Monday, 12 August 2019

SHORT GUT - BIG-BRAIN - LONG LIFE


OUR PROGENITORS HAD LONG-GUTS
WE HAVE SHORT-GUTS & BIG-BRAINS.

I've been reading an excellent New Scientist short book on the origins of Homo Sapiens - and a History of the World by TV presenter Andrew Marr. Both tracts mention a possible trigger-event that stimulated humanity's over-sized brains - namely cooking our food. 

Our primate cousins, such as chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos and D J Trump have far longer digestive tracts than do Sapiens, which they need to digest leaves, fruit, grains and uncooked meat and fish. Our cooking part or pre-digests our diet - releasing and making available more energy, about ten times more energy, than raw food. So, with the power of cooking for hundreds of thousands of years, we have evolved a far shorter gut. 

Science speculates that the hard-work and energy expenditure our ancestors put into natural digestion (internal cooking) was redirected from sustaining long, wide, slow guts full of vegetation, into growing the largest brain, relative to weight and size, on Earth. The immense brain, requiring a large skull, coupled with our determination to stand upright and walk-tall, altering our pelvis, brought huge difficulties to the natural-birth process - hence all the female screaming and yelling in labor-wards - driving the sensitive Sapiens' males away to the nearest bars until the infant's big-head is safely delivered. We need to be redesigned - for the 21st Century. 

Another fundamental re-design that occurs to me is that given we were once gorilla like, with large gaseous stomachs containing long belching guts, capable of fermenting leaves, green-bananas, nuts, grasses, dead squirrels and even tree-bark - over many hours; before discovering fire, cooking and our inner beauty and the slim waists of short-gut primates is - can our guts be even shorter? Do we need to take hours or days to digest our meals? If cooked foods halved the length of our guts - and yet still take hours or days to extract the good stuff and expel the waste - should we extract the good stuff in factories and get rid of the troublesome primate guts altogether? 

98% IS EXPELLED.  2% GIVES US ENERGY


We only retain and absorb a tiny fraction of what we consume - then we convert that fraction to energy, to power our athletics and genius. Why bother with the rest of it? I can put numbers to it. The average human weighs about 12 stone, 168 pounds, and consumes about 50 US tons or 100,000 pounds in 70 years. After converting a little (cooked) food to electricity and necessary cell repairs and renewals, the difference is waste. Thousands of tons of processed waste.

We take in and expel 600 times our body weight. As we age, the mechanisms of consumption and expulsion become vexatious and problematical - for many. Our weighty guts use a huge amount of energy to cart around. Think of the fuel needed to lift you 5 miles high, to fly to see your mother-in-law in Miami. Think of the medications and hospital bills used to deal with our wholly unnecessary part gorilla-part sapiens guts. If cooking once halved our guts and doubled our brains - what would factory assisted digestion do? The proteins and vitamins we need could be cut back to a few ounces a month. Our guts would evolve - probably to a 50th of their present size. We would absorb almost pure energy. The energy and time saved from NOT needing to shovel tons in and out of our systems would be - I am even feeling prophetic enough to say WILL be - reapplied by evolution to give us even larger brains. Do we here have a vision of the egg-headed slender small bodied aliens in Spielberg's, Close Encounters of The Third Kind? With, of course a little re-plumbing of the birth process. 

And... the extra power needed for our pre-digesting pill factories will be available from the transport energy saved. 7.2 billion humans, weighing half as much as today - saves at least half of today's transport costs. 

Short-gut mammals live longer than long-gut mammals. Females live longer than males. Mature people who eat less, live longer. What is not to like? 


EVOLUTION

Tuesday, 6 August 2019

POLAR MELTDOWN 2019 - SEAS RISE 300 FEET.



POLAR MELTDOWN 2019

OUT OF THE DEPTHS – Is an “unputTabledownable” fact based drama, set in the Thames London estuary as global warming floods the coastal margins and billions of people worldwide grudgingly migrate to higher ground. What happens to London also occurs in New York and all coastal settlements. The destruction of transport routes disrupts food supplies and the measures for containment of pandemics. Avian flu’ H5N1 kills 80% of the human race. The heroine, Alice Whitaker, survives by secretly dwelling on the upper floors in Harrods, surrounded by deep, dangerous and filthy water, to eventually emerge and join other survivors, including the politically ambitious, self-appointed Dean of London University and ruthless agents of once aristocratic land owners. Alice, supported by a nuclear submarine captain, James Cruikshank, opposes “politics and power as usual”, and is murdered for spreading radical and seditious ideas. An overt battle for who will rule Britain commences. The book ends with the compass pointing to the brave new world which will result. Throughout, quotes from the scientific literature and tales from Londoners’ lives paint an accurate picture – if a little accelerated – of what global warming will bring us.

Read what happens next - by AD 2516 - After Global Warming. (Spoiler - It is Utopia).

Monday, 5 August 2019

BREXIT - STERLING COLLAPSE




Introduction: John backs Brexit, Trump and Johnson. He sees the fall in the value of Sterling as a great opportunity for the UK economy. Mel (and I) disagree:


*******

...And from Mel Cooper - 3rd August 2019:


Try this article on this blog:
Then follow the inks to the Stephen Fry YOU TUBE broadcasts on Brexit.

Try some of the other things about Brexit on the blog. Spread the word? Brexit is a project of the New Fascism. Brexit is a con job. Brexit is the Propaganda promoted by Dominic Cummings. Brexit is all about lies. Project Fear is really Project Reality Check!

Someone should sue Boris Johnson now before it is too late. History is not going to be kind to David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris johnson, Michael Gove, Dominic Raab, Dominic Cummings, Jeremy Corbyn, Seumas Milne, etc. Britain is in thrall to a bunch of intellectual lightweights and self-serving, greedy Thatcherite fools.

BREXIT is a moral failure. Brexit is politically and morally right up there with letting Hitler take over the Sudetenland, and we all know how that worked out!

Britain will stiffen its upper lip and win through in the end, just as they did with the Blitz: but, on the other hand, we did not vote for the Blitz. People seems to believe that Brexit is worth the loss of millions of jobs, our standing in the world and what will be left of our sovereignty when we withdraw it from the EU pool of sovereignties and stand defiantly as a Small Island off the coast of the rest of Europe.

Ireland, North and south, will not be happy with the fallout they will have to absorb because of Brexit. Brexit Chaos is not going to be a lot of fun for anyone! We*are* turning our backs on Europe and will pay for it; and the rest of the world is really not going to give us all that the Brexiteers promise.

Right now we have control of our money, our laws, our borders and everything else internal. Within the EU we have a veto, sit in a forum that debates everything, and have — until all this — had an amazing amount of influence and respect.

Leaving the EU means we are going to have to dilute our Sovereignty to get trade deals with far more powerful and rapacious countries than we will be once we are a little offshore island sending all by ourselves. One of the solutions to our post-EU problems may just be turning the UK, or what is left of it, into the new Singapore to survive. And the EU is really going to be pleased with us for that.

Brexit betrays the Good Friday Agreement and and invites the likes of the New IRA and Nigel Farage to impose their vision on the UK, or what will be left of it once Scotland goes independent and Northern Ireland votes to unite with the other Ireland as a reaction. Brexit is both economically and morally bankrupting the UK already, but no one seems to want to notice. If Labour does not fully embrace remaining in the EU and having a properly informed Referendum about Brexit, then the party will lose its soul; and if it does embrace Remaind and another ferendum under Jeremy Corbyn no one will believe or trust Labour’s position anyway. Brexit is a No Win project, except for the likes of Billionaires, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin.

The UK is in dire trouble. Jeremy Corbyn is not the loyal Opposition. He is the disloyal Leninist puppet of Seumas Milne and other Eurosceptics. The Labour Party is now the left wing version of a resurgence of Fascist thinking. If you do not agree with Jeremy Corbyn (or admit to voting tactically Lib Dem) you cannot be a Labour Party member. If, on the other hand, you think that Hitler was a friend of Zionism by trying to rid Europe of all Jews and send them elsewhere, like Palestine say; or you think that the whole anti-Semitism scandal of the Labour Party is actually Fake News and it is all part of a Zionist Plot to overthrow poor, avuncular, sweet-natured Jeremy Corbyn, a man of unutterable integrity, then you are One of Us!!! I do despair, I am afraid. And we will leave the EU because the LEAVERS have taken over the discourse with the NO DEAL threat and all energy is bent on stopping that and NOT on keeping us in the EU as part of a common cause. It is all very sad. There is simply no real Opposition to Brexit, no articulation of what the EU does for us, no vision of a future within the EU that is being promoted strongly.

ASK NOT WHAT THE EU CAN DO FOR YOU, ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR THE EU?

But what is the vision of staying in the EU? Yes, we continue to have to pay a fair proportion of our wealth into the common fund of the EU. My goodness, that amounts to a whole 1% or 1.5% at most of our annual budget! Yup, folks, 14 billion minus our rebate accounts for 1%, roughly, of the annual UK budget of 990+ billion a year. 

Why does not one do the maths? Instead of being the third largest contributors to the EU budget, we should be aching to be the largest; because that would mean we are the richest! Instead of Brexmoaning about how much we send to the EU, we should be wishing we sent more because it would mean we are that much richer! Staying in the EU means that we are part of a programme that, like the Marshall Plan of old, supports the poorer sections of our continent to bring it up to a level where everyone benefits and wealth is more equally distributed. It means the Welsh farmers will get their 300 million pounds of subsidy a year. it means EU funding for medical and scientific research. It means building roads and schools and hospitals funded from the common EU pot in deprived areas of Europe such as the north of England! In means being part of a surprisingly small bureaucratic system that runs common projects efficiently. It means being part of the Galileo Project, it means being part of international co-operation on cancer research; it means having a common system for resisting terrorism; it means exchange of important information on many, many things. Yes, it means being under the jurisdiction of a European Court for common European problems and also as a court of last resort AFTER we have exhausted our internal system. It means our children and grandchildren can study at any EU university. It means we can travel without visas and problems on business or pleasure throughout the EU. It means that we have a common policy about the EU borders. 

It means, therefore, a special deal for the roughly 20% of EU citizens who move around for work and pleasure and business; but that we have complete control of our borders for everyone who is coming from elsewhere the world. it means we are not giving out visas and other privileges to the rest of the world in exchange for trade deals. It means that if we abide by EU law we can send back to Europe anyone who does not have a job here after 3 months, something our own government has never bothered to do. It means that Northern and southern Ireland can go on living with a peace accord that may be fragile but has worked for 20 years and which is under threat from Brexit. 

It means living in a co-operative community of countries that try to solve its economic, political, and moral problems together — such as dealing with the refugee crisis of the world today; or, heaven help us, the rise of a new kind of Fascism called Populism. it means that we actually talk to our nearest neighbours in a civilised way instead of turning them into rivals. It means continuing to benefit from the lack of tariffs and trade problems in all those industries where goods are flowing freely back and forth across Europe. It also means continuing the have easy dealings with the market that amounts, if you include services and not just good, to will over 60% of our business.

Britain at the moment has a far better deal being inside the EU than any deal we could possibly get from the outside with our nearest and largest trading and financial partners. As for trading under WTO rules, every single economist who is asked about it says that the WTO is a default situation and is a potential disaster of unfathomable proportions. The people leading the Brexit campaign are not interested in risk management for the population. They just want to be shot of EU regulations so that they can continue to manage their wealth without having to repatriate the trillions they have offshore tax free.

Staying in the EU will not be without its problems. The EU does need, in some areas, a lot of rethinking of even reform. But it has given the UK 45 years of peace and prosperity. Everyone who analyses the risk of leaving is worried that property will be disrupted and peace may be too. So perhaps we should have a serious intelligent debate in place of a lot of emotive propaganda and think again? And then, perhaps, even vote again.

Maybe Brexiteers know something that I do not know. If so, I wish they would tell me. Because all I can see in Brexit is an act of potentially dangerous self harm.

Mel

Thursday, 1 August 2019

TAX-EVASION DRIVES BREXIT - STEPHEN FRY


"DO OR DIE. WE LEAVE ON 31 OCT 2019" BORIS JOHNSON
Update 14 Aug 2019 :

Do you think we will see hundreds of independent MPs?

“Dear Mel, 

I agree with you and your friend about Corbyn’s sly persistent complicity in the Brexit scam.

I  am becoming more and more convinced that the party system is splintering. The UK will go to, say, a dozen parties, and hung parliaments; then to hundreds of independent MPs. The main new driver is the Internet. Cardinal Wimala of Kampala came to Oxford in about 1996, asking for our old desktop computers. He showed a film of excited Sudan villagers huddled around a PC screen – powered by a guy peddling a bicycle-generator – “This is the first time in history that these people have received news and information that has NOT been filtered by local War Lords”. The internet is bringing information to our MPs that for the first time in history has NOT been filtered by the party executives, Murdoch and whips. Hence the frantic battles over disseminating and controlling false-news (lies). MPs are being freed from dogma forced on them by people such as Dominic Cummings. The good news is that the MPs can think and act independently – The bad news is that they have to think for themselves – No more ‘isms. That is hard work. But they are paid by We-The-People £100K for a 10 month year to think things through and plan ahead. But it is getting better – eventually.
Scary, dangerous times.


Noel” 

1st August 2019 

I told you so. 

Sorry to be self-promoting, but when it seems nobody and no institutions, politicians, media, authorities or even lobbyists are listening or responding, it is a huge relief to at last have the facts professionally presented and confirmed.  Follow the money! 


One of the main motives of the anonymous people pumping billions into the relentless UK Brexit campaigns is tax-evasion. They are intent on sabotaging or at least on escaping from the European rules on reducing tax-evasion. If it requires bankrupting the UK, losing 7 million jobs and forcing millions of families into long term poverty; the offshore tax-evaders consider it a price worth paying. They won't be paying it. They will be lounging in exotic tax-havens sipping pink gins and being massaged by servants. 

COSTS OF BREXIT - 9 OCT 2018 - BLOOMBERG


Watch this video produced by Stephen Fry, a popular British actor, comedian, intellectual and TV personality, where he spells out the facts. TAX-EVASION DRIVES BREXIT.

There is only one mistake in his logic. He repeats the global PR mantra of the offshore super-rich about their tax schemes "...Which are of course wholly legal." 

Wrong, wrong, wrong. To shift profits to a tax-haven or hide profits from the IRS or any tax authority always requires lying on your tax-returns and company accounts. The devil is in the detailed bookkeeping and false asset valuations. Tax-evasion always requires fraudulent bookkeeping - which is illegal in most countries. Ask your tax-planner if they guarantee the "savings" - and whether they prefer the top or lower bunk in your shared cell. 

Ask Al Capone. Ask Trump's friend Paul Manafort, currently serving a long jail sentence. Ask the thousands who have been investigated and jailed by the IRS. Ask the executors of jailed NY hotelier Leona Hemsley, the Queen of Mean.  TAX – TWO SETS OF BOOKS - JAIL 

 (Why we don't hear more of this: because e.g. 300 BBC executives are currently being charged with tax-evasion. VIP tax-evaders suppress the news from their offshore mansions and yachts).

The main political driver behind the Brexit campaign: Trump wants to break up the EU so that US trade terms dominate; Putin wants to break up the EU to divide and rule; Boris-the-clown-Johnson wants celebrity and chaos.