Now I am going to republish that site because it is the only way I can think of to spread the word more widely.
ooOOoo
Rebecca also writes for radio. She has been a frequent broadcaster on BBC Radio Four over the years.
Her radio essay ‘Reflections on My Mother’s Kenwood Mixer’, a homage to her mother’s gritty resilience in times of trouble, promoted scores of people on Twitter and Facebook to share stories about Kenwoods and their own steely mothers. Her essay ‘On Waiting’, tells the story of being marooned with her daughters at dusk in a bus-stop in remote Norfolk during a Covid lockdown. Her essay ‘House Clearing’ tells the story of the strangeness of dismantling her mother’s house after she had moved into a carehome. And her final essay for the programme, ‘On Migration’, describes an astonishing ten days in which hundreds of wild geese flew across the skies of her home town, as well the story of the great philosopher Aristotle study of migrating birds whilst himself a migrant in flight for his life on the island of Lesbos.
You’ll find a link to Rebecca’s Private Passions episode here too. A kind of Desert Island Discs without the Desert Island…. and with the extraordinary composer Michael Berkeley in the interview seat.
Also here is her five-part series commissioned by Radio Four in 2025 called Beautiful Strangeness. You can find the link below.
Being the age I am, Rebecca’s Beautiful Strangeness programmes spoke to me in a way that I find difficult to put into words but nonetheless the series did.
Last Sunday the BBC (Radio 4) broadcast a programme entitled Are You Ready. The programme was presented by Lucy Easthope: “Lucy Easthope is on a mission to find out how we can become better prepared as individuals and as a society.”
It was thirty-minutes long and contained very useful information. I wanted to share further information found online.
Be prepared for a blackout with this emergency kit! Don’t get caught in the dark – watch this video to see what essentials you need to have on hand. In this video I want to help you be prepared for when the power goes OUT. Your emergency kit can be a lifeline when the lights go out. With these preps, you can help keep you and your loved one’s safe. Don’t wait until it’s too late – start preparing now for peace of mind in 2024 and beyond. Watch till the end and I’ll share with you 3 ADDITIONAL items that are non-nucket items but can be a HUGE blessing in a power outage.
As a former Red Cross emergency volunteer in London, I have experienced that events such as blackouts, gas leaks and floods aren’t as uncommon as we would like to think. I have a camping bag as a “go bag” containing: * toilet roll * soap * toothbrush and toothpaste * a change of clothes, walking shoes and a raincoat * a blanket * a first-aid kit with added blister plasters and water filtration tablets * 2 large bottles of water * four days’ worth of non-perishable snacks (cereal bars, crackers, flapjack type things) * a battery and solar-powered radio * a battery and solar-powered torch * a map and compass * a small address book containing my loved ones’ home addresses.
There you are.
I thought we had a ‘go bag’ prepared but it must have been me thinking of it and nothing more.
Time to turn ideas into actions! Plus we have two dogs plus two caged birds that would not be left behind.
P.S. I have found the two large boxes we had purchased a while ago plus a list of the items to be taken in the event of an emergency. However these were in the garage and had been forgotten. So now they are in the home and will be prepared for use in that emergency.
The series, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, is whether there is any spot, or place, that has not been subject to man’s effects. The series consist of five fifteen-minute programmes that were broadcast last Monday to Friday.
They are still available on BBC Sounds and if you can please listen to them.
The series is called Naturebang: “Becky Ripley and Emily Knight make sense of what it means to be human by looking to the natural world… Science meets storytelling with a philosophical twist.“
There are 35 episodes. I particularly liked the episode broadcast yesterday about the Clams.
“How do we extract the maximum amount of power from the sun? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight enlist the help of a giant, thousand-year old clam. And end up in the depths of space…
Featuring Professor Alison Sweeney at Yale University, and Mike Garrett from the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics.
Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley“
Came across this a few days ago and you will love it!
The new world comes up with some marvellous treats. Here I was listening to the radio (BBC – Radio 4) from Southern Oregon and they had this item about a Scottish thatcher using a variety of plants to thatch roofs. The thatcher had been thatching for years.
Then a quick search on the internet found this video:
Last Sunday morning I listened to a BBC Radio 4 programme The Dark Enlightenment. Here is a summary from the BBC website:
A radical political philosophy founded by a software engineer called Curtis Yarvin is gaining in influence, and said to be shaping Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.
It is on BBC Sounds. Here is the link: BBC Currently.
The plan was simple. It started by retiring all government employees by offering them incentives to leave and never return. To avoid anarchy and keep authority, the police and military would be retained.
Government funds would be seized and the money redirected to more worthwhile pursuits. Court orders pushing back against these measures as “unconstitutional” should be summarily ignored. The press should be massaged and censored as necessary. Finally, universities, scientific institutions, and NGOs should also be snapped off, their funding terminated.
These moves resemble many made (or attempted) in the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. But they were all laid out in 2012 by a single person: Curtis Yarvin.
In the past five years, Yarvin’s reactionary blueprints for governance have found powerful backers in both Silicon Valley and Washington circles.
His ideas have been taken up and repeated in various ways by Peter Thiel (PayPal), Elon Musk (X, Tesla), Alexander Karp (Palantir) and other founders, CEOs and thought-leaders within the broader tech industry. He was a guest at Trump’s Coronation Ball in January.
Yarvin’s current newsletter, Grey Room, now boasts 57,000 subscribers. “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe,” cautioned a recent article, “Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington.”
JD Vance has praised Yarvin by name and echoed his ideas, calling for a ‘de-wokification programme’. Bonnie Cash/Pool/AAP
Rebooting the state
Yarvin, a 51-year old computer engineer, has been publishing his thoughts on politics for close to 20 years. His original blog, launched in 2007, introduced his potent blend of “the modern engineering mentality, and the great historical legacy of antique, classical and Victorian pre-democratic thought”. Last week, The Washington Post called it “required reading for the extremely online right”.
Democracy was dead and doomed from the beginning, Yarvin argued in his blog, in quippy, Reddit-style prose. Governance should look to other mechanisms (tech) and modes (monarchism) for inspiration.
The state needs a “hard reboot,” asserted Yarvin. “Democratic elections are entirely superfluous to the mechanism of government” he argued. “A vote for democratic or republican matters a little bit,” he admitted, but “basically if the whole electoral system disappeared, Washington would go on running in exactly the same ways”.
Curtis Yarvin. Wikipedia
For Yarvin, then, it is not just the government that must change – a superficial swap of parties and politicians – but something far more fundamental: the form of government. Democracy was beta tested and failed to deliver. The political operating system must be ripped out and replaced.
While elements (like the term “red pill”) travelled far beyond its pages, Yarvin’s ideas remained on the fringes until recently, with their growing popularity pushing him into the limelight. Last week he hit the headlines due to his debate at Harvard, a place that has become a “symbol of resistance to Trump”, with political theorist Danielle Allen, a democracy advocate.
Allen, who debated Yarvin to provide students with “help thinking about intellectual material”, wrote after the debate that he correctly diagnoses a problem, but not its causes or solutions:
He is right that our political institutions are failing. He is also right that their members have failed to see the depth of our governance problems and their own contributions to them through technocracy and political correctness. […] But Mr. Yarvin leads them astray with his vision of absolute monarchy and racial cleansing.
A technological republic
For Yarvin and others like him, democracy’s fatal flaw is the demos (or, people) itself. Trusting the agency and ability of citizens to govern through representation is naive, Yarvin believes. Alexander Karp, CEO of Palantir, a firm that provides military and intelligence agencies with big data “intelligence”, agrees.
“Why must we always defer to the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to allocating scarce capital in a market economy?” Karp asked in his recent bestseller, The Technological Republic.
For Yarvin, Karp, Thiel and the other elites that embrace these ideas, the people are idiots. A favourite quote (likely apocryphal) is from Churchill, stating the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
If a legacy republic was one by the people and for the people, Karp argues a technological republic will “require the rebuilding of an ownership society, a founder culture that came from tech but has the potential to reshape government”.
In this vision, the state shapeshifts into something sleeker, more successful, more like a startup: the corporation. “A government is just a corporation that owns a country,” Yarvin stresses. Musk has echoed this line: “the government is simply the largest corporation”.
But if this is true, it is a pathetic one, according to its hyper-capitalist detractors: bloated with waste, saddled with debt and slowed by regulation. The state is a dinosaur which makes incremental change and must tread with caution, bending to the needs of its constituents. Founders dictate their commands and impose their will.
Dark enlightenment
“Once the universe of democratic corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in gov-corp the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO,” explains philosopher Nick Land.
“As with any business, the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as the maximization of long-term shareholder value.” In this model, the president becomes the CEO king; the citizen becomes the customer or user.
Land, more than any other, has provided the philosophical cachet around this movement, taking Yarvin’s quippy but fuzzy prose and formalising it into the political and philosophical formation known as neoreaction or the “Dark Enlightenment”, with a sprawling 2014 essay that moves from the death of the west to racial terror, the limits of freedom and the next stage of human evolution.
Nick Land. GoodReads
Land, variously regarded as a cybernetic prophet or scientific racist, has long held anti-humanist and anti-democratic views. “Voice”, or representation – the key tenet of liberal democracy – has been tried and failed, Land argues. The only viable alternative is “exit”: flight from failed governance altogether, into a post-political and post-human future.
To simplify drastically: democracy’s naive belief in equality for all – propped up and policed by the array of humanitarian organisations, government agencies and woke culture warriors that Yarvin sneeringly dubs “The Cathedral” – has held capitalism back from its true potential.
Technological fascism
For Land, Yarvin and others, optimal rule would be both hypercapitalist and hyperconservative: a hybrid political order I’ve begun to research and conceptualise as technological fascism.
Technological fascism gazes to the future and past for inspiration. It couples, in the words of writer Jacob Siegel:
the classic anti-modern, anti-democratic worldview of 18th-century reactionaries to a post-libertarian ethos that embraced technological capitalism as the proper means for administering society.
In this vision, the best form of governance marries reaction and information, Machiavelli and machine learning, aristocracy and artificial intelligence, authoritarianism and technosolutionism.
To revive the glorious traditions of the past, its champions believe, we must leverage the bleeding-edge innovations of tomorrow.
Governing like a monarch
This culture is already infiltrating Washington. Trump is governing like a monarch, making unilateral decisions via hundreds of executive orders, bulldozing through opposition and legislation.
Musk and his DOGE minions stress they need to “delete entire agencies”, commandeering offices and allegedly stealing data under the pretext of eliminating “waste”.
A recent study of over 500 political scientists found “the vast majority think the US is moving swiftly away from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism”.
In the vision laid out by Yarvin – and taken up more and more by a growing political vanguard – government is either a political inconvenience or a technical problem. Increasingly, the authoritarian imperative to impose absolute rule and the Silicon Valley mantra of “moving fast and breaking stuff” dovetail into a disturbing single directive.
As many of you know I was born exactly six months before VE Day on May 8th, 1945.
We soon moved from Acton to 16 Toley Avenue, in Preston Road, Wembley. A short distance down Toley Ave was Ledway Drive that led up to Barn Hill Pond.
A review of Barn Hill Pond by a dog walker, Tara Furlong, in 2020.
It’s a pond on top of a hill, which gets smaller depending on how hot and dry the summer is. It has been known to have sightings of its own grey heron, mallards on occasion, etc. Fish may lurk in its depths, and frogspawn in the spring. There are views of Wembley, and across to central London from the trig point nearby, and aspirations to open up the view to Harrow-on-the-Hill. Take a little wander and you may spy St Paul’s Cathedral. A small number of benches are available, and the bins overflow in fine weather. There’s nothing but green space and houses nearby. It’s accessible via a fairly short, steep uphill walk on uneven ground from the unserviced car park, which can get very busy; or from Wembley Park. Photos on a typical British day – i.e. a bit cloudy and soggy.
As a young boy I well remember looking out from Barn Hill and seeing the devastation of the property from the Nazi bombers.
There are twenty programmes on Radio 4 that are about this postwar period in Britain. I have listened to the first three and have found them deeply interesting. Anyone interested in British history is recommended to listen to them. That is the link.
The information about this episode is published below.
Ella Al-Shamahi asks why do we love dogs? Dogs evolved from wolves but why did they choose us humans to be their best friends? They say dogs are a man’s best friend but all dogs, even chihuahuas are descended from wolves, the grey wolf, a majestic, fierce and incredibly dangerous species. How did this happen but more importantly, why did we start trusting wolves? And when did wolves turn into dogs? Dogs have been a part of our story for a long time. They are depicted in cave and rock art and dogs are a part of our story because of how useful they are. From the mundane everyday hunting and guarding to the epic stories of life saving dogs . But how did we get here? Oxford Professor Greger Lawson studies ancient dog DNA and thinks the evolution from wolves into dogs began when we both realised we could help each other.
Early on last Wednesday, February 26th, the BBC Radio 4 programme World at One, had a major item on scamming. Here are the details of that programme:
Released On: 26 Feb 2025
Back in September we revealed the knitted cardigan scam. Millions have been taken in by social media ads of expensive looking knitwear for a reasonable price. Victims hear nothing until something cheap and nasty arrives in the post months later. But it’s more than a simple con. Shari Vahl reveals what its really about. Sales of stout show no sign of stopping as more young women are turning to it. Guinness blames increased demand with supply chain issues for a recent shortage. Its rivals in the dark beer world are jumping on the opportunity with some success. Will it work? Finally, a listener tells us how his energy company gave his mobile number to a criminal who went on to steal £40,000. We find out how you can prevent this happening to you. Presenter: Shari Vahl Producer: Kevin Mousle.
Then later on that morning, I watched the video below, produced by the American Social Administration
Then there was this list of scams and frauds produced by the USA Government
I was born in London in November, 1944. Exactly six months before the Second World War ended in April, 1945.
Thus it was of great interest to me that yesterday Jean and I listened to a BBC Radio 4 programme about the letters that were exchanged between two great Jewish men: Einstein and Freud, in 1932. The programme was called Why War? The Einstein-Freud Letters.
The programme ends with offering the listener a fundamental choice, which I won’t spoil for you now. But to me it is an extension of my post (or Patrice’s post) that I published recently on March 19th.
I believe, and hope, you can listen to it by clicking on this link. Here also is the text that is at that link:
In 1932 the world-famous physicist Albert Einstein wrote a public letter to the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Einstein, a keen advocate of the League of Nations and peace campaigner, asked Freud if he thought war and aggression was forever tied to human psychology and the course of international relations: could we ever secure a lasting world peace?
Einstein’s letter is deeply prescient, as is Freud’s extraordinary response. The exchange was titled ‘Why War?’. The two thinkers explore the nature of war and peace in politics and in all human life; they think about human nature, the history of warfare and human aggression and the hope represented by the foundation of the League of Nations (precursor to the UN) and its promise of global security and a new architecture of international law.
At the time of their exchange, Freud is in the last great phase of his career and has already introduced psychoanalysis into the field of politics and society. Einstein, the younger of the two, is using his huge international profile as a physicist for political and pacifist intervention.
For Einstein, future world security means a shared moral understanding across the global order – that humankind rise above the ‘state of nature’ never to devolve into total war again. He wrote to Freud, as ‘a citizen of the world…immune to nationalist bias…I greatly admire your passion to ascertain the truth. You have shown how the aggressive and destructive instincts are bound up in the human psyche with those of love and the lust for life. At the same time, you make manifest your devotion to the goal of liberation from the evils of war…’ Is it possible, Einstein asks Freud, to make us ‘proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness?’. Freud’s answer is fascinating and quite unexpected.
The exchange of letters was sponsored by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, an organisation promoting global security by using prominent thinkers, drawing on multiple fields of knowledge (from science to psychology, politics and law) to achieve a new language for international peace, following the lessons learned from the Great War of 1914-18.
But even as Einstein wrote to Freud in the summer of 1932, the Nazi party became the largest political party in the German Reichstag. Both men felt a sense of apprehension about what was coming; both were pacifist, both Jewish, both would be driven into exile (both Einsteinian physics and Freudian psychoanalysis were denounced by the new regime). The letters were finally published in 1933 when Hitler came to power, suppressed in Germany, and as a result never achieved the circulation intended for them.
Featuring readings from the Einstein–Freud letters and contributions from historians of warfare and psychoanalysis, war journalism and global security, this feature showcases the little-known exchange between two of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers, ‘Why War?’ – a question just as relevant in today’s world.
Contributors include historian of war and peace Margaret MacMillan, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet, defence and security expert Mark Galeotti, historian of international relations Patrick O Cohrs, author Lisa Appignanesi, who has written on Freud and the history of psychoanalysis, and Faisal Devji, historian of conflict and political violence in India and the Middle East.
Readings are by Elliot Levey (Einstein) and Henry Goodman (Freud)
Learning from Dogs 