'Worlds End' reviewed by Sheila E. Murphy

 Worlds End by George Myers Jr.

Paycock Press, 2026

Reviewed by Sheila E. Murphy

My proclivity toward epistolary novels drew me to Worlds End. What I found therein was much more than that, a framework focused around "Mr. K.," a fictional "naturalist and historian" who builds a treasure trove of highly specific elements he collects to his heart's content. His antagonist, "The Civic Club," is an entity seeking to build a time capsule to celebrate the founding of the Town. The book opens with a brief, to-the-point letter from the Civic Club to Mr. K.

From the outset it is clear that while Mr. K. believes his collection would add value and depth to the time capsule, the Civic Club meets his advocacy with firm, repeated notifications of the limits as to what can be included therein. In its terse opening letter, the Club states its wish to learn more about one specific item in Mr. K.'s collection, a rare arrowhead. Such arrowhead only came to the Club's attention in the final sentence of a lengthy description by Mr. K. of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, at which point he seemingly only incidentally mentions the fact of the collector's owning "an arrowhead of the sort used by the Florida Seminoles in the early 1900s" (p. 26). Mr. K. continues to extol in correspondence sent to the Civic Club the wonders of his vast collection and its inherent worth for the capsule. It becomes immediately clear that Mr. K.'s interests far exceed in breadth the highly specific desire of the Civic Club. He foresees a larger project than does his comparatively brittle correspondent.

Far from a static set of offerings, Mr. K.'s cabinet includes magnificent drawings of a range of natural objects alongside his eloquent prose. Such subjects as the Listening Shell (pp. 20-21), the Squid (p. 29), the Cedar Waxwing, the Scarlet Tanager (pp, 31-33), and a host of other focal points, stimulate the senses of the reader whom Mr. K. entertains with rich stories, history, and articulation of the natural properties of his subjects, shared in the form of a zealous expression of curiosity. For example, in "It Is Not True About the Fern" (pp. 50 - 51), we learn of several facts that may contradict any number of myths. Suffice it to say that Mr. K., possessing the very gifts that Scheherazade herself employed to save her life, brings this same intensity of motivation to what attracts and delights him, the Civic Club notwithstanding. Among the humorous moments of correspondence, the Civic Club poses the inevitable question: "Is it possible that some of your personal materials might accidentally have slipped in among the collected materials you'd like us to consider for our capsule (p. 57)?" Throughout the albeit sparse interchange between the Civic Club and Mr. K., we witness evidence of a collision of a brilliant breadth of interest and a narrow bureaucracy, resulting in what appears mutual bewilderment.

In a stroke of delicious artistry, George Myers Jr. concludes the book with the crowning chapter "Preliminary Accession Report: the K. Cabinet," (pp. 101-160) where we are introduced to the impressive array of credentials of one Elise K., the daughter of Mr. K., herself a recent retiree, who has been retained by the Civic Club in her capacity as an experienced archivist to classify and render discussion, conclusions, and recommendations regarding the vast archive submitted by her father. The report is a masterpiece of thoroughness, wit, tender humor, and logic that Elise K. brings to the task before her. That report reveals all. No spoiler to be shared, as I will leave the delightful experience of discovering a retrospective understanding to readers.

This myriad of natural wonders presented in drawings and exquisite prose depicts a contagious curiosity. Suffice it to say that George Myers Jr. shapes a brilliant book that for this reader serves as a metaphor for the creative act of pursuing science, history, or any form of art. The sometimes obsessively vibrant and extended gesture of gathering, analyzing, shaping, and offering what one has made as a life's work is demonstrated here with clarity, tenderness, and humor. There is so much to love about this book, and I confess that I fell in love with its approach, its inclusion of wildly divergent facts and pictures and stories, along with the impact that cannot help inspiring us to reflect upon the leavings after a life of devotion to one's discipline or art.

‘RollBack Rx Deserves a Serious Warning’ by David Lloyd—guest blogger

RollBack Rx is a system-recovery program that allows a Windows PC to be returned to an earlier snapshot of its operating system. When it works properly, it can be impressive. The user can turn the clock back to an earlier state of Windows in a matter of minutes, much better than Windows’ own system restore facility can.

RollBack Rx is not simply another backup program. It operates at a very low level of the computer's storage and boot system, using a special disk driver to maintain and recover snapshots. Consequently, when something goes wrong, the consequences can potentially extend beyond the application itself. The computer may be unable to boot. That is not merely a theoretical concern.

I installed RollBack Rx on a Windows 10 laptop in 2020. For some time it work perfectly well. I was able to create snapshots and use the program normally. Then when I needed to use it again, the computer failed to boot following the snapshot restoration.

Fortunately, I had a complete clone of the PC’s internal drive on an external hard drive and so I was able to use that backup to recover the computer. After that, I uninstalled RollBack Rx.

This does not prove that RollBack Rx catagegorically caused the problem. It is possible that some particular interaction between RollBack, the computer's storage configuration or Windows’ boot environment was responsible. But the sequence was sufficiently suggestive for me to conclude there was a connection. And subsequent reports from other users have made my experience considerably less easy to dismiss as an isolated incident.

RollBack Rx is not conventional backup software. This is the most important thing potential users need to understand. A conventional backup program normally creates a separate copy of your data or a disk image. If the backup program stops working, Windows itself generally continues to operate. RollBack Rx is different. Its whole purpose is to integrate itself deeply enough into the system that it can reconstruct an earlier state of the Windows installation. That requires considerably more than an ordinary Windows application.

RollBack uses a special disk driver and operates beneath much of the normal Windows software environment. Its snapshots are not simply ordinary folders containing copies of your files which you can browse and restore at will. The advantage is obvious. The disadvantage is equally obvious: the software has to be involved in the process by which the computer accesses and boots from its storage.

If that low-level machinery encounters a compatibility problem, corruption or unexpected interaction with the particular computer, the failure can potentially occur before Windows has even loaded. That is a very different risk from an ordinary application crashing.

There have been reports over the years of RollBack Rx users having boot or restart problems. A 2022 discussion on the Wilders Security Forums, for example, contains several particularly relevant reports. One user reported that after removing an older RollBack Rx version and installing version 12, the computer would not start and displayed only a blank screen. He had to use an Aomei boot disk to recover the system.

Another user described having used RollBack Rx for years, but said that on a particular Microsoft Surface Book 2 he experienced occasional total boot failures requiring a complete reinstall from backup files. He eventually removed RollBack Rx and suspected strongly that it had been responsible, although he acknowledged that he could not prove the precise cause.

Another user described a later version repeatedly failing during reboot and leaving him dependent on an external backup until a subsequent RollBack version release eventually worked.

These reports do not prove that every RollBack Rx is unreliable. Quite the opposite: some people have used the software successfully for years. But the problem appears capable of being machine-specific. A program can work perfectly on one PC and still have a serious compatibility problem on another—though in my case, RollBack Rx worked ok on the same PC until it didn’t That makes the usual “I've been using it for years and never had a problem” argument rather less reassuring than it might sound.

There is another issue which potential RollBack Rx users should know about. Modern SSDs use a command called TRIM to tell the drive which blocks of storage are no longer required. This assists the SSD's internal garbage collection and helps maintain performance and endurance. RollBack Rx's low-level storage architecture has historically complicated this process.

There has been a long-running dispute over exactly how RollBack handles TRIM. Horizon DataSys (the company that produces RollBack Rx) has described RollBack Rx as supporting SSDs and TRIM-related functionality. However, independent testing and discussion going back many years have questioned whether ordinary TRIM commands actually reach the SSD while RollBack's special disk driver is active.

A particularly striking statement appeared in a Wilders Security Forum discussion in September 2020, shortly before my own RollBack installation. An experienced RollBack user known as “Froggie” was asked whether a contemporary version of RollBack still prevented TRIM from reaching the SSD. His answer was unequivocal: “It still disables the TRIM command from reaching the SSD”.

The same issue was still being discussed in 2022. In another Wilders discussion, Froggie described the RollBack disk driver as “TRIM-incompatible” and explained that RollBack had to be deactivated and the computer restarted in order to replace that driver before performing SSD optimisation and TRIM-related maintenance.

This does not establish that TRIM caused my boot failure. The historical TRIM behaviour is a technical concern about how RollBack interacts with SSDs. My own problem was a failure to boot following a snapshot restoration and reboot. So there is no evidence that TRIM itself caused that failure.

The more general point, however, remains important: RollBack is operating at a very low level of the storage system, and its interaction with modern storage hardware is considerably more complicated than the words “backup software” might suggest.

Why haven't you heard these warnings before, you might be asking. This is perhaps the strangest thing about RollBack Rx. If you search for ordinary computer advice, you are unlikely to find warnings telling you to think carefully before installing it. There are several reasons for this.

First, RollBack Rx is a relatively niche product. Most Windows users have never heard of it. Second, when it works, it is genuinely impressive. A reviewer can deliberately damage a Windows installation, restore a snapshot and demonstrate an apparently miraculous recovery. Third, serious problems seem to be relatively uncommon and may depend upon the particular computer, storage configuration, Windows installation or RollBack version. Fourth, the technical nature of the program makes its potential risks easy to overlook.

A reviewer who thinks of it as simply another backup utility might not appreciate the significance of the fact that it installs a low-level disk driver and becomes involved in the computer's boot and storage processes. That distinction matters enormously.

It is worth making this clear. I am not claiming that RollBack Rx is malware, that it routinely destroys computers, or that everybody who installs it will encounter problems. There are many users who have had very positive experiences with it. Indeed, that is what makes the program interesting. It solves a genuine problem and can be extremely convenient.

The criticism is about risk and transparency, not about claiming that the software never works. A program can be useful and still deserve a warning about the consequences of failure. RollBack Rx belongs in that category.

If I had been given a warning before installing RollBack Rx, I would have understood the program rather differently. Something along these lines would have been useful:

"WARNING: RollBack Rx is not an ordinary backup application. It installs low-level storage and boot components in Windows in order to provide instant system rollback. Although it can work extremely well, failures or compatibility problems can potentially leave Windows unable to boot. SSD/TRIM behaviour has also been the subject of longstanding technical controversy. Do not install it without maintaining an independent, restorable disk image or clone".

RollBack Rx might be a brilliant piece of engineering. But the more deeply a program inserts itself into the machinery of your computer, the more important it becomes to have a way of recovering the machine without that program.

And that is the central lesson of my experience. Use RollBack Rx if you understand what it is. But never let RollBack Rx become the only thing standing between you and a dead Windows installation.

‘Why Jaron Lanier’s "Data Dignity" Misunderstands Modern AI’ by Ryan Soames—guest blogger

In his critique of modern artificial intelligence, computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier argues that "AI" is a dangerous misnomer. To Lanier, Large Language Models and generative systems are not synthetic minds; they are massive, automated engines of human collaboration. By harvesting trillions of words, code snippets and artworks produced by real people, AI simply compresses and remixes our collective labour. In Lanier's view, treating AI as an autonomous, intelligent entity is a harmful form of "machine mythology" that devalues human creators, obfuscates copyright and robs working people of their digital dignity.

It is a seductive thesis—one that rightly centres human labour and offers a clean framework for intellectual property in the digital age. But as a technical and philosophical explanation of what modern AI actually *is*, Lanier’s premise falls short.

By insisting that AI is merely a sophisticated archive of human output, Lanier commits a fundamental category error: he confuses the “provenance” of a system's training data with the “execution” of its underlying capabilities.

Lanier’s argument hinges on an assumption: for a machine’s process to count as "true" intelligence, it must generate logic, reasoning or understanding entirely out of whole cloth, independently of human culture. Because an LLM derives its patterns from human text, Lanier argues it is merely reflecting us back to ourselves.

The flaw in this reasoning becomes immediately apparent when applied to biological minds. No human intelligence operates “ex nihilo”. A child born today does not invent formal logic, calculus, grammar or cause-and-effect reasoning from scratch. Human beings spend their developmental years absorbing an immense dataset of cultural artefacts: books, conversations, institutions and observed behaviours. We internalise those structural patterns and deploy them to navigate new situations.

If we do not disqualify a human scientist from being "intelligent" simply because they learned physics from books written by other people, why apply that double standard to software? An entity does not need to invent the rules of logic for its application of those rules to be real.

If modern neural networks merely retrieved, collated or paraphrased their training data, Lanier would be entirely correct. Early search engines and basic natural language tools fit his "data collage" description perfectly. However, modern deep learning architectures (specifically transformer-based reasoning models) have crossed a structural threshold from *recall* to *representation*.

When a model is trained on billions of examples of logical arguments, mathematical proofs and computer code, it does not store those examples as static text files. Instead, it compresses them into high-dimensional mathematical spaces, distilling the “abstract rules” governing how concepts interact.

This is why modern models can:

1. Solve entirely novel logic puzzles framed with nonsensical words they have never seen in their training sets.

2. Debug brand-new, proprietary code bases by inferring operational flow.

3. Engage in multi-step "chain of thought" self-correction, backtracking when an intermediate premise fails.

When a system processes inputs, applies internalised logical constraints to unprecedented contexts and arrives at valid outcomes, it is performing the functional definition of reasoning. The fact that the network “learned” how to reason by analysing human data describes its history, not its current computational function.

At its core, Lanier’s thesis relies on a form of biological chauvinism. By reducing neural execution to "glorified indexing", it implies that true cognition can only belong to biological organisms with intentionality and lived experience. Philosophy of mind has long grappled with “functionalism”: the principle that mental states (beliefs, reasoning, computation) are defined by their functional role rather than the physical medium in which they are instantiated. Whether a logical deduction is executed through chemical neurotransmitters across biological synapses or through matrix multiplication across silicon transistors, the functional operation remains identical.

To claim that an LLM’s output is "just data synthesis" because it runs on code is equivalent to claiming that human thought is "just electrochemistry" because it runs on sodium and potassium ions. In both cases, reducing the system to its physical or raw materials completely misses the emergent properties of the process itself.

Lanier’s desire to reframe AI as a human collaboration is driven by noble political and economic motives: he wants creators to be compensated when their work trains automated systems. However, clinging to the "mirror of human culture" metaphor creates its own risks. If we treat AI merely as a passive mirror or search interface, we risk blinding ourselves to autonomous systems that can plan, execute multi-step tool calls and make real-time decisions in complex environments. Expecting an LLM to behave like a static library ignores its capacity to generalise, generate emergent behaviours and find non-human solutions to complex optimisation problems.

Lanier’s "Data Dignity" provides a relevant moral and economic critique of how tech platforms harvest human labour. We should pay creators, respect intellectual property, and resist the corporate hype that dresses up software utilities as godlike entities. But we must separate Lanier’s political economy from his cognitive science. AI is built “from” human data, but it is no longer “just” human data. The transition from storing cultural artefacts to executing generalised reasoning is real. Calling it "artificial intelligence" is not machine mythology: it is a straightforward description of a system that has learned to process the world’s logic on its own terms.

The Benefits of Left-wing Progressive Governments

Without left-wing progressive governments, we would not have had the following benefits. Benefits which The Reform Party would probably remove or erode if they had the chance:

 1. Women’s rights

 2. Equal pay legislation

 3. Civil rights protections

 4. Gay and lesbian equality

 5. Workplace standards

 6. Paid leave

 7. Minimum wage laws

 8. Workplace safety

 9. Free healthcare

10. State-funded schools

11. State pensions

12. Unemployment benefits

13. Clean air and environmental protections

How YouTube Brought Back the Old TV

We have more TV channels than ever before, yet TV has less variety than it had when there were only three or four channels. One of the pleasures of old TV was its variety. A programme didn't have to appeal to everybody. There was room for niche interests and programmes that were made simply because somebody thought the subject was interesting. YouTube has revived that format.

In the 1960s and 1970s, you could find almost anything on TV. A comedy would be followed by a documentary, then a serious interview, then a drama, then a music programme, then a quiz show; or some eccentric programme about railways, wildlife or local history. TV back then had a sense of unpredictability. You never quite knew what you were going to see next.

Today there are hundreds of channels, but the programmes fall into a small number of categories: reality TV, property programmes, cooking shows, celebrity shows, crime dramas and quizzes. Even the same film titles appear on several different channels within the same week, and most of them starring either Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme.

At first glance, YouTube seems to represent the complete opposite of old TV, with much of its content produced by individuals rather than TV companies. Yet when you watch YouTube on a modern Smart TV, it feels like old TV again. YouTube has recreated the old TV experience by getting rid of the modern TV schedule.

You can watch a documentary about an obscure railway line, then watch an old interview with an actor, then a music performance by Leonard Cohen from 1972, followed by somebody explaining how an LCD display works. It is wonderfully random.

YouTube has also revived the old TV chat show. Back in the day, interviewers like Michael Parkinson or Dick Cavett would have long and in-depth conversations with their guests. The interview itself was the entertainment, rather than simply being an opportunity for the guest to promote their career or plug a film, book or other merchandise. An interesting person would simply be invited on TV because they were interesting.

By the late 1980s, that kind of interview was being replaced by a more elaborate entertainment format, particularly with the introduction in 1987 of The Last Resort, Jonathan Ross's UK version of American late-night talk shows such as those hosted by David Letterman. The guests became part of a larger entertainment package: opening monologue, comedy, interview, film clip, musical performance and so on. There is nothing wrong with that format, but it changed the nature of the interview. The conversation was no longer necessarily the programme: it was one part of the programme.

Then YouTube quite unexpectedly brought the long-form interview back. A YouTube interviewer can talk to an actor, musician, writer, historian or other interesting person for an hour or more. The conversation itself is the entertainment. In that sense, something like the old Parkinson or Cavett interview has returned, though not on TV, but on a platform that can be watched on TV.

YouTube is also an enormous TV archive. For decades, TV was an ephemeral medium. Programmes appeared, were watched and then disappeared. If you missed something, you might never see it again. Now, if you have a Smart TV, you can sit in your living room and watch TV from fifty or sixty years ago.

This is very different from channel-hopping through twenty or thirty modern channels and discovering that several of them are showing identical programme titles.

It is ironic that the technology that was supposed to replace traditional TV has, in some ways, brought it back. The difference is that a TV company hasn’t prepared the evening's schedule for you.

‘The 1970s Were Not the Disaster We Were Told’ by Andrew Davies—guest blogger

The 1970s are often portrayed by right-wing commentators as a period of economic ruin, endless strikes, power cuts and uncollected refuse. This portrayal is useful in validating decades of neoliberal deregulation, privatisation and weakening of the state, presenting the problems of the era as symptoms of domestic social democracy.

Yet the reality is that, when measured by things such as structural security, housing affordability, wealth distribution and basic quality of life, the 1970s provided a standard of living that many in modern Britain can now only envy.

The main flaw in this narrative is its focus on modern consumer choices (cheaper gadgets, low-cost flights and endless disposable fashion) while overlooking the core pillars of everyday life: housing, secure employment and basic living costs.

In the mid-1970s, the average house cost roughly two to three times the average annual salary. For a young working-class family, owning a home was therefore a realistic possibility, while those who could not buy could often access secure and affordable council housing. Today, by contrast, the average house price is over eight times average annual earnings, leaving millions dependent on an expensive and largely unregulated private rented sector.

That greater affordability was part of a wider pattern of economic security. The 1970s recorded the lowest levels of income inequality in modern British history, while strong trade union activity meant that productivity gains were more likely to be reflected in rising wages for ordinary workers. People were not simply earning more; they also had greater security in their working lives.

That security extended beyond the monthly wage packet. High-quality defined-benefit pensions were common across both the public and private sectors, while employment protections provided a degree of job security that has since been significantly eroded. Today, by comparison, the growth of the gig economy and zero-hours contracts has left many workers facing a far more insecure relationship with employment.

With wages, employment and housing providing a greater degree of stability, households were also less dependent on borrowing to maintain their standard of living. Household debt levels were comparatively modest, and families were more likely to build their lives around actual earnings rather than credit cards, buy-now-pay-later schemes and high-cost loans.

It is against this broader picture of economic security that the familiar stories of the 1970s need to be considered. When right-wing commentators criticise the decade, they focus almost exclusively on two events: the power cuts of the early 1970s and the 1978–79 "Winter of Discontent". While these events were disruptive, treating them as evidence of a systemic collapse distorts the wider picture.

The three-day week in early 1974 was not caused simply by a failure of domestic social democracy, but occurred against the backdrop of an international energy crisis. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo quadrupled global oil prices, contributing to a worldwide energy crisis. When combined with domestic industrial disputes over pay keeping up with sudden global inflation, the government restricted power usage in an attempt to preserve coal stocks. Once global energy markets stabilised and wage settlements were agreed, normal service returned.

The strikes during the winter of 1978–79 (often remembered through images of uncollected refuse) were likewise a reaction to explicit wage restraint. The Labour government had imposed strict 5% pay increase caps despite high inflation, effectively asking low-paid public sector workers to accept real-terms pay cuts. The resulting strikes were a sharp but temporary dispute over pay distribution. Once wage adjustments occurred, public services resumed normal operations.

The disruptions of the 1970s were specific events that eventually ended when negotiations concluded or market supplies normalised. By contrast, modern Britain faces chronic systemic problems. Its healthcare system, public transport network and social care infrastructure operate under perpetual, year-round pressure, alongside housing and energy costs that remain unaffordable for many households rather than subsiding after a single winter.

The 1970s were far from perfect. Nevertheless, the right-wing depiction of the era as a socialist dystopia is a politically convenient caricature. In truth, 1970s Britain offered much of its working population a degree of economic security, affordable housing, relatively equal wealth distribution and strong public institutions that contrast sharply with the economic insecurity of contemporary Britain. The power cuts and strikes were short-lived disruptions; today's cost-of-living and housing crises are embedded in the structure of the modern economy. Re-evaluating the 1970s is not about nostalgia, but about recognising that a society built around greater security for the many was both achievable and real.