inkbluesky

December 10th was International Human Rights Day, Our Inalienable Human Rights

Eighty percent of Americans agree–62 percent “strongly”–that “every person has basic rights regardless of whether their government recognizes those rights or not.” Eight in ten also believe that “we should strive to uphold human rights in the US because there are people being denied their human rights in our country.” And three-quarters want the United States to focus on making regular progress on human rights. Only two in ten said the United States should move “slowly” or allow human rights solutions to “evolve naturally.”

For Americans, human rights are a matter of national values. They view human rights as crucial to protecting the dignity, fairness and opportunity that all people deserve.

Who are those two in ten that think human rights spring up out of the ground like crab grass and just stand back and they naturally spread. While violent revolutions are not required to secure every basic human right one is required to speak up once in a while and maybe even vote for people that seem like they would be good guardians of those rights.

cinnamon cultural glue. the smell of cinnamon buns is warm, homey and friendly. a shared cultural phenomenon here in the U.S. and the world. try to ignore the whole ordeal where emperor nero ordered piles of cinnamon to be burned after he murdered his wife. cinnamon or cinnamon buns and rolls, their scent floating out of houses around the world could be the secret to getting us all to grit our teeth and if not get along, at least tolerant each other. i haven’t worked out the details yet and it doesn’t have to be cinnamon, maybe apple pie would work.

Culture Speeds Up Human Evolution

Homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the globe and increased vastly in numbers over the past 50,000 years or so—from an estimated five million in 9000 B.C. to roughly 6.5 billion today. More people means more opportunity for mutations to creep into the basic human genome and new research confirms that in the past 10,000 years a host of changes to everything from digestion to bones has been taking place.

“We found very many human genes undergoing selection,” says anthropologist Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah, a member of the team that analyzed the 3.9 million genes showing the most variation. “Most are very recent, so much so that the rate of human evolution over the past few thousand years is far greater than it has been over the past few million years.”

This still doesn’t mean that we’re getting smarter and as our reliance on electronics to remember things (a large element of human learning) increases we might end up making some of our own brain functions less important as we let machines perform those tasks for us.