Eleanor Steafel specializes in writing about food. Cooking involves bringing various ingredients together to create something that appeals to the palate. Strange then, to find her authoring a political piece in the Telegraph pushing the narrative that Palestine Action is a terrorist group.

The British deep state is getting ready for another push toward totalitarianism. On 23rd June, the BBC published a brazen propaganda piece penned by deep state actor, Marianna Spring (a fake name for a fake reporter). It’s an excellent example of how propaganda works on simple minds. The conflation of death by cancer with ‘conspiracy theories’ is one of the most blatant and disgusting pieces I’ve seen yet. The aim is to excite the emotions; feelings of sadness, anger, and blame, and to tie them to the dog whistle ‘conspiracy theorist’ meme.

A topic guaranteed to trigger many people into a red-faced outburst is the suggestion of conscious AI. Not many of those outbursts make any sense, primarily because we don’t know what consciousness is. For me, that raises an obvious question. How can we know whether consciousness exists if we don’t know what it is? How can we apply even the vaguest of empirical tests to something that has no sensible definition? The response to that is often as absurd as discussions about god, especially those that elide to define what ‘god’ is before debating its existence.

Mental illness is often approached as though it has no physical causes. Patients are fenced off from biological investigation and physical doctors, and ‘treated’ via the hocus-pocus of psychology. Ignorant laypersons, incapable of imagining the experience of others beyond their own limited exposure to life, label the mentally ill as actors, or lazy people. Yet, there is undeniable evidence that many psychiatric illnesses do have biological triggers. A significant amount of those triggers are environmental, and beyond the control of the individual patient who is suffering as a consequence.

This article was first published, by me, on my website. Obviously I have a personal interest in it, but it isn’t about me. It’s about a modern culture that hides the truth behind a plastic veil. It’s about the spirit, now downtrodden by a zombie society. And it’s about thinking about words, and what it means to be human.

We all do it, all the time, and mostly unconsciously. Whatever we do, wherever we are, it happens. Thinking in categories. That object is food. That food is a fruit. That fruit is an apple. Apples are things I like. I’m hungry. That apple is for me. I will eat the apple. Normally, we don’t experience these processes, they bypass our awareness. In all likelihood, we just look at the apple, pick it up, and begin eating. Sometimes, we might not even realize we’re doing it because autopilot has taken over. We read a newspaper. We text a friend. We watch TV. The apple disappears.

Does your work have military applications? There are easy measures that indicate whether you’re working for the war machine, even if you think you’re working against it. Money and status. Are you well paid, comparatively, and does your status get rewarded? You know, things like titles, grants, promotions, awards, pensions, perks, and public and private recognition.

The prime purpose of government is to facilitate a state of existence where people can go about their lives without unlawful interference or harm being caused by the actions of others, whether this is direct or indirect. Where an action results in harm that reasonable actions cannot prevent, the government has a duty to act. In all cases, compensation is due either privately—when an individual, or organization, fails in their duty of care, or publicly, when the state fails in its duty to ensure that its citizens are afforded adequate protection under the law.

Laura Spinney wrote an article published in the Guardian on Sunday, March 9th, 2025. She claims to be a science journalist, yet her piece sets out its intention from the start. First, the headline, ‘ … the right’s fake COVID narrative … ’, and then the sub-heading, ‘ … misguided voices must be muted.’ I hope Spinney takes a long hard look in the mirror some day. It’s this sort of trash that has stoked support for fascism, thrust science into existential peril, and mixed traditional vaccines into the pot of distrust that should have, largely, been reserved for experimental vaccines.

Newspapers publish a lot of bullshit. They love to alarm, cajole, and agitate. Rarely over the important stuff. People get addicted to it. So, they keep paying mediocre hacks to give them their daily fix; although much of that payment is now made through attention and skewed political support, not money. Especially loved are headlines that enable ‘readers’ to spit out vitriolic remarks about the person, or group, who are ruining their world. The young, the ‘lazy’, and the feckless.

The Uncanny Valley is a place of strangeness. Some people think it doesn’t exist, but those of us who live there know it does. Initiation into the Uncanny Valley can come in a variety of forms. For me, it was being called a freak, an android, and ‘that thing’ by complete strangers. A popular financial services app identified me as a corpse while performing video ID verification. I was refused access to an account with no means for appeal.

Valentine's Day. The 14th of February. A day people exchange cards with their romantic partner, or send cards to the targets of their desire. There are several theories about how the practice arose, but since it started in the dark ages, nobody really knows. Sure, we have the St Valentine theory. A propaganda exercise used by the Catholic Church to transform a Roman ritual for organizing breeding partners into a Christian Saint’s day. But that had nothing to do with inter-human romance.

Classifying conflict as a world war is usually required to have several constituents. It should involve numerous disparate regions, have active participation of most of the world’s superpowers, and significant mobilization of resources from participating nations. Historically, there have been plenty of wars that meet these criteria. For wars prior to the first world war, the term wasn’t in widespread use. Post world war two, reluctance to use the term has likely stemmed from a denial of the horrific, and prolific, widespread violence that has continued throughout that period involving most of the world's major powers.

Did you know that the dark coating on your pans was toxic? Or that it got into the environment, into the water, and into your food? Unsurprisingly, it then gets into people. When it does, it has been linked to a range of chronic and deadly diseases, from cancer to colitis. It’s also in your pizza boxes, muffin casings, sweet wrappers, grease-proof paper, takeaway bags, and coffee cups. And it causes, or contributes to, a burgeoning burden of sickness.

Sustainability as a goal is deluded, unnatural, and harmful. I won’t waste time discussing disputed definitions. The idea of sustainability is simple: continuity. The aim is to create a system of metabolism which minimizes harm to its continuity. Somehow, sustainability got fused with reverence for the natural world. Yet, metabolism is about destruction and change, and nature doesn’t do sustainability. It never has.

In 2019, I got the opportunity of a lifetime. A sponsored PhD at Lancaster University, consistently ranked among the top ten universities in the country. It came following a prolonged period of recovery from depression and anxiety, for which I’d been hospitalized. Not the first bleak period I thought I’d never escape. Just as I was poking my head out of the clouds and into the sunlight, the UK government pulled on its jack boots and kicked me back down.

The term Orwellian is bandied around a lot these days. It’s pretty meaningless if you’ve not read 1984. Even those who have, often miss two of the most significant messages in the novel. The first, that controlling governance required an enemy; an outgroup with which to stir up emotion and galvanize identity. The second, that the information machine won. There was no happy ending. Even the protagonist, Winston, died smiling with love for his executioner. His conversion confirmed by the joy he felt when Big Brother’s designated enemy was defeated in battle. So, I write this article as Big Brother speaking to his reflection; as the Matrix, talking to itself.

Have you ever found a song or melody that you just can’t get out of your head? Or, maybe, you’ve spontaneously sung a ditty from an advert (cringe, blush). I have. ‘Ooooh bodyform, bodyformed for …,’ jeez, where did that come from!? It’s commonly believed we have total control over what’s in our head, but we don’t. Every day, conscious effort is put into shepherding our beliefs, our concerns, and our behaviours. And not all of it is about getting you to part with your cash.

The lingo of evolutionary science is firmly entrenched in the modern lexicon. Evolve, and evolution, are used to convey a sense of meaning and purpose, often in relation to painful and unjust experiences. Natural selection is frequently used to imply beauty or righteousness. ‘Survival of the fittest’ may be the best known of all, and most improperly used.

Having autoimmune alopecia makes me look unusual. I have no eyebrows, not that I chose that, it’s just that my hair won’t grow because my immune system stops it. My immune system causes other issues in additional to hair loss, none of it pleasant. From a direct physical perspective, being bald wouldn’t trouble me a great deal if it weren’t for the behaviour of ignorant people. However, it’s rare that I can leave the house without experiencing aggression or abuse. Some people find the sight of me so triggering, they react without thought: spouting obscenities, smirking, taking pictures, recording videos, getting excited about their ‘gaydar’, chuckling about androids needing wigs, spitting, threatening assault or death, and occasionally throwing bottles or cans of lager.

Living with autoimmune alopecia has taught me an important lesson about humanity: people make fast, ignorant judgments, based on appearance. What they can’t see doesn’t count. What they don’t understand doesn’t matter. The reason is simple. Evolution doesn’t select for the truth, but for survival, and most people remain in thrall to their unconscious biological drives. So, it’s no surprise that the majority seem unconcerned about the hazard of wireless tech. However, evolution isn’t intelligent. Failure to understand this, and the danger of what’s hidden, does affect health and survival, as we shall see.