Our (Evolutionary) Future

So i found out today, Lactose intolerance is the Human default but in populations where dairy farming emerged thousands of years ago, such as Europe, we have evolved genetic mutations to our Lactose gene which allows us to now tolerate dairy.  
As dairy becomes more globally consumed, experts think that at some point we will all evolve a tolerance to dairy but our evolutionary journey is an ongoing saga so what else do they think we will evolve, or abandon as useless to our modern selves?
Someone less charitable than me may well say that this one is obvious when you look around at certain people but our brains are shrinking Smaller Brains, fossil records show that over the last 20,000 years, average brain volume has decreased by about 150 cubic centimeters or roughly the size of a tennis ball.
Anthropologists suggest as human society became more cooperative, individuals no longer had to do everything themselves therefore reducing the need for certain mental strain and such a big brain wasn't required.
As we seem to be waiting for the next pandemic to hit, evolutionary scientists  who studied European populations after the Black Death found an increased frequency of immune-related gene variants which provided resistance to plague bacteria and they apply the same to analysing COVID-19 outcomes and identified that some people carried certain immune-response genes which will be passed on to future generations making us more immune to certain virus's.
Who needs Wisdom Teeth, the Palmaris Longus Tendon in the forearm, the Plantaris Muscle in the foot and the Coccyx? Not us apparently and they are beginning to disappear  in generations as they serve no function
Nearsightedness is becoming the norm and in East Asia, 80% of under 18s are nearsighted compared to 25% just 60 years ago. Scientists put it down to more screen use and blurry vision will become an evolutionary trait
The average ages for first-time parents have increased dramatically, women are now giving birth in their mid-30s on average and evolutionary biologists are watching to see whether genetic adaptations which delay menopause and extend fertility may become the norm.
One which is really important is resistance to air pollution which is the fourth leading cause of death globally but some people have developed genetic variants that provide a degree of resilience and how the body processes and detoxifies airborne contaminants.
That's our future then, blurry eyed kids guzzling milk and never having tasted the delights of Lemsip.

Special Guest Blogger: King Brian Boru

The Vikings in Ireland didn’t last as long as the Vikings in England. We were no match for the rampaging Scandi's at the time so during the start of my reign i ordered my people to take the Vikings to their hearts and hearths, saying: ‘I want you to welcome this Viking into your home as a guest. Feed him and look after him as if he was an Irish warrior.’
But by 1013 our army had become powerful enough to attack our  old pals so I changed my tune and said 'Now I want you to murder your guest in his sleep. As soon as you have done it light a torch and show it outside your house.’
That night thousands of torches burnt outside Irish homes and the Vikings responded and set the scene for the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 which began with single combats in the old Celtic style with one Viking leader fighting an Irish leader, but each man fell with his enemy’s sword in his body and his enemy’s hair clutched in his hands.
It was heading for a draw so the armies joined in and us Irish were dominant and the Viking leader Brodir was beaten and ran away into the woods to hide and many more Vikings ran for the safety of their ships with their tails between their legs, those that still had legs anyway but as the tide had come in the ships were not going anywhere so we massacred them where we found them, in total six thousand Vikings died that day, there literally was blood dripping from the trees.
Brodir, hiding in the woods, saw me walking unguarded as my men were pursuing the defeated enemy and just as i sank to my knees to pray and give thanks for the fine victory, he  rushed at me and lopped off my head with his axe.
He was captured soon after and my brother gave orders for Brodir to die a slow and painful death by disembowelment but having your intestine pulled out must have worked because the Vikings never came back to Ireland again.

Success Of Sugar Tax

Some people will really moan about anything as proved when the then Chancellor introduced the Sugar Tax in 2018 in an attempt to cut obesity and campaigners for  tax claimed that it would lead to 180,000 fewer cases of obesity and generate £276 million in tax revenue.
It was a tax on the soft drinks industry on drinks which were produced in the UK or imported into the country to incentivise them to reduce the sugar content of their products.
Amidst calls of 'nanny state' and how somehow it would 'mostly hit the working class', it was obviously a success because retailers complied with it and led to less sugar being consumed in soft drinks.
The Government are now looking to take another step and applying the tax to milkshakes and some Coffee's and will supposedly will result in the NHS saving £4 million a year and research shows the soft drink levy led to a significant drop in the amount of sugar in people’s diets with the amount of sugar consumed by children down by half and a third in adults.
The drinks that are excluded includes drinks that are at least 75% milk, milk alternatives such as almond milk, soya milk, alcohol-free beer and wine, fruit or vegetable juices and liquid drink flavouring .
Research from last year found that the levy may have prevented more than 5,000 cases of obesity every year among girls while another study found that fewer children in England have needed to have rotten teeth extracted at the dentist since the levy was introduced.
Has to be a good thing and after milkshakes i would be eyeing food such as cakes and biscuits because if you ever look at the label on them, the sugar and carbohydrates in them are  shocking.

Trump Effect On Other Nations Elections

Donald Trump's win in the American election has been a real bonus for other nations, because now they just say the opponent is like the American President and the voters run a mile as happened in Canada and now Australia.
Last week in Canada the  Liberal party won a fourth-term despite being 20 points behind in the polls in the lead up to the election and it seemed the Conservative Party had it in the bag until they hit upon the 'He's just like Trump' rhetoric and the Conservative Parties lead not only dropped dramatically but the leader, Pierre Poilievre, ended up losing his seat.
As Trump had repeatedly gone after Canada with  tariffs and his ridiculous assertion that he wanted to make Canada the United States 51st state, it was a ploy that worked brilliantly as most Canadians were more likely to punch Trump in the face rather than vote for someone like him and it is now The Liberal Parties Mark Carney settling his backside into the big chair at the Canadian Prime Ministers Residency.
In Australia in almost perfect parallel to the Canadian election, Peter Dutton of the Conservative Party was looking unbeatable and cruising to victory over Labor's Anthony Albanese who was struggling to turn around his campaign until they took a leaf from the Canadian Book and began comparing Dutton to Donald Trump.
The Labor campaign became weeks of saying Dutton was Australians Trump, the nickname of 'A Temu version of Trump' stuck and the last few weeks was Dutton trying to distance himself from being a Trump-a-like but he was now a man in voters mind who was Australia's Trump and as it turns out Australians do not appear to want that and Albanese won a second term with a crushing victory over the opposition and Dutton fell from hero to zero and ended up losing his own seat.
Appears then that not only has Trump made a difference in American elections but also in elections outside of his borders because now other nations have a fine example of an awful leader to point towards and ask voters, do you really want someone like THAT??

Special Guest Blogger: Henry Tandey

The Great War had started. It was expected to last about four months but it went on to last four years. The British characteristics of keeping a stiff upper lip and being sporting even carried on to the battlefield and I was as sporting as they come.
Not that I was against killing the odd Jerry, I won a Victoria Cross for crawling over No Mans Land and taking out a machine gun nest which was causing havoc with our advance.
I fought and survived some of the war’s greatest battles, Ypres, the Battle of the Somme and Passchendaele and then i arrived at Marcoing where only later i would discover what a remarkable and world changing day that was.
I was told to attack a German trench and informally to take no prisoners as prisoners have to be escorted back to the British lines which was a proper ball-ache as it meant taking valuable British fighting man out of action to escort them.
As the brutal battle reached its climax, the enemy troops surrendered or retreated and a wounded German soldier limped out of the trench and straight into my line of fire.
The exhausted German soldier simply stared at me and looked resigned to being shot because that's what we do, they shoot at us and we shot at them, everyone knows the rules but that’s when the British sporting bit kicked in and I decided it just wouldn't be cricket to shoot a helpless man so I lowered my rifle and let him go.
The young German soldier nodded a silent ‘Danke’ and scampered away to safety.
It was only later i found out that the lucky German was actually Austrian and ended up back in Germany where he began to campaign for a resurgence in German power, blamed Jewish people for being responsible for Germany’s surrender.
The name of the young man i allowed to live was Adolf Hitler and so in a way by not killing one man in a moment of British fair play, i caused the countless death of millions more.

Sorry Is The Hardest Word

Prime Ministers Question's can sometimes be a riveting watch or as much fun as being in a changing room with Donald Trump but with Reform's Nigel Farage gurning like a lunatic over his Council wins this week, he was involved in one of the most brilliant back and forths I have ever witnessed in the Commons and even better it ended with him sitting back down with a red face like a slapped arse.
As a backstory, Farage was elected as the Member of Parliament for Clacton in Essex last June but as the people of Clacton soon realised, he is never there and they are more likely to see him popping up on the TV alongside the Orange Moron or one of his deranged minions 3,000 miles way in America.
So in February, after extracting himself from Donald Trumps colon long enough to make a rare appearance in the House of Commons, he rose to ask a question, pausing theatrically at the rumbling from the Conservative and Labour benches which led the Speaker to urge him to 'Get on with it'.
'I would like to ask the Prime Minister for some advice' he began with that weird wonky smile on his weirdly wonky face, 'What do I say to the 25,000 constituents in Clacton…' but he was cut short by a clear shout of 'Say Sorry' from one of the right honourable members.
MPs fell about and after the laughter died down Farage tried again.
'What should I say to my constituents who were losing their winter fuel allowance? but with unusual humour, Starmer turned, looked at him and answered: 'What you should say to the people of Clacton, when you finally finds Clacton, is that they should vote Labour.'
In a rare moment of unity, MPs of all flavours cheered and Farage sat back down, folded his arms and looked like he wished he had stayed in America with the Tangerine Toddler, if he could remember who this strange looking Brit who kept turning up at his rallies was anyway.

Common Sense From ICC

I never understood why the International Criminal Court (ICC) announce who they are issuing arrest warrants for because all it does is pre-warn the recipient who then stays out of the of places where they are likely to get their collar felt.
With the world suddenly getting smaller for Benjamin Netanyahu and the blow-back from his genocide backing friend in the USA, in a bit of common sense, the ICC judges have ordered that the soon to be announced new arrest warrant requests related to Israel and Palestine be kept secret by the Prosecutors.
The new order comes as they prepare a fresh round of applications for Israeli suspects in connection to war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territories along with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant. A warrant was also issued for the Hamas leader but was withdrawn after his confirmed death.
Anything that improves the chances of locating and apprehending suspects has to be welcome, if they don't know that they face arrest then they won't know not to 'accidentally' wander into a country where they will be clapped in irons and sent to the Hague to stand trial for their war crimes.

What Invention Should We Uninvent?

We were sat outside a Costa during the week enjoying the sunshine and I can't remember how the conversation got around to the subject but seeing as we were a bunch of lefty tree hugging types it was probably something about the evils of Capitalism or something but we began mulling over which invention, if we could, would be uninvent as it has been catastrophic and killed the most people.
My first thoughts were either Religion or guns but then we began bouncing around other ideas and we ended up with a confusingly long list which we probably could never prove but into the proverbial pot was thrown Cigarettes, Plastics, Gunpowder, White Sugar, Cotton Clothes, Internal Combustion Engine, Coal Mines, Oil Rigs, Processed Foods, Printing Press and CFC's.
A few of those we can throw in together so Sugar and Cotton clothes are linked to the Slave trade which killed millions while the amount of deaths from Sugar alone must run into hundreds of millions through Diabetes, Cancer, Hyper Tension etc and processed food also increases Cardiovascular disease, Cancers, Obesity and diabetes and the death toll from tobacco is uncountable.
The Internal Combustion Engine  gave us  cars and lorries, trains and ships so we have all those deaths in crashes and accidents as well as the pollution it throws out which is not only killing tens of millions each year but will do so for the foreseeable future.
Environmental damage from vehicles must be included in Coal Mines and Oil Rigs which provide the material to run the internal combustion engines and all the deaths from those as well as the many deaths from Climate Change.
Atmosphere destroying Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's), especially ozone depletion and the  exposure to UV radiation which leads to skin cancer or other diseases, were so harmful to humans that they were banned in the 1980's and the Printing Press was one i was confused about until it was explained how the increased ability to read led to dangerous ideas being circulated and deaths from ideas and the resulting genocides and wars.
My Guns was withdrawn and instead we replaced it with gunpowder to encompass all explosives, guns, artillery and fireworks and the number of deaths from those since its invention is astronomical.
Hard to find hard figures to find out definitively which invention has been the most harmful and has led to the most deaths that we should uninvent it if we could and if our lunch break had been longer we probably would have thought up some more but when you think about, some of our inventions sure didn't turn out to be the best idea the inventors assumed at the time.

Press Freedom Index 2025

Every year Reporters Without Borders publish The World Press Freedom Index (WPFI) based on an assessment of each countries' journalists freedoms for the previous year and in honour of today being World Press Freedom Day, they have published the 2025 results.
Top is Norway again but Estonia have leapt up 4 places to 2nd and Netherlands, Sweden and Finland make up the top 5 with Denmark down to sixth from last years 2nd place.
The UK has gone up 3 places to 20th , Canada has dropped 7 places to 21st and Australia is up 10 to 29th  and the USA has dropped 2 places to 57th,  Russia has dropped 9 places to 171st and China has fallen into the bottom 3 just above North Korea and the worst place for Press Freedom, Eritrea
There are some surprising rises, although some are starting from a very low base but moving in the right direction are DR Congo rising from 123rd to 71st,  Paraguay now at 84 compared to last years 115th,  Bolivia now 93rd from 124th, Panama sat at 53rd from 2024's 83rd and Senegal moving up from 94th to 74th.
Moving in the wrong direction are Kyrgyzstan dropping from 120th to 144th, Samoa going from 22nd to 44th, Argentina who were 66th last year and 87th this, Burkina Faso who are 105th compared to last years 86th and  Chile who are 69th but were 52nd last year.
So if you are a Journalist in the North of Europe then enjoy your Freedoms, if you are a journo in China, North Korea or Eritrea then you may want to rethink your career choice.

More War Crimes By Israel

It has always amazed me what Israel can get away with, there are always some who will refuse to condemn literal murder and Genocide as if because of what happened to the Jews  years ago, they now have a free pass to go around doing whatever they like to whoever they like.
The treatment of Palestinians is one of the greatest crimes of the last 75 years but they continue to go on dishing out massacres and inhuman treatment and still they get billions of pounds worth of aid while Gazan's are digging through the rubble of their former homes and now it has stormed an international aid convoy bound for Gaza.
As Israel is well known for attempting to cover up it's misdemeanours such as the recent murder of 15 Ambulance staff, i am sure they will try to justify sending drones to bomb an humanitarian aid ship heading for Gaza in International Waters off the coast of Malta.
'The Conscience twice came under attack from armed drones and caused a fire and a substantial breach in the hull which made it impossible to continue the mission' explained the Ships Commander  while 'on a mission to challenge Israel’s illegal and deadly siege of Gaza and to deliver desperately needed, life-saving aid”.
A previous sailing launched in 2010 ended in bloodshed and 19 deaths when Israeli forces stormed the Mavi Marmara vessel but this attempt was in response to Israel imposing a blockade on Gaza two months ago, allowing no food, fuel, medicine or other item into the territory while resumed intense military operations in Gaza after deliberately collapsing the ceasefire with Hamas.
Humanitarian organisations in Gaza have distributed the last of their stocks and the Red Cross said it would not have access to food, medicine and life-saving supplies needed for many of its Gaza programs unless aid deliveries resumed immediately.
“Aid must be allowed to enter Gaza. Hostages must be released. Civilians must be protected,” it said. “Without immediate action, Gaza will descend further into chaos that humanitarian efforts will not be able to mitigate.”
Israeli officials justify the blockade with claims that Hamas routinely steals aid, distributing it to its fighters or selling it but Aid officials in Gaza deny any theft of aid in recent months so more Israeli lies to continue the killing and force the Palestinians to leave their land.
Some defenders of Israel are so blind to what happens in front of them there's nothing at all they wouldn't jump to defend making them complicit in the Genocide but if this incident had been carried about by Iran, or anyone we were trying to portray as an enemy, so much condemnation would have been spewed out it would have created a vast cloud of outrage that airlines would be unable to fly through.
But as it's Israel, some Governments will keep their heads down or even try to find a way to blame the victims as they do with the Palestinians but Israel have the holocaust trump card and play it at every opportunity as well as a useful idiot in the White House but it is about time we stopped falling for it and told it to begin acting like a responsible state because something needs to be done regarding bringing Israel to book for its deplorable actions.