published an enthralling article about an anonymous benefactor who was paying professors huge sums of money to review a strange 60-page philosophical manuscript. Slate editor David Plotz talked about “The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician” on this week’s Political Gabfest, citing it as one of his favorite magazine articles of all time. Ryerson gave Slate permission to republish the story in full. 

  2. LittleSis: a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government →

    LittleSis is a free database detailing the connections between powerful people and organizations. We bring transparency to influential social networks by tracking the key relationships of politicians, business leaders, lobbyists, financiers, and their affiliated institutions.

  3. John Robb on Markets and Warfare

    Our unregulated global marketplace is a fantastic conduit for warfare since it is…

    • extremely complex (nobody understands it, least of all economists),
    • tightly coupled (information travels at the speed, measured in milliseconds, of programmed trading),
    • highly leveraged (perched precariously on a mountain of debt),
    • and vast (two orders of magnitude larger than the global economy, aka add two zeros to the end of any metric of measurement).

    Better than all of the above, in a blindingly fast transition to relativism over the last few decades, the global marketplace is now completely dominated by participants without a moral compass.  These participants are completely free of any internal constraints on behavior and hold wealth as the only true metric of success.  The only constraint on means is:  don’t get caught.

    The rest of his post metions how 21st century economic combat between nation states and global guerillas could unfold.