What’s New:

October

More chapter-studies for Lord of the Rings:  Journey to the Cross-roads, The Stairs of Cirith Ungol, Shelob’s Lair, and The Choices of Master Samwise.  This completes Book Four, the second part of The Two Towers.

Three new essays:  Myself as an Aboriginal European, Why Freedom Has Limits  and Why China’s Existing Government Works Well.

Here is an excerpt from limits of freedom:

July

Further chapter-studies for Lord of the Rings:The Black Gate is Closed , Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit, The Window on the West, and The Forbidden Pool.

Blog on Science Fiction & Fantasy.  Some random observations.   New Right Economics as Science Fiction, Games of Thrones and Books, And if you prefer Lord of the Rings…, Watership Down: A Tale of Dead Rabbits.

Blog on Science: Beyond Earth, We Seek Wisdom, Ultima Thule – the Furthest Visited Object, Other Space News, Gene Therapy – Not Making Superhumans, Monkeys Get Cosy With Wolves, Kilograms Leaving the Material World.

Also Steven Pinker Misunderstands the Enlightenment and Woodrow Wilson’s Deceptive ’14 Points’.  (Both previously available on the Long Revolution website.)

May

Did my own t-shirt design, using a specialised shop to get it made.   And someone just asked if they could get their own.  Referred them to the shop.

Innovation Without Capitalism.   How radio developed from pure science.  And how Marconi, who made it real, was quite at home with Italian Fascism.
How most new inventions came from non-capitalist sources.

Also two more chapter-studies for Lord of the Rings: The Taming of Smeagol and The Passage of the Marshes.

April

I have complete my chapter studies for Book Three: the first half of The Two Towers.   Covering The Road to Isengard, Flotsam and Jetsam, The Voice of Saruman and The Palantir.
Also a chronology of all the chapters I have covered.

 

March

Fear of Socialism.  How the Labour Party defectors have abandoned all Labour traditions and now defend the excess wealth of the rich. And how the charge of anti-Semitism is wildly hyped, pushed at the expense of other forms of discrimination.

February

Race & Reformist Rioting – Brixton 1987.
The Brixton Riots of 1987 caused panic at the time.  Was Britain’s traditional niceness about to be lost?  Were we seeing the start of a race war?
I said then it was a “reformist riot”, a protest by people who wanted a better spot in the existing system.  My comments have stood the test of time.

The invention of agriculture and cities.
Humans Ascending; Metals and Marxists; Catalhoeyuek – a Dead End Without Streets; No Cats At Catalhoeyuek; Walking Birds and Headless Humans; Cities, States, and Leninists as Criminals; Wheels On Fire; Priam’s Tragedy – the Original Trojan Legend?; Troy’s Non-Greek Alexander; Greece Without Greeks

Six more chapter-studies for Lord of the Rings: The Riders of Rohan, The Uruk-Hai, Treebeard, The White Rider, The King of the Golden Hall, and Helm’s Deep.

 

November

What If the Russian Revolution Hadn’t Happened?  Arguing that the Soviet Union only went wrong in the 1960s.  That it was economically efficient up until then, and establish global equality for women, the lower classes and non-whites.

Also more Tolkien, completing The Fellowship of the Ring and then The Departure of Boromir.    All at Lord of the Rings, Chapter by Chapter.

October

For Tolkien fans, I have added six new chapter studies, getting as far as The Mirror of Galadriel.  Also a separate study of who Tom Bombadil is.

September

Baby Boomers to Blame?  How the wealth-grab by a more-than-millionaire class has been overlooked, with ordinary people tricked into blaming each other.

The ‘White Race’ does not exist.  Why I identify myself as an ‘Aboriginal European’.

Britain’s Mixed Feelings About Hitler in the 1930s.   Until it came to war, the British Centre-Right was surprisingly friendly to Hitler.

August: Adam Smith Misled Us.  His famous book simply invents the notion that profit is the only sound guide to creating real material wealth.  The real economy, though called ‘Capitalist’, has never really matched his claims.  Not been what the New Right claimed.

Deaths caused by Hitler – 45 million or more.  At least seven million non-Jewish Germans.

21st July. Parliaments Different From Democracy

Democracies and one-party states.  Europe’s mediaeval Parliaments were devised as a way of formalising the European notion that the king must consult with his more important subjects.  Only very gradually did they democratise.  Dropping this complex system onto a society with very different traditions mostly fails.
Britain was not even loosely democratic until the 1880s, when about 60% of adult males at the core of the British Empire got the vote.
One-Party states in countries without a Parliamentary tradition are often a better way of expressing the actual Will of the People.

29th June: The Mixed Economy Won the Cold War.  How the West was tricked into mistrusting its highly successful Mixed Economy system.  How the Baby Boomers were sold ‘Imaginary Capitalism’ as the answer to their dreams of Freedom.

May 22nd – some short stories, all but the last under 1000 words

• Turning the Year.  Christmas or Winter Solstice in a world very unlike our own.
• Mistcrap in Flipworld.  Another Christmas, but this one darkly comic.
• Vindalf’s Gift.  A man goes gambling near Christmas, but gets a chilling surprise.
• Fire works, Ice Endures.  Britain has snow on Bonfire Night.  How does a Guardian Spirit handle it?
• Einstein and the Official Christmas Day.  The complications of time dilation, and of having a father who dies centuries ago.
• Becoming Dangerous Yellow.  An Incarnate Idea finds he is outdated in the ever-changing Real World.  Can he shift?
• Third Time Lucky.   A Briton from 2015 finds himself mysteriously in 1915.  He could change history.  But should he?
• The Ashes Of My Brief Existence.  A teenage delinquent knows that she must die, that others may live.
• One Walked To War.  Centuries in the future, a space settlement has become mediaeval.  One good-natured but dangerous soldier tells his own small story.

Menus

• 10) Human Biological History & Nature
• 15) Other Science
• 20) British History
• 25) World History
• 30) Human Dynamics
• 35) Politics
• 40) Against globalisation
• 50) About Literature, Film and Art
• 55) About Tolkien
• 60) About Science Fiction and Fantasy
• 70) My Own Science Fiction
• 80) Holiday Photos
• 90) Humour
• 95) My Artwork
• About Me
• My Father Raymond Williams

Additions In The Last 12 Months

21st January.  Asocialism: Part One; The Muon and the Green Great Dragon.  Also available as a PDF, Problems 28 – The Muon and the Green Great Dragon.  I have also separated out most of the topics as separate small articles, which will be easier to read:

• Why Muons were real, even when no one had believed they should exist. Or could explain why they did exist.
• Why atoms are not really ‘a hole in a hole‘.
• Why any native English speaker knows that a ‘green great dragon’ is bad English, but would be unlikely to know why.  It starts from Tolkien’s observations on the matter.
• Reality – Schrodinger’s Cat.
• How religions came in waves of ideas, and gave us ways to organise our thinking that had not existed before.  But show their human origin, by always supposing that it was a universe made as a dwelling for humans and similar creatures

Also incidental studies of constellations, computer code, the multiple meaning of words like ‘Mao’ in Chinese, cosmic scales and calendar months.

20th January.  Lord of the Rings, Chapter by Chapter.  The first six chapters studied in detail, plus an explanation of how Gandalf gradually realised which ring it was.

6th November.  What Was The Lowest Ever Number of Sovereign States? An estimate suggesting a minimum of less than 60 just before World War One.

15th June

• Four menus of new material:
  10) Human Biological History & Nature
  15) Other Science
  20) British History
  25) World History.
• (All of them were previously posted at the Long Revolution website.  Organised differently here.)