Rachel, a Thinker

Crone and Matriarch. Humankind exists because mothers birth babies. How we relate to each other matters and Love matters most.

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@keybehaviours This is why I stopped going. Seeing the Police escorting activist to the Tree then letting them play Black Block was instructive.

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

As a child I had high disgust towards many foods and although I eat hundreds more foods than I did then, disgust for this kind of spread isn’t unique for a pasty far north hemisphere dweller.

[Owen Lewis @is_OwenLewis]

NEWSFLASH: there's deep genetic reasons why Europeans don't "Eat ze BUGZ."

Europeans and their colonial descendants have a deep rooted aversion to eating insects. New reseach finds it's not just cultural, it has a genetic origin going back thousands of years.

A new genomic study from Spain’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology analyzed dental calculus (tartar) from 745 ancient human samples across Eurasia, some up to 33,000 years old. They found almost no evidence of routine insect consumption in northern Eurasian populations — in stark contrast to humans in tropical regions and even Neanderthals.

Key findings:

• Northern Europeans showed very little insect DNA in their ancient dental tartar.

• Genes for chitin digesting enzymes (chitinases) carry mutations that reduce the ability to break down insect exoskeletons in northern Europeans. These mutations became fixed around 9,000 years ago.

• Neanderthals, who lived in the same environments, appear to have consumed insects more regularly (including fly larvae and mosquitoes), with better adapted chitinase genes.

Tropical populations of humans (as well as chimpanzees and gorillas) still carry genetic variants supporting higher chitin digestion, reflecting more consistent insect availability and consumption.

Lead researcher Pablo Librado explained: “The scarce presence of insects in the diet of northern Eurasians suggests that the absence of entomophagy is not solely due to recent cultural factors, but also to a long ecological and evolutionary history.”

Lower insect biomass and diversity at higher latitudes likely made regular entomophagy impractical, leading to genetic and cultural abandonment over millennia. Though the fact that Neanderthals consumed insects regularly throws doubt on this as a sole explanation.

The study highlights how deeply our diets have been shaped by our genomes and environments. It's a compelling look at the deep roots of what we do (and don’t) eat.

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

High control/high trust homogenous society

[East German Visuals @GDRvisuals]

Community clothing lines outside a Plattenbau in Rostock, 1980s.

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@MerrynSW It’s already happening

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@NickDixon @Nina_Power_ Sydney Carter was prolific at this time and so many of his songs are ear worms of mine from time to time.

And the creed and the colour and the name won’t matter. We were eating our lunches thinking about starving children in Burundi around this time.

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@NickDixon @Nina_Power_ Here it is

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@Nina_Power_ I found this in a charity shop. The Golden Cockerel and I have seen the Golden Sunshine were favourites when I was in a Catholic Primary School in the late 70s. We had a great piano playing teacher and it was a very musical school but we didn’t sing any ‘serious’ hymns’

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@millerman And chooses how long to stay.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

This past week, on a test bed in Britain, a Rolls-Royce jet engine ran at full take-off power on pure hydrogen, putting out water vapour instead of carbon.

Nobody on Earth had managed it before. It is the sort of thing that ought to stop the country in its tracks, and it will be forgotten by the weekend.

Leave aside the recent paroxysms of renewed net-zero insanity from Derelict Ed and the pervasive atmosphere of offended envy that greets much homegrown achievement nowadays in Britain. This engineering is a wonder, and it's British to the bone.

We gave the world the jet engine in the first place - Frank Whittle, a Coventry man and an RAF officer, patented it in 1930 while the Air Ministry assured him it was a curiosity. Rolls-Royce is today one of perhaps three firms anywhere that can build a large aero engine at the outer edge of the possible, and it has just done what most of the industry swore was twenty years away.

As usual, you marvel at how little the people who govern us had to do with it. The engineers in Derby are world-class; the stewardship above them is third-rate. They pulled off a global first while paying the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world to keep the power on over the bench - a weight no German, American or Gulf rival has to carry. We produce frontier brilliance on the shop floor and fritter it away at the despatch box, and we have done for two generations.

That is the maddening shape of modern Britain: brilliance from below, sub- (or, indeed, ultra-) mediocrity from above. The people here who actually make things are still among the best in the world; the state that is meant to back them treats a firm like Rolls-Royce as a photocall today and a takeover target tomorrow, and prices its energy as though it would prefer the next plant were built in Texas.

Progress starts from the other end. Give these people what every rival government gives its champions and we beg ours to do without: the cheap, abundant power their competitors already enjoy, a supply chain built around them, and a state that guards a national asset rather than auctioning it. The hard part of a British revival - the talent, the nerve, the engineering - is already done, and was done again this week, by people who deserve a far better country than the one currently sitting above them.

We just taught an engine to breathe fire and exhale water. The least we owe the men and women who managed it is a government and a state as brilliant as they are.

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@shagbark_hick Grief is real but it’s a parallel path outside reality and it’s not a good place to reveal to others. Slipping back over onto the good path feels good and a time will come when recalling your mom will bring a smile and even laughter.

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@sotontimes Who was Gurpreet telling to ‘stay away from him (Henry), we’ve got him’? Was there someone else there wanting to help?

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@stellaomalley3 Fate is a little different in your 70s https://t.co/iRzl3DQbHs

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@OrganisedPauper It’s hard to employ enough people and pay them to run a 7-day a week office-based estate agency. When DH and I had our estate agency business we did viewings on Sundays but we ran our whole week more flexibly - and staff we tup’ed when we bought another agency refused w/e at all.

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

These roses have been in my garden for decades but they spent a good amount of that time stuck to chicken wire round the tree and overcome by ivy. I dealt with the ivy about 8 years ago and cut the rose right back. This year it’s flowered again and their scent is welcome.

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@edwest I thought the way to do this journey was going to be by going suborbital; not being locked in a box for 22 hours.

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@supertanskiii We live in a Global world and for the most part, progressives have thought this is a great thing. Ukraine flags flying here and offering homes to Ukranians is just one example. Why they think it’s awful now is because they no longer agree with a particular message.

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

It’s going to be windy again tomorrow and EDF Freephase is at 0p from 8am til 4pm so I’ll delay washing clothes til tomorrow and do bedding too as well as charge every gadget and power bank we own and put the immersion on for hot water from the taps. Our house is all electric!

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

UK electricity with wind is affected by intermittency and curtailment. In a scarcity/overabundance market you may as well play the game, so I have been playing with EDF Freephase since November. Today the game is get the washing done and roast veg to add to dinner before 4.

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@SteveSkojec Me too yesterday!

[Rachel, a Thinker @WinterSling]

@RhonddaBryant I despair.