From Greenwich Village Folk to Liverpool Poetry

When I first became involved in Liverpool’s poetry performance scene in late 1991, I wondered if the scene could, to some extent, encompass ideas that I had read about regarding the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene, which I had read about through my interest in Bob Dylan.

What interested me about that folk scene was not just the music, but the way the whole thing worked as a cultural ecosystem. There were open-floor sessions where relatively unknown performers could take part, but established folk singers would also appear as guest performers. There were folk clubs, folk magazines and folk radio programmes that promoted local performers and events, and these different parts of the scene reinforced one another. This meant that the open floors provided new performers; the established guests brought attention and prestige; the magazines and radio helped spread the word; and the whole process helped create a larger and more vibrant cultural community. This made me wonder whether something similar could be happen for Liverpool poetry.

In October 1991, a poet, David Bateman, whom I had known for a few years, mentioned that there was a relatively new poetry open-floor night called The Evil Dead Poets Society based at The Pilgrim pub in Pilgrim Street. I asked if I could come along and he said yes. At the time, as far as I was aware, this was the first such poetry venue in Liverpool, or at least in the city centre. And by November, I could see that the Greenwich Village folk scene model did have the potential to be transposed onto the Liverpool poetry scene.

One part of my idea was that established poets could appear as guests at the open-floor nights. The local poets would continue to have their opportunity to perform, but occasionally an established poet would be brought in. I thought this could benefit everybody: the guest poet would attract an audience, the local poets would gain exposure, and the Evil Dead Poets would gain a higher profile.

I was also thinking about how local radio could become involved. On 24 November 1991 I discussed with David Bateman the possibility of approaching Radio Merseyside about a regular programme dealing with local poetry readings and events. I also discussed it with Peter Corbett, a local visual artist I knew. 

I then wrote a letter to Radio Merseyside suggesting the radio programme idea. Their response was that it could not be done, not because poetry itself was unsuitable for radio (after all, Radio Merseyside already had a weekly poetry programme at that time in which people could send in poems to be read out by the presenters) but because Radio Merseyside represented the whole of Merseyside, and a programme devoted specifically to the Liverpool poetry scene could appear unfair to listeners in other parts of the the region.

Meanwhile, the guest-poet idea was beginning to circulate within the Evil Dead Poets group. At a meeting at the Pilgrim pub on 12 March 1992, a proposal I had written about the idea was discussed alongside another idea that the group had come up with for a second poetry venue with a more structured programme.

Unfortunately, after organising a poetry reading for the Liverpool Festival of Comedy in the summer of 1992, a few members of the Evil Dead Poets fell out with me, for reasons I never fully understood. As this made me feel awkward in their company, I eventually left the group.

The later history of the Liverpool poetry scene, as recounted in David Bateman's 2001 book Gladsongs and Gatherings, describes how, during 1992, the Evil Dead Poets Society developed monthly guest nights alongside its open-floor nights, with regional arts funding helping to support them. The first grant-funded guest night featured the American poet Michael Donaghy in October 1992. The group also changed its name to Dead Good Poets Society that year. When I read this account in the book, I was puzzled that I had not been mentioned in a footnote regarding the idea.

Over the next few years the Liverpool poetry scene expanded considerably. The development of Dead Good Poets was only part of it. There were new poetry groups, library poetry events, workshops, magazines and other performance events. By 1996, performance poetry had become quite high profile in Liverpool's cultural life. The open-floor model continued, and  existed alongside guest poets, funded events, workshops, poetry and music fusion events and other forms of collaboration. This was particularly interesting to me because it was the kind of Greenwich Village folk scene ecosystem I had been imagining and advocating for in 1991.

Also in 1996, Radio Merseyside gave the scene some attention, with various one off programmes about the scene in that year.

So, in a few short years, the Liverpool poetry scene had changed dramatically. In 1991 I was suggesting ways to nurture greater visibility for a relatively small poetry scene, and by 1996 there was a much larger and more interconnected poetry scene that was itself generating enough activity to attract radio coverage.

I should point out that I am not claiming that I created Liverpool's poetry renaissance in the 1990s. That would be absurd. There were many other poets, organisers, arts workers, venues, libraries and funding bodies involved, and the scene developed through the efforts of many people. 

But I do think the fact that I was proposing this particular model at such an early stage is worth mentioning. In doing so, I was merely taking something I had read about in books about Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk revival and trying to adapt it to Liverpool poetry in 1991.

"The Mystery of Liverpool's St John's Beacon' by Simon Noakes - guest blogger

'Why the Far Right Deny they are Far Right' by Robert Miller—guest blogger

The reluctance of far-right movements, politicians and commentators to accept the "far-right" label is one of the defining features of modern political discourse. While left-wing, centrist or moderate conservative groups generally operate within established self-identifications, figures on the radical right almost universally reject the tag.

This denial is rarely accidental. Instead, it stems from a combination of strategic optics, historical baggage, mainstreaming goals and genuinely divergent self-perceptions.

In post-WWII Western society, the term "far right" is inextricably linked to fascism, Nazism, white supremacy and totalitarian violence. Because standard political norms treat these historical precedents as uniquely abhorrent, accepting the label "far right" carries an immense political cost.

For modern populist and nationalist figures, adopting the term would mean accepting instant political isolation. Rejection of the label is a form of stigma management—a deliberate attempt to distance themselves from 20th-century atrocities while promoting policies that critics argue share underlying ideological themes.

To gain actual political power, pass legislation or win elections, political movements must build broad coalitions. The tag "far right" acts as an immediate electoral ceiling, turning off moderate conservatives, swing voters and mainstream media outlets.

By framing themselves simply as "patriots", "common-sense conservatives", "populists" or "the silent majority", these figures make their platform accessible to everyday voters. The denial serves to pull the Overton window—the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse—further to the right without triggering the defense mechanisms of democratic institutions.

The refusal of the far right to self-identify as such is a mix of tactical communication and ideological self-defense. By reframing their beliefs as popular, mainstream nationalism while dismissing official labels as hostile establishment propaganda, these movements effectively protect their public image, expand their electoral reach, and reshape political norms from within.

T.E. Lawrence and Rory Stewart: A Comparison

There is an interesting resemblance between T. E. Lawrence and Rory Stewart. At first glance, the comparison seems a little odd. Lawrence belonged to the First World War and became one of the most famous figures of the twentieth century. Stewart is a contemporary British former politician, diplomat and writer. Lawrence operated in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire; Stewart found himself in post-invasion Iraq. One became “Lawrence of Arabia”; the other became a rather unconventional Conservative politician who eventually left Westminster. Yet their careers share a curious pattern.

Both were unusually young, highly educated British men who found themselves operating in complicated foreign societies, apparently far beyond what their age and formal position might have suggested. Both became useful because they could move between worlds. And both acquired something of the aura of the exceptional individual: the person who seems able to accomplish things that conventional institutions and officials cannot.

The comparison also raises a more interesting question about Lawrence himself. Was his remarkable career really the result of some almost inexplicable personal genius, or was he an unusually talented man who happened to be placed in an extraordinary situation?

The answer is probably somewhere between the two. Lawrence was genuinely exceptional. But the circumstances in which he operated amplified his abilities, while the stories later told about him amplified them further.

Lawrence did not begin the Arab Revolt as “Lawrence of Arabia”. He was a young British archaeologist and intelligence officer who had acquired an unusually detailed knowledge of the Middle East. He had travelled extensively in the region before the First World War, spoke Arabic and had worked for British intelligence in Cairo.

When he was sent to the Hejaz in 1916, his formal role was essentially that of an intelligence and liaison officer. He was expected to establish contact with the Arab forces and report on the situation. That is considerably less dramatic than the opening of David Lean's 1962 film, in which Lawrence appears to be plucked from obscurity and sent into the desert to meet Prince Faisal. He rapidly demonstrates that he understands the Arabs and the desert better than the conventional British officers around him, and before long seems to be shaping the campaign himself. The reality was slower and more complicated. Lawrence became influential because he proved exceptionally useful as an intermediary between the British and Arab sides.

That is where Rory Stewart provides such an interesting modern parallel. Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Stewart was appointed Coalition Provisional Authority Deputy Governorate Co-ordinator in Maysan province in southern Iraq. He found himself responsible for an extraordinary mixture of tasks: elections, development projects, tribal disputes and civil-military relations. He operated in an environment of growing unrest and eventually faced a siege by Sadrist militia.

Again, the formal title does not quite convey the reality. Here was a relatively young British man dealing directly with local political leaders, tribal figures, military officers and an increasingly hostile population. Like Lawrence, he had been placed in an unfamiliar society under extraordinary circumstances and given responsibilities that appeared disproportionate to his age and formal position.

The strongest resemblance between the two men is therefore not that they were soldiers, politicians or adventurers. It is that both became useful because they could operate between institutions. Lawrence understood the British military and intelligence establishment, but he also understood Arab language, culture, geography and politics. He could explain one side to the other. Stewart found himself in a similarly awkward position in Iraq. He had to interpret local political and tribal realities to coalition authorities while simultaneously explaining the intentions and limitations of the coalition to the Iraqis with whom he was dealing. This is a particular kind of talent.

The intermediary does not necessarily possess the greatest formal authority. Instead, they become valuable because they can enter a room occupied by people who do not understand one another and make communication possible. They know enough about both sides to translate not merely words, but assumptions, expectations and fears. Such a person can become extremely important very quickly. And it is also easy to see why such people could become legends.

There is a long tradition behind the British fascination with the exceptional individual abroad. Imperial history is full of stories of men who supposedly succeeded because they possessed qualities that ordinary officials lacked. They understood the people, understood the terrain, ignored bureaucratic conventions, lived among the population, improvised and took risks. Above all, they seemed to possess an almost instinctive understanding of what needed to be done.

Lawrence fits this pattern almost perfectly. His knowledge of Arabic and the Middle East was real. His ability to establish relationships with Arab leaders was real. His willingness to travel through dangerous territory and operate alongside Arab forces was real. But these qualities could easily be transformed into something larger: the image of the extraordinary European who somehow understood an entire foreign society better than the institutions of his own government did.

David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia inevitably reinforces this interpretation. The film gives Lawrence the dramatic centrality required by an epic. The Arab Revolt becomes, to a remarkable extent, Lawrence's journey through the desert. He appears to understand what must be done before everyone else does, and to possess the imagination and courage necessary to make it happen. That makes superb cinema, but it also creates the impression that Lawrence was indispensable.

But an intermediary can be genuinely talented without being the person who controls events. This distinction is crucial in Lawrence's case. The Arab Revolt did not begin because Lawrence arrived and gave the Arabs a plan. It was an Arab political and military movement with its own leaders, objectives and internal divisions. Faisal had his own ambitions. Auda Abu Tayi had his own interests. Arab soldiers and officers were already fighting, and the Hashemite leadership had its own relationship with Britain. Lawrence entered an existing historical process. He became important within it, sometimes extraordinarily so, but he did not create it. Nor did he control it.

He could influence Faisal. He could advise British officers. He could help coordinate operations. He could encourage particular strategies and sometimes carry them out himself. But he could not determine the ambitions of the Hashemites, the interests of other Arab leaders or the ultimate decisions of the British government.

The same distinction applies to Stewart in Iraq. Stewart could negotiate with a tribe, organise an election, attempt to resolve a dispute or defend his compound. His position gave him considerable responsibility at ground level. But he could not determine British foreign policy, the overall strategy of the occupation or the eventual political settlement. This is what makes the comparison more interesting than a simple claim that Stewart was a modern Lawrence. Both men illustrate the limits of individual agency inside a much larger political structure.

The exceptional individual can sometimes achieve remarkable things at ground level. They can solve problems that bureaucracies struggle to solve. They can establish relationships that formal institutions cannot. They can improvise when procedures fail. He can sometimes achieve an extraordinary amount precisely because he is willing to operate outside normal institutional boundaries. But they cannot necessarily overcome the political assumptions of the institution above him.

Lawrence eventually encountered this problem in its most painful form. He became increasingly disillusioned with the gap between British promises to the Arabs and the political settlement that followed the war. The man who had helped persuade Arab leaders to cooperate with Britain discovered that his own influence was limited when confronted by the larger strategic and political interests of the British Empire.

Stewart encountered a different version of the same problem in Iraq. His responsibilities placed him close to the consequences of coalition policy, but proximity to a problem is not the same thing as control over it. He could see the difficulties of the occupation at ground level and attempt to respond to them, but he could not redesign the entire intervention.

The circumstances were obviously very different. Lawrence was operating during a world war and within an imperial system; Stewart was working during an occupation undertaken by a modern coalition. The comparison should not be pushed too far. But the underlying pattern is worth noticing.

Both men entered situations in which conventional institutions struggled to understand the environment around them. Both became useful because they possessed unusual personal abilities. And both demonstrated how easily such abilities can be mistaken for comprehensive power. This is perhaps the central problem with the mythology of Lawrence.

The popular story encourages us to imagine that the right man (and historically it usually was a man), possessing sufficient courage, imagination and understanding, can solve an apparently insoluble problem. History is generally less obliging. Courage is not omnipotence, and intelligence is not control.

Lawrence's later reputation complicates matters further because he participated, to some extent, in the creation of his own legend. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is not a neutral record of events, and some of Lawrence's claims and descriptions have been questioned or challenged. This has sometimes encouraged a reaction in the opposite direction: if Lawrence exaggerated his achievements, perhaps the achievements themselves were largely fictitious. That does not follow.

Lawrence really did undertake dangerous journeys. He really did operate with Arab forces. He really did expose himself to considerable danger. He really did become an important liaison between Faisal and the British. The fact that his experiences were later shaped into a powerful personal narrative does not mean that the underlying achievements disappear.

The more interesting question is not whether Lawrence was brave or whether he was a fraud. It is how much of the Lawrence legend should be attributed to the man himself and how much to the extraordinary circumstances in which he operated, the institutions that relied upon him and the storytellers who came afterwards.

Rory Stewart provides a useful modern perspective on this problem precisely because he never became “Stewart of Iraq”. Modern Britain is much less receptive to the imperial hero-making that produced Lawrence's reputation. Stewart nevertheless possessed several of the qualities associated with the older archetype. He was a highly educated young British man who went somewhere difficult, abandoned the comfortable headquarters when necessary, immersed himself in local society and attempted to understand political realities through direct personal contact.

His willingness to walk through towns and villages and talk directly to people distinguished him from the image of the distant Western official operating behind institutional walls. It also made for compelling stories. And compelling stories have a tendency to simplify. The young official who understands the locals becomes the man who understands the country. The administrator who solves a difficult problem becomes the man who can solve the crisis. The intermediary becomes the hero.

The comparison should not be taken to mean that Stewart deliberately created a heroic persona comparable to Lawrence's. Lawrence's relationship with his own legend was unusually complicated, whereas Stewart's story belongs to a very different media and political culture. The similarity lies instead in the way an individual operating in an unfamiliar environment can become the focus of a much larger story.

That transformation is important because it reveals something about how historical reputations are constructed. Exceptional individuals are often easiest to understand when history is reduced to a story about character. It is more satisfying to say that Lawrence possessed extraordinary courage and imagination than to explain the complicated interaction of Arab politics, British strategy, imperial interests, local rivalries and wartime circumstances that made his particular career possible.

The same temptation exists with Stewart. His ability to operate among very different groups in Iraq was real. His willingness to experience the consequences of policy at ground level was real. But neither quality made him master of the situation. His story is interesting partly because of what he could accomplish, and partly because of what he could not. That may be the most useful way to understand Lawrence as well.

Lawrence did not merely participate in history; he became a character in the story of his own history. Stewart offers a fascinating modern echo of that phenomenon. His career reminds us that Britain still occasionally produces the same kind of figure: the unusually capable young outsider who enters a foreign crisis and suddenly finds himself carrying responsibilities far greater than his formal position would suggest. But the comparison ultimately tells us less about the similarities between the two men than it does about the limits of the exceptional individual. Neither man could control the larger forces surrounding him.

That is perhaps the most revealing lesson of all. The intermediary can influence events without commanding them. The exceptional individual can compensate for institutional weaknesses without overcoming them. And the person who appears, from a distance, to have mastered a crisis may in reality have been operating within a narrow space between forces far larger than himself.

'Are We Sure Fisetin Actually Clears Senescent Cells?' by Jay Kordich—guest blogger

I've been taking fisetin as a monthly “hit-and-run” senolytic. The idea is simple: senescent cells are sometimes described as “zombie cells”—cells that have stopped dividing but haven't died. Instead, they remain and pump out inflammatory substances known collectively as the senescence-associated secretory phenotype, or SASP.

Fisetin is one of the natural compounds that has been identified as a potential senolytic: something that selectively kills these troublesome cells. It sounds great, but recently I started asking a rather awkward question on some forums: “How do we actually know that fisetin removes senescent cells in humans?” The answer turns out to be less satisfying than I expected.

There is no shortage of evidence that fisetin can affect senescent cells. In laboratory experiments, fisetin has been shown to kill various types of senescent cells. In animal models, fisetin can reduce the number of cells carrying senescence-associated markers and improve a variety of age-related problems. This is where the excitement about fisetin comes from.

The senolytic research showed that fisetin could reduce senescent-cell burden in old mice and improve several measures of health and ageing. Subsequent animal studies have produced further encouraging results. So this isn't a completely invented mechanism created by the supplements industry. There is a scientific foundation underlying it. But when we move from mice to people things become less certain.

You might imagine that scientists can simply take a blood sample, count the senescent cells, give someone fisetin, take another blood sample and see whether the number has fallen. Unfortunately, biology hasn't made things that easy. There isn't a single definitive test for senescent cells, and so researchers use a collection of characteristics. They might look for proteins such as p16 or p21, changes in SA-β-gal activity, loss of proliferation, DNA-damage responses, changes in Lamin B1 or various SASP proteins.

The problem is that none of these is a perfect “senescent cell detector”. Different kinds of senescent cells can have different characteristics. A cell can express p16 without necessarily displaying every other feature of senescence. SASP molecules can increase for reasons that have nothing to do with senescent cells. This means that measuring one marker and seeing it fall after fisetin doesn't automatically prove that fisetin has gone around the body killing senescent cells.

Researchers themselves acknowledge this problem. A major 2024 review of fisetin concluded that reliable, sensitive and accessible measures of senescence and treatment response still need to be validated. The authors specifically pointed out that the lack of consensus on validated senescence markers makes it difficult to assess whether fisetin is actually producing senolysis in humans. That's quite an admission.

“But haven't humans taking fisetin shown reductions in senescence markers?” you might ask. And the answer is yes. One human study looked at people who reported taking fisetin at around 100 mg per day. After treatment, researchers found reductions in certain circulating SASP-related markers and a reduction in a population of peripheral blood mononuclear cells displaying a particular senescence-associated phenotype. That's encouraging, but the researchers themselves were careful about what they claimed. The study wasn't the standard high-dose, two-day “hit-and-run” senolytic protocol. It was observational, the participants were self-dosing and the study didn't establish that the changes resulted from actual removal of senescent cells.

The 2024 review makes exactly this point: these human observations suggest beneficial effects, but further clinical studies are needed to establish whether the effects are actually mediated by senescent-cell removal.

Imagine I take fisetin and my blood level of IL-6 falls. That's potentially good news, but IL-6 isn't a senescent-cell counter. It can change for many reasons. Likewise, suppose the number of cells carrying a particular p16-associated marker falls. That's more interesting, but even then, we would ideally want to know whether those cells actually disappeared because fisetin selectively killed them, or whether something else changed their phenotype or their marker expression. This distinction matters because fisetin has other biological properties.

It can influence inflammatory signalling, oxidative stress and other cellular pathways. In other words, fisetin doesn't come with a molecular label saying: “I am only here to kill senescent cells”. It can have other effects too. So if inflammation goes down after taking fisetin, we can't automatically say: “We have just cleared lots of senescent cells”. We need stronger evidence.

This is the part that surprised me. Surely the obvious thing would be to take people with a measurable senescence-associated profile, give them fisetin and measure them before and after treatment. And researchers are beginning to do exactly that.

There are now clinical trials specifically designed to investigate fisetin's effects on senescent cells and to work out better ways of measuring those effects. One trial, for example, is giving participants a short two-day fisetin treatment and then following them for up to three months, measuring pharmacokinetics, safety, inflammation, senescent cells and general health.

Another human study found that a particular senescence-associated cell population in blood, measured using C12FDG, decreased in people reporting fisetin use. This is a useful piece of evidence because it moves beyond simply measuring a generic inflammatory molecule. But even this isn't the same as having a universally accepted measurement of total senescent-cell burden throughout the body. Your liver, muscles, blood vessels, skin, lungs, fat tissue and other organs can contain different populations of senescent cells. A blood test can't simply tell us what is happening in every one of them.

In other words, we haven't yet reached the point where we can confidently say that taking a fisetin capsule causes a measurable reduction in the total number of senescent cells throughout your body.

Does that mean taking fisetin is pointless? Not necessarily. It just means there is enough evidence to make fisetin scientifically interesting. And enough animal evidence to make the senolytic hypothesis compelling.

But there isn't yet enough evidence to say: “We know exactly how much fisetin you need to remove X% of your senescent cells”. And that has consequences for all the other questions we've been asking. How much should we take? How often? Should it be two days or three? Is 1,000 mg enough? Is 1,500 mg better? Does taking it with fat improve the result? Does liposomal fisetin work better? Do we need a monthly pulse? Nobody has properly nailed all of those questions down in humans.

Which makes the liposomal debate rather amusing. This was actually what led me down this rabbit hole. I was looking at plain fisetin versus liposomal fisetin and thinking about whether I should be trying to maximise absorption. But then I realised something rather obvious. We know that liposomal or otherwise enhanced formulations can increase fisetin exposure. Fine. But we don't yet know what level of fisetin exposure is required to clear senescent cells in humans. So if a liposomal product gives me ten times as much fisetin in my bloodstream, what have I actually gained? Maybe it's better. Maybe considerably better. Maybe the extra exposure makes no difference whatsoever to senescent-cell clearance. We just don't know.

The sensible experiment would be remarkably straightforward: Plain fisetin vs enhanced fisetin vs placebo. Measure senescence-associated biomarkers before treatment. Give the treatments. Measure them again. And then, ideally, measure actual clinical outcomes as well. That would tell us whether improved fisetin absorption actually translates into improved senolytic activity. Until then, “better absorbed” and “better senolytic” are two different claims.

Sometimes the most useful discovery isn't finding the answer. It's discovering which question hasn't actually been answered yet. And with fisetin, that question is surprisingly fundamental: Does taking fisetin actually clear a meaningful number of senescent cells in humans? We have good reasons to think it might, but we don't yet have good enough evidence to say that it definitely does.

Repairing Ageing or Curing Ageing?

When we talk about curing ageing, it is tempting to imagine that there is one obvious objective, which is to find a way to stop the human body from deteriorating and therefore allow people to remain healthy for much longer than they do today. There are two different ways of approaching that goal, one approach is to repair the damage that ageing causes, while the other is to alter the underlying biological processes that cause ageing in the first place.

The longevity scientist Aubrey de Grey's philosophy is built around the idea that ageing can be understood, at least in large part, as an accumulation of molecular and cellular damage. Rather than attempting to prevent every biochemical process that produces this damage, he proposes developing therapies that can periodically repair or remove it, and the important point here is that the objective is not simply to treat the diseases that tend to appear in old age, but instead to intervene earlier and repair the underlying cellular and molecular problems before they eventually develop into disease.

He divides ageing damage into several broad categories, including the loss of cells, the accumulation of senescent cells, mitochondrial mutations, intracellular and extracellular waste and structural changes such as extracellular crosslinking. The proposed solutions therefore include regenerative medicine, gene therapies, molecular waste removal and the elimination of senescent cells, among other approaches. This is a serious and intellectually appealing way of thinking about ageing because, if an ageing body accumulates damage over time, it seems reasonable to ask why we should not simply find ways to remove that damage and restore the body to a more functional state. A classic car provides a useful analogy for understanding the idea.

Imagine a classic car that is kept in exceptionally good working order for several decades, and as its tyres gradually wear out, they are replaced, while its brakes are renewed when they begin to deteriorate and, eventually, components of the engine are replaced as they become worn out. The suspension can also be renewed, the electrical system can be repaired when faults develop, and the bodywork can be restored when it begins to corrode. If this process of maintenance is sufficiently effective, then there is no obvious reason, at least in principle, why a sufficiently well-maintained car could not remain functional for an extraordinarily long period of time.

De Grey explicitly makes use of this kind of engineering-maintenance analogy, because his argument is essentially that the human body could similarly be maintained by repairing the damage that normal metabolism inevitably produces over time. There is something quite compelling about this idea because we do not necessarily need to understand every single detail of why a car ages in order to keep repairing it; instead, we need to understand what has gone wrong, identify the component that has failed or deteriorated, and then develop a reliable way of fixing or replacing it. If that principle can be successfully transferred from engineering to biology, then perhaps we could maintain a human body in much the same way.

However, this is where I have a philosophical reservation, because even if we eventually develop extraordinarily sophisticated rejuvenation medicine, there remains an important question about what exactly we would mean by having "cured" ageing. Suppose, for example, that at the age of 60 you undergo a treatment that restores your tissues to something resembling their condition when you were 40, and as a result you remain healthy for another 20 years. At 80, the damage has accumulated again, and so you undergo another treatment, while at 100 you require another, and then at 120 you require another after that.

Such a development would unquestionably represent an astonishing medical achievement, because it could allow people to remain healthy for vastly longer than they do today. Nevertheless, we would still have to ask whether we had actually cured ageing, or whether we had simply become exceptionally good at maintaining an ageing organism. To me, that distinction is important, because there is a conceptual difference between stopping a biological process and repeatedly repairing the consequences produced by that process.

A facelift provides a relatively simple illustration of this distinction. A facelift can make an ageing face look considerably younger, and although the result can be dramatic, the underlying biological processes of ageing continue regardless. Eventually, therefore, another facelift might be required, and nobody would normally describe the original facelift as having cured ageing. It has altered one of the visible consequences of ageing, but it has not fundamentally changed the process that produced that consequence.

Likewise, imagine a future in which we could repeatedly restore an elderly person's tissues to a youthful state, perhaps even making an 80-year-old function biologically more like a 40-year-old. That would certainly be revolutionary medicine, and it could potentially transform the human experience of old age, but if the underlying biological ageing process continued beneath the treatment and continued producing the same forms of damage, then I would still describe this as a form of age management. It would be extraordinarily sophisticated and effective age management, but it would nevertheless still be age management.

This is where the classic-car analogy becomes particularly interesting, because de Grey's answer is essentially that it does not necessarily matter whether the car's components would naturally deteriorate if we become sufficiently good at replacing them. If the car can remain permanently functional because we are capable of continually repairing whatever goes wrong, then from a practical perspective we have effectively defeated the consequences of ageing, even if we have not eliminated every underlying reason why individual components would otherwise deteriorate. I think that is a perfectly reasonable definition of success, and indeed, from a practical medical perspective, it might be the definition that matters most. However, there is another way of looking at the same car, and that is to ask whether we could eventually discover why every component was wearing out in the first place.

Suppose that, rather than continually replacing the car's parts, we discovered how to alter the underlying mechanisms that caused those parts to deteriorate. Imagine that we could change the engine so that it no longer gradually wore out, alter the suspension so that it no longer degraded, prevent the electrical system from accumulating faults, and protect the bodywork from corroding. In that situation, we would no longer merely have become exceptionally good at repairing an old car; instead, we would have fundamentally changed the ageing process of the car itself.

That, to me, is a fundamentally different achievement, and it is a distinction that I think can become lost when the term "anti-ageing" is used too broadly. If we use the same phrase to describe everything from slowing biological deterioration to periodically repairing accumulated damage and, ultimately, completely preventing the biological processes associated with ageing, then we risk treating very different achievements as though they were essentially the same thing.

There is actually a third approach as well, because rather than repairing damage after it has appeared, we can attempt to slow the rate at which that damage accumulates in the first place. This is where many of the interventions being investigated within geroscience sit, because exercise, nutrition and various pharmacological interventions might influence processes such as metabolism, nutrient sensing, inflammation, mitochondrial function, autophagy and other biological mechanisms that are associated with ageing.

The drug Rapamycin is particularly interesting in this context because it targets mTOR, which is a major nutrient and growth-sensing pathway, and its effects have made it one of the more extensively studied pharmacological approaches to slowing certain aspects of ageing. However, even here, there is an important conceptual distinction, because slowing ageing is not necessarily the same thing as stopping ageing. If a drug reduces the rate at which biological deterioration occurs by 20%, for example, that could still be enormously valuable if it means that a person remains healthy for several additional years. Nevertheless, the underlying ageing process would still be operating, albeit at a slower rate.

This is why I find the distinction between slowing, repairing and stopping ageing so useful, because it allows us to separate several different goals that are sometimes grouped together under the same general term. Slowing ageing means that damage accumulates more slowly, while repairing ageing means that accumulated damage is periodically removed or corrected, and stopping ageing would mean that the underlying processes responsible for progressive biological deterioration had been fundamentally altered. Reversing ageing would then take the idea one step further, because it would involve restoring an already old organism to a younger biological state and then somehow allowing it to remain in that state rather than simply beginning the ageing process again.

None of this means that the “repair-and-repeat” approach should be dismissed, because far from being something I would consider undesirable, it could represent one of the greatest achievements in the history of medicine. If I could choose between ageing normally and having access to periodic treatments that restored my biological condition to that of a much younger person, I would choose the latter. A treatment that allowed an 80-year-old (I am not 80, by the way!) to function more like a healthy 50-year-old would be an extraordinary achievement, even if that treatment had to be repeated throughout the person's life, and de Grey's concept of “longevity escape velocity” makes the argument considerably more ambitious still.

The basic idea behind longevity escape velocity is that the first generation of rejuvenation therapies does not necessarily have to solve every form of ageing damage once and for all. Instead, those therapies would only need to provide enough additional healthy life for subsequent generations of technology to be developed, and those improved therapies could then provide additional time for still better therapies to emerge. In this way, each generation of medicine could potentially extend healthy life sufficiently for the next generation of medicine to arrive before the damage of ageing once again became overwhelming.

Under that scenario, medicine could theoretically remain ahead of ageing indefinitely, and the person would therefore not necessarily receive exactly the same treatment every few years forever because the treatments themselves would continue to improve. First-generation rejuvenation might repair some forms of damage, while second-generation therapies could repair a broader range of problems, and third-generation therapies might become considerably more precise, effective and safer. Eventually, the cumulative effect of these improvements could potentially result in indefinite healthy life, which is an extremely interesting possibility even if it does not quite amount to what I would personally call a cure for the ageing process itself.

For me, a genuine cure for ageing would require something more fundamental. Imagine, for example, that at the age of 60 a person undergoes an intervention that restores their biological state to approximately that of a 40-year-old, but instead of simply allowing the same ageing processes to begin again, the intervention has fundamentally altered whatever mechanisms are responsible for progressive biological deterioration. In that situation, the person could remain biologically around 40 even as their chronological age continued to increase, so that at 70 they were still biologically 40, at 80 they were still biologically 40, and even at 100 or 120 they remained approximately at that same biological state.

Such a person might still eventually die from an accident, an infection, cancer or some other disease, because preventing ageing would not necessarily make someone completely invulnerable to every possible cause of death. However, they would no longer be undergoing the progressive biological deterioration that we currently call ageing, and therefore I think such an intervention would genuinely deserve to be described as a cure. It would no longer be a matter of continually putting a plaster over the consequences of ageing; instead, it would be more like removing the mechanism that keeps producing the wound. There is also no reason to think that these different approaches are mutually exclusive, because the eventual longevity toolbox could contain several different layers that work alongside one another.

Bob Dylan and the Art of Recontextualising

When Bob Dylan was given the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, the Swedish Academy praised him for 'having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'. As a Dylan fan for over 30 years, I can wholeheartedly agree with this assessment. But I would take it further. For me, his true genius lies in his use of “intertextuality” (a literary term for borrowing elements from other creative works and making them resonate with meanings that they might not have had in their original context.)

To many Dylan fans, what I have just said might seem to diminish him as a genius. For me, the opposite is the case. This aspect of Dylan is paramount to understanding how the organisation of his songs’ texts creates such wide-ranging meanings seemingly effortlessly. Put another way, his use of sampling, recontextualising and stitching together disparate fragments of human culture is exactly what makes his work uniquely resonant. Dylan's originality, in other words, partly comes from his ability to be “unoriginal”.

Dylan did not invent the technique of borrowing lines for intertextual purposes. He inherited it from the traditional folk, blues and ballad traditions of the early 20th century. In those genres, song lyrics were not necessarily set in stone but were more fluid. Singers habitually borrowed a verse from, say, a 19th-century ballad and another from a Mississippi Delta blues song, placing them both within another song. A song was less a fixed object than part of a constantly evolving tradition.

So what Dylan did was not particularly remarkable within the folk tradition. But he took this folk ethos and elevated it into a modern fine art. One could argue that this approach had already been developed in literature, most notably by T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land, for example, is constructed from fragments of different literary, religious and cultural traditions. Eliot takes material from Shakespeare, Dante, the Bible, popular songs and classical literature and places it into a new context. But I would argue that Dylan took to this approach more naturally than Eliot. Eliot made the collage visible. Dylan made it invisible yet more effective.

That distinction is important. Eliot often wants us to notice the collision between the different sources. Dylan frequently conceals the seams. A listener can hear a Dylan song and experience it as a unified piece of writing without necessarily realising that parts of it may have originated decades, centuries or even thousands of years earlier.

Here are just three examples of Dylan’s intertextual approach.

In his 2001 album Love and Theft, he borrowed several lines from Confessions of a Yakuza, a 1989 book by Junichi Saga. When Saga heard about this, he was apparently flattered. In his 2006 album Modern Times, Dylan borrowed fragments from the Roman poet Ovid and the Civil War poet Henry Timrod. And in his 1985 song 'Tight Connection to My Heart', he borrowed a line from a 1967 episode of Star Trek spoken by Captain Kirk.

The important point is that Dylan isn't simply taking phrases because he likes the way they sound. His genius is not merely in finding a phrase, but in knowing where to place it. That is where borrowing becomes transformation.

In its original context, a line or phrase serves a particular, often functional purpose. But when Dylan takes that line and places it somewhere completely different, its meaning changes because its surroundings have changed. ‘I’ll go along with the charade’, for example, is a line from Star Trek. In that context it is simply dialogue spoken by Captain Kirk. But when Dylan places it into a song about emotional exhaustion and failed relationships, the phrase suddenly becomes a poignant reflection on human deception and the performance of a relationship that has already begun to collapse.

This is why I think it is useful to think of Dylan as an editor of human experience. An editor doesn't necessarily create all the raw material. The genius lies in selection, arrangement and juxtaposition: knowing which fragments belong together and understanding what happens when they are placed alongside one another.

The same principle applies on a much larger scale. Dylan has absorbed biblical language, blues idioms, folk ballads, Beat poetry, noir fiction, cinema, Shakespeare, old songs and the American vernacular.

When a Dylan song contains fragments of old folk songs, biblical verse, noir films and classic literature, it gathers an innate sense of historical weight. Even if a listener does not identify the exact origin of a line, the song can still feel oddly familiar. There is a sense that they have heard something like this before, even if they cannot quite say where. Dylan therefore creates a concentrated web of shared human memory.

The song feels timeless not because it was written in a vacuum, but because it is constructed from the very building blocks of the culture around it. He takes language that already carries cultural associations and gives those associations a purpose.

Dylan's genius isn't merely that he creates language from nothing. It is that he knows which pieces of language already exist, understands the cultural weight they carry and knows exactly where to put them. He is, in that sense, not simply a songwriter. He is a curator of human language and memory.

That, to me, is why Bob Dylan is a genius.

'Why the Rise of "Professors of Practice" Is Fracturing Higher Education' by Ryan Soames—guest blogger

In higher education, few initiatives cause as much unspoken resentment, or ideological friction, as the rise of the "Professor of Practice". Originally intended to bring real-world experience in government, diplomacy, business and public leadership into universities, these appointments have become increasingly common across elite institutions.

At their best, they offer students direct access to people who have shaped policy, negotiated treaties or led major organisations. At their worst, they blur the line between practical authority and academic authority, turning faculty appointments into prestige assets rather than scholarly ones. This distinction matters because practical expertise and scholarly expertise are not the same thing.

The traditional academic route is long and arduous. Earning a doctorate and securing a permanent academic position typically requires years of methodological training, peer review, original research and sustained contribution to a discipline's knowledge base. Universities have historically treated that process as the foundation of intellectual authority.

Practitioner appointments depend on a different kind of expertise: execution rather than analysis. Having governed a country, negotiated a peace agreement or run a multinational company undoubtedly offers valuable insights into decision-making. But critics argue that having done a job is not the same as understanding the broader systems that produce its successes and failures.

Without formal training in research methods or pedagogy, practitioner-led courses can drift towards memoir delivered as lecture, rich in personal anecdotes, but less equipped to teach students how to interrogate evidence, construct arguments or conduct independent research.

The timing of this trend makes it particularly contentious. It has expanded alongside a deepening employment crisis for early-career academics. Across many universities, doctoral graduates and postdoctoral researchers face years of temporary contracts, insecure employment and shrinking opportunities for permanent positions.

To someone who has spent a decade publishing papers, teaching seminars and surviving on precarious contracts, watching a university create a high-profile faculty role for a former politician or public figure can feel less like innovation than institutional contradiction. It sends an uncomfortable message: that public visibility may be rewarded more generously than years of scholarly labour.

Universities rarely present these appointments in those terms. They emphasise mentorship, networking opportunities and exposure to real-world experience. Those benefits are genuine. But there is another incentive that receives far less attention.

In an increasingly competitive higher education market, famous names function as powerful institutional brands. A former prime minister, celebrated author or internationally recognised diplomat can attract media coverage, impress prospective students, reassure funding donors and open doors to influential guest speakers and corporate partnerships. These appointments generate prestige that extends well beyond the seminar room. But when reputation becomes the primary return on investment, educational value risks becoming a secondary consideration.

Perhaps the deepest concern is political rather than economic. Universities have traditionally understood themselves as places where power is examined critically. Yet when former policy-makers become permanent academic figures, that relationship can become more complicated.

The seminar room risks becoming a platform for retrospective justification rather than critical scrutiny. Instead of being examined primarily through scholarship, controversial decisions (from foreign interventions to economic reforms) might be filtered through the institutional legitimacy that accompanies a prestigious faculty title.

None of this means practitioners should be excluded from universities. Guest lectures, visiting fellowships, executive seminars and co-taught courses can create exactly the kind of productive dialogue between theory and practice that universities should encourage. The problem begins when institutions confuse practical distinction with scholarly distinction.

A university should not treat celebrity as a substitute for academic achievement, nor political prominence as an equivalent form of intellectual authority. If Professors of Practice become permanent, highly compensated symbols of institutional prestige while research departments and junior scholars continue to absorb the pressures of austerity, universities risk undermining the very values they claim to defend.

Higher education should remain a home for rigorous inquiry, independent scholarship and intellectual criticism, not a retirement home for prestige.

The Day Joni Disappeared

Back in 1988, I found myself in a situation that made me panic. I was sitting in my bedroom, letting my female hamster, Joni, play on the floor, when, out of nowhere, she spotted a small hole in the corner of the room where the floorboards didn't quite meet the wall. Before I could move to block her path, she ran straight down into the pitch-black void beneath the floorboards.

I was terrified. I kept thinking, what if she can't find her way back out and starves to death, squeaking for help that I couldn't give her? I immediately turned off the TV, which was showing the film The Outlaw Josey Wales, so that the room would be in silence, the better for me to hear her shuffling around beneath the floorboards.

I then got the small hamster ladder from her cage and lowered it down into the hole, hoping that she would somehow come across it in the dark and climb out. Then all I could do was wait anxiously, listening to every slight scratch she made beneath the floorboards.

What I didn't know at the time was that, to a hamster, being under floorboards is no big deal. Unlike humans, who, if they were small enough to crawl beneath floorboards, would probably have no idea how to navigate their way out of such a dark labyrinth, hamsters are natural nocturnal burrowers. They can navigate tunnel systems using their sense of smell.

From the second Joni disappeared down the hole, she was leaving behind a scent trail that she could use to smell her way back to the entrance. In effect, she had her own chemical GPS system.

After what felt like hours, but was only around 20 minutes, her tiny face appeared at the edge of the hole. She had found her way back and climbed up the ladder. She looked at my relieved face as if to say, “Why were you so worried? This is what I do”. She was entirely unfazed by the ordeal. I ran over to her, picked her up and kissed her.

She was completely covered in underfloor dust and looked like a Victorian urchin chimney sweep. It took her days of licking her fur coat to get rid of the soot.

She was a resilient, clever little pet, and although her loss to the fatal hamster disease wet tail six months later was heartbreaking for me, that floorboard adventure is one of my favourite memories of her.

It was terrifying at the time, but it proved just how remarkable hamsters are.

A Sunday Walk in 1980s Liverpool

In April 1980, when I was 16 years old, I would go for walks in Liverpool city centre on Sunday afternoons. On one such afternoon, as I was walking down Upper Parliament Street and reached its junction with Great George Street, I came across the ruins of the David Lewis Youth Club on the corner. The building had stood on that spot for 74 years before being demolished earlier that month. It had ceased operating as a youth club in 1977, and I never knew it as a living place. My only contact with it was seeing its remains that Sunday afternoon in 1980, when the building had already fallen into dereliction.

What remained was a mountain-like pile of reddish stone slabs, rising to a height of around fifteen feet, or so it seemed to me. The original building had been around a hundred feet long, and the rubble covered much of its footprint, heaped up into rough, uneven mounds.

Being more adventurous in those days, I decided to investigate. The site wasn’t cordoned off, as it would be now, so I began to climb the rubble cautiously, feeling like an explorer in dangerous territory, which it was—one slip and I could have been seriously injured if not killed.

When I reached the highest point and looked out across the surrounding area, catching a glimpse of the docklands and the River Mersey beyond, I felt like Alexander the Great surveying a conquered city.

The David Lewis Youth Club had once seemed a solid monument to Victorian philanthropy, a place explicitly built for young people. Now it was reduced to dust (a casualty of a road-widening scheme) and, looking back, its demolition seemed symbolic of Liverpool’s decline over the previous 30 years.

I carried on with my walk into the city centre. In 1980, Sundays were satisfyingly quiet. Almost everything was closed: the shops, the cafés, the offices. The few exceptions were the museum and art gallery, the three cinemas—the Odeon, the ABC and the Futurist; a handful of chip shops and a couple of Wimpy fast-food outlets, then known as “Wimpy Bars”. To the best of my recollection, there were no McDonald’s or Burger King branches in Liverpool at that time.

Apart from myself and a few other people out walking, it felt like I was walking around a village whose population had fled. I enjoyed the lack of hustle and bustle, and looking in department-store windows imagining what I would buy if I had the money.

Looking back now, I don’t remember the city centre as being run-down. The streets were clean, the buildings largely intact and the newer architecture of the late 1960s and early 1970s were streamlined and neat. There was little street furniture and none of the visual clutter that there is now.

The silence of Sundays contrasted with weekdays, then, the city centre offered young people a range youth-oriented of places to go: trendy cafés, music shops, free or discounted courses, a wide network of youth clubs, discounted access to theatres and cinemas; and informal community hubs such as the Open Eye Gallery café and the Unity Theatre café, alongside many other places to congregate and feel part of a shared cultural life. So as a 16-year-old, I never felt I was living in a city in decline.

‘How the Right Redefined Fairness’ by Andrew Davies—guest blogger

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, Western politics entered a new era of cultural conflict. The old arguments over taxation, welfare and the size of government were increasingly replaced by a deeper battle over the meaning of a single moral idea: "fairness".

Both the political Left and Right claim to defend fairness, but the word has become a battlefield because the two sides are not simply debating different policies. They are promoting competing visions of what society owes to its members.

Over recent decades, the Right has increasingly advanced a definition of fairness centred on individual responsibility, personal freedom and proportional reward. According to this worldview, a fair society is one where people are free to make their own choices, keep the benefits of their work and face the consequences of their decisions.

On the surface, this argument has a powerful appeal. Few people object to the idea that effort should be rewarded or that individuals should have control over their own lives. Yet this definition of fairness contains a hidden assumption: that society is already operating from a reasonably level playing field.

The problem with this interpretation is that it treats unequal outcomes primarily as the result of individual choices rather than differences in starting conditions. It places responsibility almost entirely on individuals while downplaying the influence of wealth, inherited advantage, education, healthcare access, discrimination and wider economic structures.

By reducing fairness to equal rules rather than equitable outcomes, the Right shifts attention away from whether the system itself produces unequal opportunities. A society can claim to treat everyone the same while still preserving advantages for those who begin life with greater resources.

This is where the concept of "meritocracy" becomes politically powerful. The idea that people should succeed through talent and hard work appears fair because it rejects arbitrary privilege. But when unequal starting points are ignored, meritocracy can become less a pathway to fairness and more a justification for existing hierarchies.

From this perspective, policies designed to address structural disadvantages are often portrayed by the Right as unfair interventions. Public healthcare measures, social programmes, environmental regulations and targeted support for disadvantaged groups are framed as government overreach rather than attempts to correct imbalances created by the existing system.

The language of personal liberty becomes central to this argument. When right-wing politicians describe regulation or redistribution as an attack on freedom, they are not simply defending individual choice. They are advancing a particular moral view: that protecting individual autonomy is more important than actively correcting social inequalities.

This creates a powerful political narrative. The individual is presented as the hero struggling against an intrusive state, while collective solutions are portrayed as threats to freedom. The result is that any attempt to address inequality can be reframed as an unfair punishment of those who have "played by the rules".

Yet this raises a deeper question: is fairness simply about ensuring that everyone follows the same rules or does fairness also require examining whether those rules operate within an unequal society?

A society where everyone is technically free to compete is not necessarily a society where everyone has a genuine opportunity to succeed. Freedom without meaningful opportunity can become a slogan that protects the advantages of those who already possess power and resources.

The modern political divide is therefore not merely about policy preferences. It is a conflict between two competing moral visions. The Right's definition of fairness emphasises freedom from interference, while the Left's definition emphasises freedom from disadvantage.

The challenge is that the Right has often succeeded in presenting its version of fairness as simple common sense, while casting systemic approaches as ideological experiments. But the belief that people should simply be left to succeed or fail on their own is not an absence of ideology. It is an ideology built around the assumption that existing conditions are fair enough.

Until societies confront that hidden assumption, debates over fairness will remain trapped in a cycle where one side argues for individual responsibility and the other argues for social responsibility, with both believing they are defending justice itself.

‘Inside the Billionaire-Backed War on Net Zero’ by Robert Miller—guest blogger

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference has rapidly cemented its status as the premier intellectual clearinghouse for the British right. Bringing together Conservative politicians, free-market ideologues, right-wing media figures and billionaire business leaders, the annual London summit frames itself as a bold challenge to what organisers call the "failed assumptions" of modern society. In reality, it operates as a heavily weaponised counter-cultural movement—frequently dubbed the "anti-woke Davos"—designed to push a populist, corporate-friendly agenda under the guise of civilisational renewal.

Nowhere is the true nature of this agenda clearer than in ARC’s relentless hostility toward Net Zero climate policies. While supporters attempt to frame this opposition as a principled defence of economic growth and personal freedom, critics see something far more calculating: a sophisticated, well-funded campaign to paralyse climate action, operating in near-perfect harmony with the commercial interests of the fossil fuel industry.

The conference has successfully positioned itself as a major magnet for conservative and populist political power. It regularly features high-profile British figures, including Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Conservative heavyweight Kemi Badenoch, alongside international cultural combatants like ARC co-founder Jordan Peterson. Yet, behind the high-minded rhetoric about liberty and family values lies a massive network of industrial self-interest.

While ARC’s public face is one of academic and cultural debate, joint investigative reports by DeSmog and Greenpeace's Unearthed have stripped away the veneer of independent intellectualism. Leaked internal documents, donor records and sponsor lists reveal that the conference is directly propped up by deep-pocketed fossil fuel interests, prominent right-wing political donors and powerful US backing tied closely to Trump-era energy policies. Far from a detached forum for ideas, the summit serves as a convergence point where powerful political networks and oil-and-gas fortunes meet.

The leaked data exposes an attendee and donor roster heavily populated by representatives from major carbon-heavy entities, including Koch Industries, Valero Energy and BP. The corporate alignment is not subtle. The platform has been handed directly to figures like Chris Wright, the American fracking executive turned US Energy Secretary, who has used his ARC appearances to explicitly attack climate regulations, label aggressive green policies a tragedy and advocate for the aggressive expansion of fossil fuel production.

To shield themselves from accusations of simple corporate lobbying, ARC’s orchestrators wrap their arguments in the language of working-class advocacy. They claim their skepticism of Net Zero is rooted in legitimate worries over rising energy bills, industrial competitiveness and a lack of public consent for rapid economic transitions. They frame carbon-reduction targets as "reckless" state interference driven by an ideology of fear.

However, critics point out that these populist talking points mirror the exact, long-standing public relations scripts used by climate-sceptic organisations and fossil fuel publicists for decades. The strategy has merely evolved: rather than disputing the core science of climate change, the attack is now directed at the political and economic mechanisms required to end fossil fuel dependence. By focusing the debate on the immediate costs of transition, ARC provides a highly sophisticated new megaphone for carbon-dependent industries desperate to delay regulatory disruption.

Ultimately, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is not a neutral debate about the future of Western civilisation. It is a highly effective framing operation in a broader, high-stakes political battle. As governments face the immense challenge of transitioning to a low-carbon economy, the industries that stand to lose the most require political cover to protect their existing economic structures. By organising an "anti-woke Davos", ARC has successfully constructed a elite network where ideological warfare and fossil fuel profitability comfortably align to slow the pace of global climate action.

Dreams, Lucid Dreams and Near-death Experiences Are the Same Reality

I’ve come to the conclusion that lucid dreams and near-death experiences are not separate phenomena but different levels of access to the same underlying reality. I can’t prove this, of course, and the idea is not presented as a scientific claim, but as a thought experiment.

It suggests that consciousness does not create dreams entirely from within the brain, but instead interacts with a deeper realm that exists independently of physical reality. The experiences we call dreams, lucid dreams and near-death experiences (NDEs) could, thus, represent different degrees of immersion in that realm.

Here is the thought experiment.

Imagine that an astral realm exists, and that every night during sleep, consciousness enters this realm. However, our experience of it is heavily filtered through the brain. The brain acts not merely as a receiver but also as a projector, overlaying the experience with memories, emotions, fears, desires, symbolic imagery and random associations.

As a result, a dream becomes a hybrid experience, with part of what we experience coming from the astral realm itself, and another part being generated by the brain. For illustration, imagine the ratio is approximately:

50% genuine astral experience

50% brain-generated augmentation

The surreal elements and bizarre narratives found in dreams would be the result of this brain overlay. Beneath the chaos, however, there might be an authentic experience trying to break through. The dream, in this model, is not entirely fantasy and not entirely reality, but a mixture of both.

Lucid dreaming introduces an interesting complication. When people have these dreams, they often report that the dream becomes extraordinarily vivid; with colours appearing brighter, sensations being sharper and the environment they inhabit feeling more stable and coherent. This is because in this model the amount of distortion introduced by the brain is less than in regular dreaming. The ratio has changed:

80% genuine astral experience

20% brain-generated augmentation

This results in the brain contributing less symbolism and fantasy elements, allowing consciousness to gain a clearer view of the underlying environment. In other words, the dream world stabilises because less of it is being continuously rewritten by the brain. Lucidity, therefore, is not merely awareness within a dream. It is increased access to a deeper reality.

Near-death experiences present a fascinating challenge to conventional categories. Many people who have had them describe:

Extraordinary clarity

Hyper-realistic perception

Meeting deceased relatives

Feelings of profound peace and love

A sense of returning "home"

One feature of NDE reports is that people say the experience was more real than ordinary waking life. Within this thought experiment, the explanation is simple. During an NDE, the brain's filtering influence approaches zero. The ratio now becomes:

100% genuine astral experience

0% brain-generated augmentation

Consciousness experiences the realm directly, without the imaginative overlays normally imposed by the sleeping and living brain. The clarity reported during NDEs is therefore not an illusion. It is what reality looks like when viewed without distortion.

Most theories treat dreams, lucid dreams and NDEs as fundamentally different phenomena. This model treats them as points along a single continuum:

Regular Dream → Lucid Dream → Near-Death Experience

The difference is not location but clarity. The same realm is being experienced in all three cases. What changes is the degree of interference produced by the brain. Under this framework:

Dreams are heavily filtered.

Lucid dreams are lightly filtered.

NDEs are unfiltered.

The progression is similar to adjusting a radio signal. At first static obscures the broadcast, then gradually the signal becomes clearer, with eventually only the signal remaining..

Most religious and philosophical systems imagine death as a transition between separate worlds. This model suggests that death is not a doorway but is a deepening. Every night consciousness briefly enters the larger reality. Lucid dreaming brings greater awareness within it. Near-death experiences provide temporary access to it. Death represents complete immersion within it.

Whether true or false, this thought experiment has an elegant simplicity. Instead of dividing consciousness into separate categories, it unites them within a single framework. Dreams become partially obscured perceptions. Lucid dreams become clearer perceptions. Near-death experiences become direct perceptions. Death becomes the final removal of the filter.

'The Hidden Despair of Quantum Atheism' by Clive Reid—guest blogger

For centuries, scientific materialism offered a bleak but straightforward view of the human condition: you are a biological machine inside a cold, mechanical clockwork universe. When you die, the lights simply go out. 

But in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a new breed of metaphysical writers sought to rescue us from this cold existential void. Utilising the bizarre, counterintuitive discoveries of quantum mechanics, authors like Michael Talbot in his seminal work The Holographic Universe constructed a dazzling new cosmology. They described an escape from the rigid prison of the old science, replacing it with a universe of pure potential, where the mind is all-powerful and consciousness survives death.

Yet, when we pull back the curtain of "quantum mysticism" and look closely at the architecture of this universe, an unsettling realisation emerges. This "New Science" cosmology has not defeated materialism at all; it has merely rebranded it. It is the other side of the very same atheistic coin. And beneath its promise of ultimate freedom lies a unique, exhausting and terrifying new form of existential dread: the hidden despair of quantum atheism.

Traditional materialism asserts that reality is made of solid, independent pieces of matter. Quantum atheism softens the edges but keeps the underlying "materialistic" structure. Drawing from the quantum physicist David Bohm’s concept of the "implicate order", Talbot’s model posits that the universe is not a collection of physical objects, but a seamless, interconnected sea of holographic frequencies and data.

In this cosmology, there is no transcendent Divine Creator, no higher spiritual hierarchy written into the fabric of eternity. The universe remains a closed, mechanical system—it is just that the machine has been upgraded from a Victorian steam engine to a highly advanced quantum computer.

The tragedy of this shift is subtle but profound. By replacing a loving God with a mathematical "holographic matrix", quantum atheism strips the cosmos of any inherent sacredness. You are no longer a soul meant to eventually rest in a divinely constructed afterlife. Instead, you are a piece of sentient software navigating a massive virtual reality simulation.

The most alarming aspect of quantum atheism is what it does to the afterlife. In traditional spiritual traditions, death is a moment of total surrender. You step through the gates of a reality that exists independently of you, trusting in a stable, eternal home that will catch you when your physical body fails.

Quantum atheism completely shatters this comfort. Because its proponents are dogmatically wedded to the idea that reality is fundamentally fluid and shaped entirely by the observer, they are forced to make the afterlife completely thought-responsive.

As Talbot notes through the parapsychological research of Joel Whitton and Kenneth Ring, the next dimension is a realm where your innermost thoughts, fears and expectations instantly materialise into the environment. This sounds liberating at first glance, but the terrifying corollary is that you are entirely responsible for rendering your own existence.

Whitton’s hypnotised subjects reported that in the “between-life state”, if they stopped actively thinking, their very boundaries vanished and they dissolved into "an endless cloud, undifferentiated" To remain “you”, you must continuously think yourself into being.

This is where the hidden despair sets in. For a human being who has spent a lifetime exhausted by the chaotic, intrusive and often painful nature of human thoughts, the quantum afterlife offers no rest. There is no objective floor to stand on, no fixed walls to shelter you and no divine embrace. If your mind wavers, your reality destabilises. You are trapped in a state of perpetual psychological exertion, forced to act as the sole software engineer of your own eternity. Ultimately, quantum atheism projects modern secular humanism directly onto the metaphysical plane.

The gaping bias of writers like Talbot is their deep fear of an objective, unyielding reality. In their eagerness to prove that materialism is dead and that human consciousness is all-powerful, they swing the pendulum to a dangerous extreme: a cosmos so fluid that nothing is ever permanently real.

The human heart does not find ultimate comfort in a self-constructed computer game. By replacing the sacred, independent sanctuary of the afterlife with a psychological mirror, quantum atheism robs humanity of its final rest, leaving us eternally wandering the high-definition corridors of a simulation of our own making.